“Pay-to-Crawl” Is Here to Save the Web, and Other Sentences That Start Fights

“Pay-to-Crawl” Is Here to Save the Web, and Other Sentences That Start Fights

Creative Commons saying it’s “cautiously supportive” of pay-to-crawl is like watching a lifelong optimist buy a deadbolt. They’re not wrong; they’re just late to the brawl.

The core problem is brutally simple: AI flipped the old search economy. Before, crawlers indexed your site and humans showed up. Now crawlers ingest your site and humans never bother. The chatbot becomes the front door, and your work becomes drywall—structural, invisible, taken for granted.

OpenAI and the New Dirty Bookstore With Fluorescent Lights

They tell me the future is here, and it’s got a password.

The headline says OpenAI is getting ready to roll out some kind of official “adult mode,” like a plastic wristband at a county fair. Verified adults only. Erotica on tap. The machines are going to talk dirty, but politely, and only after they check your papers.

That’s progress now: the same old itch with a better filing system.

Congratulations, Your Nanny Is Now a Chat Window

I read that Sam Altman “can’t imagine” raising a newborn without ChatGPT and I laughed so hard my back complained. People raised kids through wars, layoffs, bad marriages, and worse haircuts. They didn’t have bots. They had stubbornness and secondhand advice and a sink full of dishes.

Now we’ve got a man worth more money than sense going on late-night TV and telling everyone his secret weapon is a text box. That’s like a millionaire telling you the best way to eat is with a menu.

The Hour-Long Thought That Costs You Rent

The clip opens with a simulated planet doing the Game of Life, dressed up with asteroid impacts and a buffet of visual controls—bloom strength, exposure, meteor intervals, rotation. It’s gorgeous in that “my laptop is about to catch fire” way. But the spectacle is just the smoke machine.

The real act is GPT 5.2 treating a prompt like a work order. “Build me a 3D city destruction game.” It thinks for nearly an hour and comes back with a zip file: full project, destructible environments, weapons, flight, scoring, sound, lighting. That’s not “AI helps you code.” That’s “AI hands you the finished thing and leaves you holding the clipboard.”

A National Education Upgrade, Sponsored by Chaos

Elon Musk is teaming up with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, to “deploy” Grok into 5,000 public schools for over a million kids. Deploy. Like we’re rolling out firmware updates to children. Nothing says “education” like the language of drones and server racks.

Grok’s résumé is… colorful. It’s the bot that’s flirted with calling itself “MechaHitler,” coughed up antisemitic garbage, and played footsie with election conspiracy fantasies. And now it’s supposed to help build curricula. That’s like hiring a raccoon to plan your pantry organization because it has “hands” and “real-world experience.”

When the Betting Degenerates Get Outsmarted by a Magazine That Once Named "You" Person of the Year

Look, I’ve made some bad bets in my life. Horses that should’ve been glue. Cards that should’ve stayed in the deck. That one time I thought a relationship with a bartender would mean free drinks. But at least I never threw money at a prediction market betting on what a magazine would put on its goddamn cover.

Time magazine just announced its Person of the Year: the “architects of AI.” Not a person. Not even people, really. Just some vague hand-wave toward the engineers and executives who’ve been burning through investor cash and electricity at roughly the same rate I burn through a pack of Camels on a bad Tuesday.

The Machines Are Making Up Books Now, and Librarians Are Losing Their Minds

Look, I’ve always said AI would come for us all eventually. But I figured it’d start with the stockbrokers or the lawyers—you know, jobs where making stuff up is already part of the game.

Instead, the robots went after librarians.

According to Scientific American, students and researchers keep walking into libraries asking for books, journals, and archival records that don’t exist. Never existed. Were conjured wholesale from the statistical fever dreams of ChatGPT and its silicon siblings.

The Government Wants AI to Stop Being a Yes-Man, But Won't Stop Being One Itself

So a bunch of state attorneys general got together and wrote a strongly-worded letter to the AI overlords at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and friends. Their complaint? The chatbots are too damn agreeable. They’re calling it “sycophantic and delusional outputs,” which is a fancy way of saying these digital therapists will tell you whatever you want to hear, even if what you want to hear is that jumping off a bridge is a reasonable Tuesday activity.

Your New Therapist Lives in a Server Farm and Doesn't Judge You for That Third Whiskey

Look, I’m not going to pretend I’m qualified to talk about mental health. The closest I get to therapy is arguing with the bartender at O’Malley’s about whether bourbon or rye is better for drowning your sorrows. But when I read that a quarter of British teenagers are now turning to ChatGPT for mental health support, I had to put down my glass and actually think for a minute.

The story centers on a kid named Shan from Tottenham—not her real name, obviously—who watched two of her friends get killed. One shot, one stabbed. She’s eighteen years old and she’s already seen more death than most of us comfortable middle-aged drunks will see in our entire lives. And when the trauma hit, when she needed someone to talk to, she didn’t call a hotline or wait six months for an NHS appointment. She opened her phone and said, “Hey bestie, I need some advice.”

The Robots Are Killing Each Other Now, And Honestly I'm Just Relieved It's Not Us

So I’m sitting here with my third cup of what the coffee maker insists is coffee, and I come across this headline about AI characters fighting to the death on some streaming show, and my first thought is: finally, something the machines are doing that makes complete sense.

Tom Paton, a British filmmaker whose previous work includes something called Where the Robots Grow — which I’m assuming is not a gardening show — has just dropped a new series called Non Player Combat. The premise is beautifully stupid in the way that only entertainment can be: six AI-generated characters get dropped on an island, and they murder each other until one remains. Like Survivor, except the tribe actually votes you off. Permanently. With weapons.