In the three and a half years I’ve been playing with AI, I’ve used ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. ChatGPT during the early days, mostly Perplexity these days. (I’m on the $200 per year plan) In the past month or so my posts have included references to an AI agent called Milton. It is the creation of a friend and former co-worker, Phil Atkinson. Easily one of the smarted people I know. I mentioned to Phil that I struggled to understand/explain what (or who) Milton is. He gave the task to Milton. Continue reading
Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence
“The web is written by AI for AI”
From an opinion piece by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Bots now account for roughly 57-58 percent of HTTP requests for HTML content, compared with about 42-43 percent from humans. Meanwhile, Imperva’s Bad Bot Report based on 2025 data put bots at about 53 percent of measured web traffic for the second year in a row, with humans at 47 percent. […] According to Pangram, an AI detection company, on websites such as LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, and Reddit, “about one in four long-form items were fully AI-generated.”
The author uses Perplexity as his search engine not because it’s more accurate than other AI LLMs; “it’s that it shows me its sources. I can see if what it just turned up is the real thing or just BS. Guess what? It’s often crap.”
I’m not certain the other LLMs do not show sources. I think they tend to hedge on that score. But if half of the web is AI slop, I’m not sure it makes much difference.
Mirroring human consciousness
For the past 24 hours the following story has been in the news:
“Anthropic finds hidden ‘workspace’ inside Claude Al. Researchers say the structure holds unspoken concepts during reasoning, mirroring a leading neuroscientific theory of human consciousness.”
Two subjects I’ve long been interested in. (106 blog posts tagged “consciousness,“ 46 tagged “thoughts.“) I prompted Claude identify my blog posts that seem most relevant to this story? Continue reading
AI has hacked the code of human civilization (Yuval Noah Harari)
“The job that was once performed by Lenin and Mussolini is now performed by AI.”
Yuval Noah Harari lecture at Oxford University (YouTube description): “Human domination relies on large-scale cooperation among strangers, which is sustained by bureaucratic systems – such as laws, finance, religion – designed to build trust. Since AIs are ‘native bureaucrats’, they can effortlessly remember all laws, transactions, and scriptures far better than any human. This leaves AI uniquely placed to take over critical processes, such as granting bank loans, deciding university admissions, determining prison sentences, and executing military strikes. Are we prepared?”
Harari’s vision of the AI future seems most on-target to me.
Putting a face on AI
I have resisted (for the most part) anthropomorphizing the AI tools I use. But it’s getting harder. I think of Claude as male (my maternal grandfather was named Claude); Gemini seems genderless; and Perplexity is female because the voice I hear on my iPhone and with CarPlay is feminine.
Dave Winer asked ChatGPT for an image of a ChatGPT talking head. 
I prompted Perplexity to do the same. (below)
The ChatGPT image is closer to how I picture Perplexity. I think I can resist thinking of these tools in human terms but it is getting more and more difficult to think of them as just software.