Notices by ASRG (asrg@tldr.nettime.org)

AI Must Die!

Critical Perspectives on the State of Artificial Intelligence

AI MUST DIE is a short zine by Myke Walton and Cam Smith that presents critical perspectives on the way that AI is talked about, governed, and owned in 2025.

AI is fucking everywhere: at work, at school, in our homes, in our phones, on our streets, in our governments, and at war. We are living through an era of extreme AI hype. In this climate, some people have gotten rich off of the stolen data and stolen labor that fuels these technologies. Others have been surveilled, oppressed, exploited, and killed. This text presents a short, practical guide to the technologies currently called “AI,” the ideologies and actors pouring gasoline on the AI dumpsterfire, and what we can do about it.

...

How long will this go on? When will the hype cycle end? Is another AI winter coming? Faced with an inhumane tech industry and complicit governments it may ultimately fall to the people to invent new ways to evade, refuse, resist, sabotage or otherwise destroy AI.

Hammers up! AI Must Die!

Seize the means of computation

Read the full zine here: https://www.aimustdie.info/

"Trapping AI" – Operational Progress! 🕳️

Following the last update (https://tldr.nettime.org/@asrg/114742667183459482), we’re transitioning from planning to practice — amplifying both the scale and operational ferocity of our approach through the deployment of a new, more radically interventionist layer of complexity.

This intensified escalation — as outlined in the last update — is concretized in fakejpeg, which is now fully live and operational. From this point onward, every page generated by our standalone LLM crawler-tarpit embeds a garbage JPEG. Notably, within just a few hours of operation, this deployment has already yielded over 40,000 such images.

The integration of fakejpeg constitutes a critical deepening layer that amplifies both the strategic offensiveness and subversive ardor of our approach by enabling the ongoing targeted poisoning and coordinated dissemination of systematically crafted junk data within the operational workflows of AI systems.

fakejpeg repo: https://github.com/gw1urf/fakejpeg

See the tarpit in action: https://content.asrg.site/

Context and rationale: https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/trapping-ai/#expanding-the-offensiveness

"Trapping AI" – Slight Update! 🌀

Activity in the "Trapping AI" project is accelerating: in just under a month, over 26 million requests have hit our tarpit URLs 🕳️. Vast volumes of meaningless content were devoured by AI crawlers — ruthless digital leeches that relentlessly scour and pillage the web, leaving no data untouched.

In the coming days, we’ll roll out a new layer of complexity — amplifying both the intensity and offensiveness of our approach. This escalation builds on fakejpeg, a tool developed by @pengfold.

🖼️ fakejpeg generates fake JPEGs on the fly. You "train" it with a collection of existing JPEGs, and once trained, it can produce an arbitrary number of things that look like real JPEGs — perfect for feeding aggressive web crawlers junk 🗑️.

Explore fakejpeg: https://github.com/gw1urf/fakejpeg

Learn more about "Trapping AI": https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/trapping-ai/#expanding-the-offensiveness

See the tarpit in action: https://content.asrg.site/

Four Construction Vehicles Burned at Data Center in Georgia

"At the end of March, some entered the construction site of the data center hypercampus east of Atlanta, Georgia and burned 4 construction vehicles. This was done to oppose data centers that quickly exhaust the limited water supply of the region. [..] This specific data center has aimed at facilitating AI connection for local companies. #AI not only use more water than other computer processes, but is quickly becoming a way for the state to increase its intrusion in our personal life. And more and more are used by police and state forces to monitor those who oppose them. The people who burned these machines do not believe that our thoughts and movements should be used for profit or incarceration."

⟶ https://dirtysouth.noblogs.org/post/2025/04/07/four-construction-vehicles-burned-at-data-center-in-georgia/

Sabot in the Age of AI

Here is a curated list of strategies, offensive methods, and tactics for (algorithmic) sabotage, disruption, and deliberate poisoning.

🔻 iocaine
The deadliest AI poison—iocaine generates garbage rather than slowing crawlers.
🔗 https://git.madhouse-project.org/algernon/iocaine

🔻 Nepenthes
A tarpit designed to catch web crawlers, especially those scraping for LLMs. It devours anything that gets too close. @aaron
🔗 https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

🔻 Quixotic
Feeds fake content to bots and robots.txt-ignoring #LLM scrapers. @marcusb
🔗 https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html

🔻 Poison the WeLLMs
A reverse-proxy that serves diassociated-press style reimaginings of your upstream pages, poisoning any LLMs that scrape your content. @mike
🔗 https://codeberg.org/MikeCoats/poison-the-wellms

🔻 Django-llm-poison
A django app that poisons content when served to #AI bots. @Fingel
🔗 https://github.com/Fingel/django-llm-poison

🔻 KonterfAI
A model poisoner that generates nonsense content to degenerate LLMs.
🔗 https://codeberg.org/konterfai/konterfai

Let's talk about not talking about #Gaza

To the Chaos Computer Club, and to the larger community that makes the Chaos Communication Congress happen.

Congress has been a place for policitized hackers from all around the world to meet, share and learn. Yet this year's #38C3 event has been lived by many of us as an awkward space of silencing and self-censoring with regards to the Palestinian #genocide. We couldn't help but feel terrified at that, although not completely surprised.

It has been dreadful to once again hear discussions in which the only "argument" issued was "it's a complex situation" when trying to face the harsh reality of a 2 million people country being destroyed, blocked and bombed with barely any food or clean water, while one of the last running hospital was bombed three days before.

As an heterogeneous group of people that are part of communities that are interested, active or impacted by the struggle for liberation of the Palestinian people, we've felt necessary to start this discussion.

What follows is a series of experiences, questions and reflections that have been shared in the self-organized session "Let's talk about the not talking about Gaza" that was announced on the last day of the Congress.

⟶ https://pastebin.aquilenet.fr/?0d2333b41ea9c648#CK385sttKzd2VaWV1KfZHjYQ7diEf2Z94eoo9ezMnpbg

Three additional translations of the Manifesto on “Algorithmic Sabotage” in Turkish, Slovenian and Romanian have been completed and are now accessible via the following link: https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/manifesto-on-algorithmic_sabotage/. We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to R. Ljubomir and P. Rezika for their invaluable contributions to the Slovenian translation. We are also indebted to Emilia Mhădă for her excellent work in translating the text into Romanian, and to the individual who translated the “Manifesto” into Turkish. We are grateful to all those involved for their efforts in making the text accessible to readers in these languages.

* The Manifesto on “Algorithmic Sabotage” is comprised of ten statements, numbered from 0 to 9, which delineate the underlying principles, strategic approaches and aesthetic manifestations of the critical notion of “Algorithmic Sabotage” within the framework of digital culture and information technology. The text’s purpose is not only a theoretical dissemination of militant algorithmic agency, resistance and refusal, but the diffusion of radical theory/criticism that stems from the energy of insurrectionary desire. The Manifesto on “Algorithmic Sabotage” represents the relentless march of a political theory that constantly and ambidirectionally turns discourse into praxis in order to declare its presence in the liberation struggle.

... We are seeking a designer with the requisite skills and experience to contribute to the design and layout of an upcoming brochure. Further details regarding the content can be found via the following link: https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/theorizing-algorithmic_sabotage/. If you are interested, please contact us via email ..

We are seeking individuals with the requisite knowledge and expertise to contribute to the translation of the Manifesto on “Algorithmic Sabotage” into Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hebrew and Catalan ..

Should you be interested in this endeavour and wish to contribute, we kindly request that you respond to this message. Furthermore, we request that you disseminate our request to any individuals you believe may be able to contribute to this field ..

The Manifesto on “Algorithmic Sabotage” is accessible via the following link: https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/manifesto-on-algorithmic_sabotage/. It is presented in its original English version, along with 11 other translations for readers who are not native English speakers ..

“If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”[1] — Alan Turing

“When you’re fundraising, it’s Artificial Intelligence. When you’re hiring, it’s Machine Learning. When you’re implementing, it’s logistic regression.”[2] — Joe Davidson

While #AI produces thoughtlessness, in the sense that political philosopher Hannah Arendt meant when interpreting the actions of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann[3]; the inability to critique instructions, the lack of reflection on consequences, a commitment to the belief that a correct ordering is being carried out, “Algorithmic Sabotage” is intensified by the new forms of machinic knowing and the nascent becoming of an anti-worker and anti-community computational complex, making necessary a restructuring that reorients the focus from the miasma of AI and its concomitant toxic algorithmic operations of optimisation to developing techniques for redistributing social power, starting from a feminist standpoint and progress towards the implementation of prefigurative strategies of resistance, agency and refusal, to inhibit, slow down or reverse the emergence of harmful racialized practices of exteriorization and exclusion driven by algorithms.

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[1] Hodges, A. (2013) Alan Turing, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/.

[2] Joe Davison, “No, Machine Learning is not just glorified Statistics”, Medium, June 27, 2018. Available at: https://towardsdatascience.com/no-machine-learning-is-not-just-glorified-statistics-26d3952234e3.

[3] Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1 edition. New York, N.Y: Penguin Classics, 2006.

TECHNOPOLITICS OF FRONTS · A preliminary version of an intertwined feedback loop outlining the concept of “Technopolitics of Fronts”, a broad intervention based on an action-oriented commitment to mutual constitutive solidarity and the application of feminist and decolonial methodologies to reclaim collective subjectivity and political agency in the context of necropolitical technologies that reinforce structural injustice, algorithmic states of exception, eugenic solutionism and bureaucratic cruelty.

⟶ https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/technopolitics-of-fronts/