As NixCraft wrote when sharing this: the irony is that it’s from Perplexity. The rest of you can do this, we won’t. We might be one of those little corners of the web still making human-written content. Life skill in 2025: to spot what is real and what is slop. A bit like […]
Read More… from Ninety per cent of the web could be “AI” slop next year
Beware Substack. I received a newsletter today that I had never heard of, so I unsubscribed—to find that I had allegedly signed up to everything that the user publishes. Not bloody likely. This wasn’t a case of being on someone else’s Substack and accidentally clicking ‘Yes’ to other suggested newsletters. Normally there’d only […]
Read More… from Beware Substack—and TV3 makes terrible design and marketing decisions
This was interesting: how the “AI” theftbots (yes, I’m coining that word) affected Autocade’s traffic. We had blocked a bunch of them already—notably the western ones and ByteDance—but there were many others that still got through. This is from Cloudflare, but even their default settings miss a bunch, especially Chinese ones, and they don’t […]
The old The new The old The new The Autocade logo has changed, and we’ll be letting you in on why in due course. It hasn’t been done just because of æsthetics, though after 17½ years it was probably time for an update. Meanwhile, on the “AI” scraping front, which […]
Read More… from Autocade gets a new logotype; and we block a lot of “AI” bots
Originally published in Lucire A year ago, we lost our good friend Helen Baxter. This loss was most deeply felt by no one more than her husband and partner of 25 years, Chelfyn. In the past year, he has come across a way to honour her memory. Head to the YouTube channel Zoechelfyn, […]
Read More… from Chelfyn Baxter honours Helen’s memory using AI in an ethical way
Unfortunately, we’ve had to block some individual IP addresses as we suspect they’re guilty of stealing content from Autocade. These aren’t the clearly marked “AI” bots, but individual IP addresses that have hit the site at a far greater frequency than humanly possible, and some have tried to access non-existent pages that could not possibly […]
Read More… from The extra things you now do in online publishing: blocking suspicious bots
Shufei had a great idea in conversation on Mastodon: Eventually soon the disinformation will be so thick that vetting for truth on the internet will become practically impossible. Industrialized libel by LLM will front data protection rackets: pay a fee to get your name clear from lies of varying severity. I don’t see a way […]
Francis Saele posted a link to an article by Steve Carey in Inc. on his Linkedin, and I found it very worthwhile sharing, too—even if Inc.’s firewall comes down on you saying that you’ve exceeded your quota of free articles. (That quota appears to be zero for some of us. Fortunately there are always ways […]
Abdelkader Boudih, a.k.a. Seuros, shows how dodgy Amazon is. In July, his Amazon Web Services account was terminated and 10 years of his data were gone. ‘No warning. No grace period. No recovery options. Just complete digital annihilation.’ What Amazon then did over 20 days was gaslight him, with humans acting like chatbots. We’ve seen […]
Read More… from Amazon Web Services: where 10 years of your work can just vanish
Sadly, while these Autocade visitor numbers look rosy, Cloudflare does count bots, even if the bots go no further than notching up a “visit” on the system. No data are transferred to them. Fortunately, we have our page-view counter, and with every known “AI” bot blocked on our end, including a bunch that Cloudflare […]
Read More… from Switching things around: a post about bots written by a human