Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers

lekevicius 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I'll do that once any of the top 4 AI chatbots says they'll start making requests with this header. Before that it's just a neat idea with no adoption.

I also think it's exceedingly unlikely that any of the top 4 chatbots would choose to load websites this way. Too many risks for a 0.01% adoption even years later.

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LunicLynx 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hello … AI company that wants easier access to data

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kaangiray26 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

hoping for this to get mainstream so that I can just view the pages without any ads, js and bloat

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Elfener 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> But imagine for a second they did do that. You get the API, all the info is there.

> Why do you need AI then?

(from this HN comment, worth a read in full: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43679585)

	▲	phoghed 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Let's say you want to plan a trip to Thailand with your family. You could use the fancy AI to do it for you, or you could build a stupid frontend with minimal natural language understanding. It's giving https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863#9224

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qznc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, that is why this will not get popular.

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jiehong 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Markdown ads?

	▲	qingcharles 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Time magazine already serves their pages like this to agents with ads for the agents in them, IIRC.

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maurelius2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even without AI this would be a nice feature.

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monneyboi 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, this is the way forward. All the POW stuff is such a waste of energy.

The open internet deserves a real solution instead of gatekeepers in the form of brightdata, firecrawl, cloudflare and the likes.

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a2ff6eeb0 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hm, interesting avenue for prompt injection.

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spockz 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

How is that different from today where agents just do searches and ingest web pages?

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hnlmorg 16 minutes ago | parent [-]

I don’t disagree with you in principle but there is a difference.

The MD content isn’t intended for human consumption whereas HTML is. So you either have that injection readable to your users, which could be jarring to non-technical readers, or you play the cat-and-mouse game of hoping those pesky crawlers don’t ignore text that’s not human-visible on a rendered page.

	▲	spockz 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Right. And today we have something similar with search engines going on where sites want to offer the full text to the engine for seo. But maybe they want to do the opposite to agent and poison the well. So human agents still get the “real” data and agents the “something plausible but not quite right” data. Or everything just disappears behind something like cloudflare or a paywall.

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ErroneousBosh 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

So can I use this to serve actively harmful content to the Cocaine Piracy Parrots?

Maybe tarpit them into reading gigabytes of Markov Chain nonsense, really slowly?