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Website operators are being asked to feed LLM crawlers poisoned data by a project called Poison Fountain.

The project page links to URLs which provide a practically endless stream of poisoned training data. They have determined that this approach is very effective at ultimately sabotaging the quality and accuracy of AI which has been trained on it.

Small quantities of poisoned training data can significantly damage a language model.

The page also gives suggestions on how to put the provided resources to use.

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[-] XLE@piefed.social 6 points 3 months ago

Do you have any basis for this assumption, FaceDeer?

Based on your pro-AI-leaning comments in this thread, I don't think people should accept defeatist rhetoric at face value.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 points 3 months ago

A basic Google search for "synthetic data llm training" will give you lots of hits describing how the process goes these days.

Take this as "defeatist" if you wish, as I said it doesn't really matter. In the early days of LLMs when ChatGPT first came out the strategy for training these things was to just dump as much raw data onto them as possible and hope quantity allowed the LLM to figure something out from it, but since then it's been learned that quality is better than quantity and so training data is far more carefully curated these days. Not because there's "poison" in it, just because it results in better LLMs. Filtering out poison will happen as a side effect.

It's like trying to contaminate a city's water supply by peeing in the river upstream of the water treatment plant drawing from it. The water treatment plant is already dealing with all sorts of contaminants anyway.

this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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