BlueMonday1984

In other news, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 got sent a viewpoint article with the title "Can Artificial Intelligence Speak for Incapacitated Patients at the End of Life?".

I will give MAIHT3K credit for managing to get through that shit, because what the actual fuck.

I've kinda said this before, but I expect shit like this to feed a growing trend of treating all crawlers as malicious until proven otherwise, and blocking them accordingly - even if it causes serious problems, its arguably better than the risk of getting fucked by an AI crawler.

I also expect robots.txt to fall out of use as a consequence of this plague of AI crawlers. Between OpenAI openly ignoring it, Perplexity openly deceiving it, and Anthropic spamming crawlers to get past it, the trust necessary for robots' "voluntary compliance" model to work has been thoroughly fucking shredded.

At this point, I wouldn't fault anyone for blanket-blocking all scrapers/robots - sure, doing that will make you unfindable by search engines, but search is basically useless nowadays for finding anything actually interesting, and trying to play whack-a-mole with AI scrapers just means you're gonna get your shit stolen.

Might as well go back to word-of-mouth.

Baldur Bjaranason coming in with a solid sneer aimed squarely at his own industry's finest

This pasta will never die.

Its a surprisingly good complement to OP Chris Paxton's Tweet about "normie opinion on AI", given it shows why said "normie opinion" is so resoundingly negative.

I've made some brief nods to how the AI bubble is rapidly souring public perception of tech (here and here), but it really feels like AI has, to quote @datarama, "made tech synonymous with “monstrous assholes” in a non-trivial chunk of public consciousness".

I feel like I should collect my thoughts on that front - I could probably make an interesting post out of it.

Reid Southern bringing us a good sneer

The proposal itself does still assume that AI scrapers are being run by decent human beings with functioning moral compasses, which is why I feel its inadequate.

This take might be overly harsh on AI/tech as a whole, but at this point I've run out of patience regarding this bubble and see no reason to believe anyone in the AI space is a decent human being, at least for the time being.

Not a sneer, but a mildly interesting open letter:

A specification for those who want content searchable on search engines, but not used for machine learning.

The basic idea is effectively an extension of robots.txt which attempts to resolve the issue by providing a means to politely ask AI crawlers not to scrape your stuff.

Personally, I don't expect this to ever get off the ground or see much usage - this proposal is entirely reliant on trusting that AI bros/companies will respect people's wishes and avoid scraping shit without people's permission.

Between OpenAI publicly wiping their asses with robots.txt, Perplexity lying about user agents to steal people's work, and the fact a lot of people's work got stolen before anyone even had the opportunity to say "no", the trust necessary for this shit to see any public use is entirely gone, and likely has been for a while.

I'd personally consider that sufficient grounds to accuse Proton of stealing its customers' data.

At the (miniscule) risk of sounding unnecessarily harsh on tech, any customer data that gets sent to company servers without the customer's explicit, uncoerced permission should be considered stolen.

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse [Thomas Claburn, The Register]

Personal opinion: c'mon bubble

"Positive is that if you didn't tell someone it was GenAI, they might not notice!"

Nah, they'd be able to immediately tell from just how fucking garbage it is