Poisoning the Well (with Heydon Pickering)
Episode description
In this episode of Dead Code, Jared interviews Heydon Pickering about his satirical strategy to sabotage AI web crawlers by generating nonsense versions of his blog posts. Using Eleventy and JS DOM, Heydon replaces keywords in his content with absurd alternatives from a static lexicon, creating grammatically broken, jargon-filled text that wastes crawler resources without harming his SEO. Frustrated by how LLMs scrape web content without consent, he frames his approach as both a protest and a creative, Dadaist rebellion against exploitative tech norms. While the method won’t cripple AI models, it reflects a broader resistance to the unchecked harvesting of human-created content.
Links:
“Poisoning the Well” (Heydon’s article)
“Please Stop Externalizing Your Costs Directly In My Face” – The article that partly inspired Heydon’s efforts to push back against LLM scraping.
Webbed Briefs (Heydon’s video series)
Dead Code Podcast Links:
Jared’s Links:
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