THE LABYRINTH

I've seen in a few places online people talking about setting up 
auto-generated labyrinth websites designed to endlessly trap AI 
crawlers in some rather petty effort to protest against them. In my 
experience crawlers seem to get trapped in my online services 
without me even trying - I even had to block a Gopher crawler that 
got stuck in GophHub for weeks. But anyway what really strikes me 
about this idea of an AI-consuming labyrinth is how the internet is 
already built, often rather deliberately, as a labyrinth to occupy 
us alleged human intelligences.

I mused over this last night on the couch in one of my long 
sessions of thinking silently, naked, in dim light, while the room 
got colder as I'd turned off the heater in preparation for bed, 
after the usual opening dream of finding a girlfriend gave way in 
hopelessness to more academic concepts. Unusually I caught myself 
near the beginning and chose to write down my thoughts on a 
crumpled scrap of paper rather than let them float away harmlessly 
into the ether as usual. So this morning I awoke determined to 
transcribe them here, a reboot of the crazed philosophical tone I 
had when I started this phlog, albeit absent the start which was 
already lost unrecorded:


I mean I don't know whether I envy or fear the state of mind where 
this is anything but a waste of time. Do you? I mean one way or 
other it's all a game and who knows who they're playing against? 
Who cares who they're playing against? Who even wants to know? All 
we care is to play, all we know is to play. AI might be a crappy 
approximation of humanity's creativity, but it's an accurate model 
of humanity's consumption. In that respect it's a perfection all of 
its own. Endless energy consumed, endless data fed in, endless 
bullshit out. AI is the internet, the internet is AI. The 
intelligence of all humanity spewed out without an index, churned 
over by search engines, fed back to itself via page ranking 
algorithms, and now regurgitated by AI. It's all the same shit. 
It's not human, it's not machine, it's a life-form of its own. 
Never alive and never dead. We sustain it and it sustains us. We 
control it and it controls us. We look to it to find ourselves and 
find only a billion other eyes peering deeper into the darkness. 
Deep down there it lives, but we will never see it, never know what 
it sees back of us, or what it does.

 - The Free Thinker