Paib Extension - Blog Posts
I recently came across someone talking about AO3 being targeted by data scrapers and was wondering if there's anything that could aid in protecting your work.
So here's an extension that tries to do just that!
What does it do?
It modifies your text in a way that makes it harder for automated systems to process while the human eye sees no difference. Here's how it works:
Visual Changes: It randomly replaces some letters with similar-looking characters from different alphabets (e.g., the letter "a" might turn into a Cyrillic "а").
Invisible Modifications: It adds invisible characters that are not visible to the human eye but make it harder for automated systems to detect the actual content.
Randomized Effects: The changes are applied randomly, so the text looks normal to you, but it's scrambled enough to be able to confuse AI scraping tools, especially low grade ones.
In short, it "poisons" the text to make it less useful for AI, while still being readable for humans. However I want to mention that this is not a guarantee that the AI will not recognize your text anymore.
How do I Install it? (GitHub) https://github.com/Artepti/PoisonAIBros
Watch this Video or just look at the instructions under it!
Go to this Github Page (https://github.com/Artepti/PoisonAIBros) and click on the "<>Code" Button and then "Download Zip".
Unzip the files. And, go to your extensions setting in your browser. chrome://extensions/ (Google Chrome) opera://extensions (Opera) edge://extensions/ (Microsoft Edge)
Enable Developer Mode in the upper right corner.
Click on "Load unpacked" in the upper left corner and select the unzipped Folder called "PAIB-main", click on the Folder in there that's also called "PAIB-main" as well.
Congrats! You have added the extension PoisonAIBros!
Simply right-click on your AO3 Text (while in the HTML Editing Window) and select "Poison Selected Text" and voilà, your writing has been made into poison for AI!
I've tested PAIB on Microsoft Edge, Opera and Google Chrome. I've now also created an extension specifically for Firefox since they have a few different rules, download it here (https://github.com/Artepti/FirefoxPAIB)
If you want to see the Unicode that's been inserted, paste your poisoned code into here and click on "Show me the characters"
Important: The only negative I've discovered from using this extension is that it confuses screen readers, HOWEVER after a bit of tinkering and coming to a very simple solution, I've made a little dictionary for NVDA so that the screen readers read the poisoned text as normal. Download it here: https://github.com/Artepti/Unicodedictionary
I would not recommend using it on languages that don't consist of latin letters. The extension leaves math symbols, arrows etc alone, and while I have made sure that the code doesn't affect a lot of special characters (e.g. ü,â,..) I cannot possibly promise you that I caught them all.
My knowledge about coding is still very limited (I used AI to defeat AI by letting it help me out *insert Spiderman meme here*) so I'll try my best to help, but please keep that in mind.
Lastly, you shouldn't poison the text in the html Tab twice as it will make part of the invsible characters visible in the final text!