I’m not a participant in this race.

Are the AI companies worried about anything but their valuations?

I don’t care about their valuations, but I do care about the risks that they are creating for the economy, society, and the technological advancement, at large.

Micro transactions [in this case] are a great idea, these crawlers need to be taxed and made to pay for the unaccounted external costs. Furthermore, we need to fund any risk mitigations, security coordination, and other safety work. If these things are not imposed on the market, the most ruthless player will create the biggest mess they can get away with.

I don’t see a better way to do this, right now, than to allow Strips, or CF, to create some way to charge the crawlers. Imagine I have some really expensive content, I can put it behind the paywall, or subscription model, but that’s very specific to the human consumer. What if I do want to search engine or content aggregator to consume some of the content? It would be quite hard for me to sign an exclusive agreement with OpenAI, like what Reddit or NYT are doing. It might be quite beneficial to create some infrastructure to let bots automatically to pay for access. It might even be crypto based, I don’t think it really matters. It just has to be easy for me to integrate it, and the bots need to find it easy to use.

If we all start doing this, I think this could be of benefit to all content creators, such as musicians, movie makers, game developers, and even independent journalists.

We used to pay for software and things, but what has happened? Walled gardens and production monopolies are taking over. This has largely reduced the quality of all the content we consume.

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