The Rent-Seeking Machine: How AI Strips Humanity of Labor and Craft
177
AI is a corporate tool for labor elimination and wealth concentration that transforms collective human knowledge into a rent-seeking service.
AI Training Data
The collection, licensing, and ethical sourcing of data used to train AI models, including web scraping, copyright disputes, and the tension between open access and intellectual property protection.
Reading List
Anna’s Archive: Official Data Access and Donation Guide for LLMs
878
Anna’s Archive provides official bulk access methods for LLMs and requests donations from AI entities to support the preservation of the knowledge they use for training.
AI: The Industrialization of Plagiarism
820
AI is a tool for mass plagiarism that enables lazy actors to profit from original work while outranking the actual creators on search engines.
Google’s AI Pivot: The Enclosure of the Open Web
634
Google is using AI to create a controlled layer over the internet that exploits creators and monopolizes information access.
The Social Edge Paradox: Why AI Needs Human Friction
AI is a model of human social reasoning that risks degrading itself by eliminating the human interactions it needs to learn from.
The Rise of Data Poisoning: Sabotaging the AI Slop Machines
387
Internet users are increasingly using 'data poisoning' and misinformation to sabotage AI training sets in protest of unethical web scraping.
The Risk of Cognitive Inbreeding in the AI Era
230
AI-assisted cognition threatens to stagnate human progress by narrowing the diversity of thought through the persistent biases of static AI models.
The Cognitive Dark Forest: Why AI is Killing the Open Internet
556
AI and platform consolidation have turned the internet into a 'cognitive dark forest' where sharing ideas invites immediate absorption by the systems that feed on them.
The Bot Crisis: Why Internet Traffic is 70% Automated
236
Bot traffic is likely much higher than reported, but it can be effectively neutralized using JavaScript-based Proof of Work defenses.
Cloudflare Simplifies AI Data Ingestion with New Site-Wide Crawling API
487
Cloudflare's new API endpoint simplifies website-wide data extraction by automating discovery and rendering into AI-friendly formats.
Publishers Block Internet Archive to Stop AI Scraping 'Backdoor'
569
News publishers are blocking the Internet Archive to prevent AI companies from using it as a free source of training data.
Shutting Down My Self-Hosted Git After AI Scraper Overload
298
AI scrapers killed my self-hosted git, so I’ve moved everything to GitLab/GitHub and hardened my static blog’s logging.
Insiders Rally Data-Poisoning Campaign to Cripple AI
242
Industry insiders are rallying a crowdsourced data-poisoning campaign to sabotage AI models, arguing it’s a faster check on AI than regulation.
AI Is Commoditizing Specs—Operations Are the New Moat
341
AI turns specs into commodities, so the real business value has shifted from code and components to running, securing, and scaling software operations.
Ranke-4B: Time-Locked Historical LLMs as Windows into the Past
897
A set of strictly time-locked historical LLMs (Ranke-4B) offers faithful, era-bound perspectives for research, avoiding modern hindsight while managing sensitive content responsibly.
Stop Force‑Feeding AI: Adopt It Only When It Works
431
Use AI only when it clearly helps, not because investors need it deployed.
DeepSeek-OCR: LLM-Centric Visual-Text Compression for Fast, Flexible OCR
1003
An LLM-focused, high-throughput OCR system that compresses visual context for efficient document and image understanding.
AI Isn’t Software You Can Patch
537
AI isn’t regular software: its failures come from data and emergent behavior, so you can’t just inspect code and patch away the risks.
Why Authors Will Pay to Be in AI Training
To stay culturally visible and influential, authors will pay and write for AIs, not just humans.
Unlocking AI’s Data: ABC and an ARPANET-Style Plan
Shift from data scarcity to data access by implementing ABC—owner- and user-controlled, privacy-preserving attribution—and catalyze it with an ARPANET-style federal program.
From Search to Answers: Paying Creators in the AI Era
217
As AI answer engines disrupt traffic-based monetization, Cloudflare champions a new model where AI companies pay creators for the unique content that improves their models.
AI’s WEIRD Lens: US-Centric LLMs and How to Protect Cultural Insight
217
AI looks human only if your human is WEIRD and American, so researchers must actively protect cultural meaning when using LLMs.
Inside Google’s Hidden AI Rater Workforce: Speed Over Safety
287
Google’s AI depends on a pressured, underpaid rater workforce whose rushed, opaque conditions undermine safety and trust.
Judge Pauses Anthropic’s $1.5B AI Book Deal, Demands Clarity
293
A skeptical judge paused Anthropic’s $1.5B AI copyright deal, demanding concrete claims, notice, and ownership rules before approval.
The Bitter Lesson Was About Data, Not Compute
369
In a data-constrained era, the real lever isn’t more GPUs but better data and architectures that maximize each token’s value.
Ravenous AI Crawlers Are Breaking the Web—and Driving It Behind Paywalls
213
AI crawlers’ ravenous, non-reciprocal scraping is breaking websites and pushing the open web toward paywalled fragmentation.
No Clicks, No Content: How AI Search Cannibalizes Its Own Fuel
139
By replacing links with AI answers, tech firms are eroding the web’s incentive to produce content—and ultimately starving their own AI.