Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent • Robb Knight

AI Agents robots.txt Builder | Dark Visitors

A handy resource for keeping your blocklist up to date in your robots.txt file.

Though the name of the website is unfortunate with its racism-via-laziness nomenclature.

AI and the Rise of Mediocrity

Simply put: AI thrives when our need for originality is low and our demand for mediocrity is high.

AI will fill the world with grindingly average texts, passable but derivative illustration and video, and unoriginal but functional new product designs.

What is being mechanized by AI is our tastes—our ability to discern quality (or originality) at all.

The value is in the difficulty - Annotations

We’ve seen this arc before, and music is the richest analogy.

Like Bruce Sterling always says:

Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody.

I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian

AI writing reminds me of Tennyson’s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem:

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more

It’s Not AI. It’s FOMOnetization.

FOMO is a feeling. But it’s also a business model—and increasingly, one of the more successful ones. Fear, in general, makes people much easier to separate from their money. It’s perfectly suited to this moment of ubiquitous grift, where everything feels like a lottery ticket or a multi-level marketing scheme.

It’s even more perfectly suited for “the age of AI,” which squeezes economic FOMO from both sides. AI could make you wildly rich (the first person to start a billion-dollar company with zero employees!) or leave you hopelessly destitute (part of the looming “permanent underclass”). Which one do you want to be? Smash that like button, sign up for my online course, and use my new AI-powered business platform!