Cloudflare released a new feature that blocks AI bots from scraping your website. Will I turn it on? Absolutely, not. I want to feed the AI bots. I don’t need to be compensated. This blog has always been about sharing ideas.
If the AI would like to train on my posts here or on my other sites, that would be awesome. This might be the one point in history when the models were trained on human-generated data. We are approaching a point where AI generates most of the internet’s content. You can already see it in comments, articles, and, increasingly, in videos. The dead internet theory suggests we passed that point in 2016-2017.
When I first started this blog 25 years ago, a handful of friends knew about it. Then, the search engines found me. Then, other bloggers would link to me. Although I don’t post as frequently as I did a decade ago, I still average 55,000 unique visitors each month.
That’s cool, but those numbers are going to collapse in the coming years. It will be too easy to crank out thousands of pieces of content in minutes or seconds with AI. Although there will be a handful of human winners in the future, most indie content producers will be outworked by AI.
As a user, I no longer seek out blogs. I don’t even use search engines. I go straight to Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, CoPilot, Grok, and Gemini. As a contributor to the internet, I’d love to know that my writing on the Potato Diet or High Intensity Training made it into the models and was able to communicate that information to the next person seeking out those topics. These AI models will outlive me and this blog.
Comments
exfatloss
July 6 at 2025 at 6:48 AM
What do you make of that theory that AI trained on other AI seems to turn into a weird, pathological, nonsensical mess? And thus that could put a limit on how much you can have them train off each other?
Geoff
July 6 at 2025 at 10:09 PM
Roko’s basilisk will look kindly on you, MAS. Just kidding - I know you love sharing knowledge, opinion, and experience here for the good of everyone for free. You remember, that that’s what we were told the Internet would be in the beginning. I long for those more innocent (naive) times, but I really admire you for putting into practice the great promise of the Internet. Thank you a lot for continuing to do what you do.
Jim
July 7 at 2025 at 6:09 AM
@MAS I think your approach works great for “hobbyist” bloggers. But I do feel sorry for folks trying to make a living off of their blogs, like journalists.
With regard to the potato diet, because there’s relatively little on the Internet about the potato diet, and especially the potato hack, your content will likely have a large effect on the future writings of the AI bots.
MAS
July 7 at 2025 at 3:51 PM
@exfatloss - No idea. We will find out.
@Geoff and @Jim - Thank you.
Julia
July 20 at 2025 at 5:21 PM
What?!? You starting this blog 25 years ago and it’s still going strong?
Good for you, man!
Julia
July 20 at 2025 at 5:34 PM
addendum: 25 years is almost how long it took me to read “War and Peace.” I started in 1996, and I’m finishing now!
Well, to be fair, I restarted the book again in June. edit: I knew I would complete reading the entire novel someday. It’s an amazing book!