The open web with AIs is turning into a dark forest.
The Dark Forest and Generative AI
Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
Against the dark forest
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
An exploration of the problems and possible futures of flooding the web with generative AI content
The AI Aesthetic
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
AI Slop and the End of Knowledge
As an early fan of the internet, I was amazed that all the knowledge of the world was becoming available to everyone, everywhere, all the time. But things have changed.
What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web
I remember, pretty clearly, my excitement over the early World Wide Web. I had been on the internet for a year or two at that point, mostly using IRC, Usenet, and Gopher (along with email, naturall…
AI Agent Traps
As autonomous AI agents increasingly navigate the web, they face a novel challenge: the information environment itself. This gives rise to a critical vulnerabil
AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find
AI has broken the economic bargain behind the web, and everybody is losing.
Track, control, and optimize for AI agents and bots | Known Agents (formerly Dark Visitors)
Use Known Agents to turn the rising wave of AI agents, LLM assistants, and other bots crawling your website into a new growth channel for your business
The AI people have been right a lot
Try to keep an open mind as the world gets increasingly wild.
OpenAI News
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
AI Slop is Killing Online Communities
Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further.
Is there something it is like to be an AI?
Posted on Wednesday 2 Jul 2025. 1,593 words, 6 links. By Matt Webb.
AI Is Evolving — And Changing Our Understanding Of Intelligence
Advances in AI are making us reconsider what intelligence is and giving us clues to unlocking AI’s full potential.
