Hate having to read an article and use your brain to understand what it's about? Would you rather read what an AI says it (hopefully) says instead? If so,
Latest nightly builds of Firefox 139 include an experimental web link preview feature which shows (among other things) an AI-generated summary of what that page is purportedly about before you visit it, saving you time, a click, or the need to ‘hear’ a real human voice.
Awesome! Now half the sites on the web contain a tiny drop of information, buried under paragraphs and paragraphs of GPT-generated text, and now my browser uses the same LLM to reverse engineer the original information. What could possibly go wrong the LLMs talk to other LLMs and summarize, bloat, summarize and then bloat and then finally summarize every bit of information for us.
Do we actually still make websites for humans, or is it all just AIs and SEO?
I wonder if the preview does a pre-fetch which can be identified as such? As in, I wonder if I'd be able to serve garbage for the AI summarizer, but the regular content to normal views. Guess I'll have to check!
Update: It looks like it sends an X-Firefox-Ai: 1 header. Cool. I can catch that, and deal with it.
I agree with your sentiment. It's sad that your (or my) website can't respond with a X-This-Website-is-not-AI-Garbage header to indicate that "Hey user, you can actually just open this website and read it and get the infos you need without an AI assistant.".
I'm pretty sure Firefox's preflight request will also not load ads and so could be seen as a bad scraper.
Or are you referring to my "try to detect sketchy user agents" ruleset? Because that had two false positives in the past two months, yet, those rules are responsible for stopping about 2.5 million requests per day, none of which were from a human (I'd know, human visitors have very different access patterns, even when they visit the maze).
If the bots were behaving correctly, and respected my robots.txt, I wouldn't need to fight them. But when they're DDoSing my sites from literally thousands of IPs, generating millions of requests a day, I will go to extreme lengths to make them go away.
Alternatively, you could make your response more useful, removing the UI to aid the AI. After all, the user should be allowed to choose how they navigate the web.