ai

Gotta block ’em all

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Robb Knight, a software developer who found that Perplexity was circumventing robots.txt to scrape websites it wasn’t supposed to, told 404 Media there are many cases where it’s hard to tell what a user agent does or who operates it. “What’s happening to people, including me, is copy-pasting lists of agents without verifying every agent is a real one,” he said. Knight added that the Wall Street Journal and many News Corp-owned websites are currently blocking a bot called “Perplexity-ai,” which may or may not even exist (Perplexity’s crawler is called “PerplexityBot.”)

Source: Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)

The solution we used on this here blargh is simple: We blocked everyone on robots.txt:


User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Crawl-delay: 360

We also like to have a terminal window to look at what’s currently hitting the server and we block bots liberally. We’ve already blocked ahrefs.com and perplexitybot for being assholes without rate limits. Does this mean this here blargh will be that much harder to find? Yeah, but we don’t particularly care about it.

Some idiot will claim theirs is the first full AI song and it will suck

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No, the goal was instead to see if AI mastering could really be a “sonic accelerant” for the hobbyist, the amateur, the laptop producer, the opening act, the indie label, the Famous Artist doing demos in their home studio, or the mix engineer who has five minutes to send a band home with something they can play in the car.

Source: AI can now master your music—and it does shockingly well | Ars Technica

Just picked up a jerb (henceforth referred to as musicbarJerb). I wonder if the musicians up on the stage even know about this.

I’m sure the small-time rappers in town already do but… like the post says, at the end of the day, most people in the music industry consider this a tool, not the end result.

We can be predators. We have to.

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I have some thoughts about the hockey-stick rise of “AI” (more like advanced machine learning) , it’s current iterations are bullshittiers (from On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt

His book On Bullshit addresses his concern and makes a distinction between “bullshitters” and liars. He concludes that bullshitters are more insidious: they are more of a threat against the truth than are liars.

Whatever happens with AI— it’s a bullshitter. It doesn’t, it can’t, care about what is true or false. Whomever uses it also does not care, and they will use it to expand their underdeveloped thoughts and ideas to have it talk about nothing at all, in an effort to confuse and control; to influence you to buy some random widget you don’t need.

Combine the output of AI writing tools with software to paraphrase and re-edit and everyone will have a really hard time telling what was written entirely by humans and what was fabricated from nothingness.

In time, media created with the assistance of AI will probably become the apex predator of your time and attention on the internet, where to attract attention is to attract predators:

Is our universe an empty forest or a dark one? If it’s a dark forest, then only Earth is foolish enough to ping the heavens and announce its presence. The rest of the universe already knows the real reason why the forest stays dark. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth learns as well.

This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.

While it’s markedly safe to hide, it also means you give up your potential for change on the larger Internet, letting those predators bend the environment to their will permanently.

We’d do well to remember that on the Internet nobody cares you’re a dog.

The text itself is the lie

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GPT-3 is a communication revolution that threatens to eliminate the possibility of information about the original human intentionality behind a given text post.

Source: GPT-3: Informational Hyper-Inflation – Never Met a Science

Unless you see the name of someone who is a real human on a text you cannot be sure that text was written by an actual breathing human. Even then you’re not assured the text was actually written by a human, merely that it was vetted by a human who then decided it was okay to put their name to this text.

You still cannot be sure the text was actually written by them. As the author of that post says this will only help drive written media away giving priority to audio and video media.

How long until those are mediated by AI? Nvidia is already making a go at it with the purpose of reducing used bandwidth but it won’t be long before the tech is being used to fake entire appearances.

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