The Bot Wars Begin: AI’s Aggressive Data Grab Sparks Digital Resistance
From BNPL food delivery to endless mazes of fake content, this week’s tech developments reveal the increasingly combative nature of our AI-powered future—and how you can turn these tools to your advan
Dear Friend –
There is never a dull moment in AI land. Earlier this week, the pundits declared OpenAI in trouble as Google’s newly released update to its Gemini-class AI models took the reins in a bunch of AI benchmarks. And before the proverbial ink on the opinion pieces dried up, OpenAI published their new image generator and turned the whole world into a blatant copyright-violating Studio Ghibli clone. The financial litmus test will hit your stock ticker in just a few hours from now when CoreWeave (which provides GPU access to AI companies) goes live. The early indicators don’t look that great… 🤷🏼
Here are some nuggets to consume while your eyes are peeled on your Bloomberg terminal:
Headlines from the Future
Buy Now, Pay Later for Food Delivery ↗
Assuming this is not just a thing DoorDash did for marketing purposes, it surely points to a worrying trend:
DoorDash users can use Klarna to pay in four, interest-free payments or defer payments and let people pick a ‘date that aligns with their paycheck schedules.’
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The AI Bot Wars Are Here ↗
AI (specifically large language models) need oodles of data to be trained on. AI companies thus gobble up as much data as possible – from publicly available data on the open Internet to copyrighted material from sources such as LibGen (a vast library of pirated books and scientific articles).
A longstanding practice for website owners to prevent bots from scraping their websites is the use of a robots.txt file – a small text file that you place in the root of your web host instructing (originally search engine) bots to only index certain parts of your website or stay away completely. Search engine operators such as Google or Microsoft honored these instructions – until the AI hype took hold and all rules went out the window.
Now AI bots aggressively crawl the Internet, ignoring instructions in robots.txt and even disguising themselves as regular Internet traffic to avoid being blocked – and it leads to problems beyond “just” stealing data:
According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies’ bots. […] Schubert observed that AI crawlers ‘don’t just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not.’ [Source]
In retaliation, Cloudflare, one of the largest network providers, lets its users fight back by deploying drastic measures:
“When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them,” writes Cloudflare. “But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources.” [Source]
When it comes to AI, the gloves are most certainly off now…
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How to Create Your Personal Instant ChatGPT Expert ↗
The AI revolution isn’t just about having tools - it’s about knowing how to use them effectively. This simple 3-step hack transforms ChatGPT from a generic assistant into your personal subject matter expert.
Want ChatGPT to become an instant expert? Try this 3-step hack from Reddit.
First, ask for “20 words describing a [specific specialist].” This creates the foundation for your expert persona.
Next, request a 4-sentence prompt using those words to “summon this specialist.” This crafts the perfect instruction set.
Finally, paste that prompt into a new chat and watch the transformation happen.
The result? Instead of generic bullet points, you’ll get a conversational expert who guides you through complex topics with natural paragraphs and deeper insights.
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The End of YC ↗
Benn Stancil’s commentary about the changing nature of software development (vibe coding is all the rage now, kids!) draws an important conclusion: If developing software (aka writing code) becomes more and more democratized, what stronghold do places like Silicon Valley have on innovation?
Taking this thought a step further – if the value is less and less in the software development process and rather in domain expertise in the problem space, will we see a geographic shift of innovation ecosystems toward their respective client spaces?
Just as it’s becoming harder to out-write an LLM, it’s becoming harder to out-develop one too. And if experts can prompt their way to a product just as easily as those of us in Silicon Valley can, what winning talent are we left with?
What We Are Reading
🧠 The Alarming Reason Why Smart People Can’t Solve Simple Problems Anymore How algorithmic thinking is creating a generation that waits for instructions rather than seeks solutions. @Jane
✈️ The Booming, High-Stakes Arms Race of Airline Safety Videos Airlines have been producing more elaborate and celebrity-packed safety videos. However, research suggests that the more entertaining the safety video, the less passengers recall key safety information, raising questions about the balance between entertainment and safety education. @Mafe
📈 Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks AI just got its own Moore’s Law—except instead of more transistors and doubling every 2 years, it’s completing longer tasks faster, doubling its endurance every 7 months. @Kacee
⚖️ The Weight of the Internet Will Shock You Much more of a philosophical excursion than a physics debate, how much mass would you attribute to the internet? It’s an astonishing duality of omnipresence and infinity matched with physical intangibility. @Julian
🪱 The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack Scientists and researchers have been trying to create a digital twin of a microscopic worm called Caenorhabditis elegans since 2011, with the goal of understanding how brains interact with the world to produce behavior, but they have not yet been successful. @Pedro
🌱 Harvard Study: Open Source Has an Economic Value of $8.8 Trillion If you know Jane’s and my history, you know we worked for Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser and, at the time, one of the largest open-source projects in the world. Open source is truly everywhere – but what’s it actually worth, and more importantly, how do we ensure it continues to be a gift that keeps on giving? @Pascal
Rabbit Hole Recommendations
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Happy Distractions
☢️ Note to self: Don’t import plutonium… ‘Naive’ science fan faces jail for plutonium import.