Well corporations are people so if you banned them then you've repressed their freedom and we can't have that.
Need to feed the machine so they chew up cycles and bandwidth on our end so they can grab the information so they can capture the users and money on their end.
You sound like you have something against billionaires, are you okay?

Oh no, I absolutely *love* googling for something and *FINDING MY OWN POSTS* being used as if they were authoritative, and not the foggy memories of an increasingly old man.

Positively the pinnacle of the modern world! The best thing ever!

Why is there even a google docs bot, what is it doing?

These stupid AI BOTS are causing lot of problems for sites..

Bogging them down,etc...

This AI crap needs to go before something bad happens...

Dude111 wrote on 2026-05-04, 18:41:

This AI crap needs to go before something bad happens...

Bad already happened, at what point will it be bad enough to cause any action?

(My view is that ai is operating exactly as expected in terms of bad)

Too bad they can’t all be throttled to 14.4 modem speeds.

Are they really registered users, or does the forum just classify them as such after using the User-Agent or source IP to detect which bot it is?

I made a post a few days back and saw it returned in google AI search result. Really dreadful. I also wonder why stuff like "Claude [Spider]" don't get banned

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-04-30, 03:11:

Why is there even a google docs bot, what is it doing?

There are programs running all over the place. The ones doing their job, doing what they were meant to do, are invisible. You'd never even know they were here. But the other ones... Well, you hear about them all the time.
...is the system assimilating some program that's doing something they're not supposed to be doing.
They have their reasons...but usually a program chooses exile when it faces deletion.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-04-30, 00:58:

Oh no, I absolutely *love* googling for something and *FINDING MY OWN POSTS* being used as if they were authoritative, and not the foggy memories of an increasingly old man.

Positively the pinnacle of the modern world! The best thing ever!

heh I always laugh when that happens to me.

Yes, finding anything near definitive or correct information on a Google search or LLM query has become a task of searching through the muck of the quagmire.

This is why it is still important to have a very large home reference library. Thousands of PRINT books checked by proofreaders, quality control, peer review, scholars, etc in a time BEFORE the great AI "contamination" of medocracy and lazy, shoddy instant answsers took over.

We know social media is very bad. It melts minds, being its own idiot box. AI/LLM disinformation and its profound future destruction of definitive knowledge / information will make social media look like child's play.

Weren't these "spiders" just bots, that index search results on regular web search engines? Or there's no more difference between artificial "intelligence" bots and "spiders"?

Currently I see these registered bots online:
Apple [Spider], Bing [Spider], ChatGPT [Bot], Claude [Spider], DuckAssist [Bot], Facebook [Bot], Feedly [Bot], Google [Spider], Google Docs [Bot], Google Other [Bot], Inoreader [RSS], NewsAI [Bot], Perplexity [Spider], Petal Search [Spider], Pinterest [Bot], Protopage [RSS], Qwant [Spider], WordPress [Bot], XenForo [Bot], Yandex [Spider]

These are far from "almost harmless": ChatGPT [Bot], Claude [Spider], DuckAssist [Bot], Facebook [Bot], Feedly [Bot], Google Docs [Bot], Google Other [Bot], NewsAI [Bot], Pinterest [Bot].

Those are strange, but nowadays every "peope (in singular)" (corporation) pushes a."i." sh33t: WordPress [Bot], XenForo [Bot].

Mostly like search results indexing bots: Apple [Spider], Bing [Spider], Google [Spider], Perplexity [Spider], Petal Search [Spider], Qwant [Spider], Yandex [Spider].

And writing of corporations ("people" - are you serious?!), they are not people or living things. They are legal fictions for non-living subjects. And this is not the worst...

aVd wrote on 2026-05-05, 03:58:

And writing of corporations ("people" - are you serious?!), they are not people or living things. They are legal fictions for non-living subjects. And this is not the worst...

Completely agree.
Justice in my opinion isn’t about making things equal to everyone, but about helping out the ones in disadvantage while limiting the ones with too much power. Companies are definitely the latter and shouldn’t be treated like some regular person when discussing “rights” or “freedom”.

"Corporations are people" was sarcasm.

lti wrote on 2026-05-09, 19:59:

"Corporations are people" was sarcasm.

The amount of insane shit on the internet killed my sense of sarcasm long ago 😂.
Well…better safe than sorry I guess, who knows how many people would genuinely start feeling bad about billionaires losing their freedom after reading that?

lti wrote on 2026-05-09, 19:59:

"Corporations are people" was sarcasm.

It’s also a US Supreme Court ruling

If any one thing should be overturned that is the one. Aptly named “citizens “ united
(no citizens were involved in the creation or litigation of that ruling)

Back to bots, my commentary from a decade ago on a specific rare proprietary computer is used in ai responses because it appears more in depth “scholarly” articles on said machine from 15-30 years ago just no longer exist (not even on archive)

There was commentary that 99% of “web content “ from the 90’s no longer exists and was not properly archived. ~2013 era already has 40% missing

Similarly 87% of commercial software from the 80’s no longer exists or is archived. (Purportedly, I doubt high end or proprietary software is in that number)
Ergo… My targa video capture card lists 800 compatible programs, can’t find a single one.

Most of the time when I am using ChatGPT to try to find some more info, it will end up trying to point me to one or more of my posts here on Vogons and I have to tell it that I am the one that made those posts.

zyzzle wrote on 2026-05-04, 23:55:

a time BEFORE the great AI "contamination"

I was going to say that reminds me of the situation with 'Low-background' steel being sourced from shipwrecks that predate the Trinity test... and then I found out someone had already made that comparison.

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-05-11, 16:53:

Most of the time when I am using ChatGPT to try to find some more info, it will end up trying to point me to one or more of my posts here on Vogons and I have to tell it that I am the one that made those posts.

haha, I've had this experience, but with Usenet. I used to post a lot on Usenet back in the day, and its surreal to see 20+ year old Usenet posts of mine showing up on searches.