Yes. Particularly if they have to cloak a curl call as a Chrome browser.

I doubt it's as high as 85% at this time. Usually only the tech savvy can do effective ad blocking. But as AI sites such as Perplexity are increasingly being used by the average user this number will rise. And that will break the web's business model as we know it. Be prepared to pay for everything you access. And if Perplexity does it on your behalf, be prepared for a really big bill from them.

Yeah. I don't know many people who still use Google.

About half do.

When I access a web site, I send my request directly to that website. Not through an LLM. Semantics about proxy servers aside, If you fiddle with the content while in transit, you are operating an agent which is doing the scraping.

And you need to medicate right now.

Do OpenAI and other AI vendors depend that much on the government sector for their income? Somehow, I don't think so. On the other hand, is there a network effect? Wherein the IRS and other agencies expect to receive ChatGPT-compatible input. So everyone obliged to file with them figure they'll either have to convert their submittals or just bite the bullet and switch to ChatGPT. Then solution there is to place the burden of conversion from some open data format to their preferred one onto the government agency.

... someone to prompt an AI to generate all possible sequels of every movie in existence. Resulting in the market becoming swamped by garbage.

Producing garbage is the sole privilege of Universal Studios.

So is 3G.

Any automated collection of webpage content. It doesn't matter if the agent doing the scraping stores it verbatim, summarises it or throws it in the bit bucket. From the point of view of the web server, all of these are equivalent.

But Perplexity is basically admitting it:

It really doesn't matter if Perplexity thinks they are "a helpful digital assistant". That's not what the robots.txt file says. There's no flag in there to allow only the "helpful" ones to scrape. Just don't scrape, m'kay?

... Rivian should have the same rights. Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and all that*.

*Yeah, I know that the shyster legislators manage to create law that applies only to their buddies.

They burn _some_ of it. The rest, they throw into rivers or directly into the sea. That which they burn isn't all burned in well controlled, high temperature incinerators. Which will reduce plastics to H2O, CO2 and some Nitrogen oxides. The latter being able to be further reduced in the same manner as diesel exhaust treatment.

In the short term, this is how you solve the "plastics crisis". You just have to keep people in remote villages from "recycling" technology by throwing it in a campfire to recover the copper. And then you have to solve the political fallout now that you have deprived a few hundred million people of their livelihoods, scavenging crap from garbage dumps.

And they are correct. So, we should quit producing fossil hydrocarbon based plastics and go back to using whale baleen. While we're at it, we can reduce the production of hydrocarbon oils by replacing them with spermaceti.

And we'll credit all these changes to the efforts of Greenpeace.

Put AI to work on the problem.

... resurrect the Mojave phone booth.