everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: chatgtp

  • How AI Redefined Access and Ownership in 2025

    How AI Redefined Access and Ownership in 2025

    Tried something different this year, asked ChatGPT to summarize the year for me.

    One benefit of having the entire archive of this blog part of OpenAI’s learning model is that it can spit back what it’s learned, not only in substance but also in tone. It’s uncanny.

    Here’s how ChatGPT responded:

    Absolutely — based on Ian Kennedy’s actual writing on everwas.com (which covers tech policy, AI’s impact on the open web, local NYC issues, and personal essays), a hypothetical 2025 Year-in-Review blog post from him would blend thoughtful analysis of tech trends with sharp local and cultural commentary.

    Here’s how Ian Kennedy of everwas.com might write a “2025: A Year in Review” post:

    2025 felt like the year the internet finally stopped pretending it was the open playground of ideas and began behaving like what it’s actually become: a contested battleground where ownership, access, and value are constantly being negotiated — not just by corporations, but by governments, communities, and the technology itself.

    AI Changed the Web — But Not in the Way We Expected

    At the start of the year, conversations around artificial intelligence were dominated by shiny demos and sci-fi ethics. By year’s end, the conversation shifted to who owns the data and who gets paid for it.

    Policy makers, IAB task forces, and publishers around the world began framing the debate in terms of rights and compensation, not just innovation. The old model where content was indexed freely by search and repurposed by AI is now being replaced by a future where:

    • Publishers insist on licensing and metered access
    • AI crawlers are treated like commercial participants
    • Content is tokenized and monetized rather than scraped for free

    This wasn’t just theory — it became a reality for countless newsrooms and creators struggling to survive in an era where AI can answer queries without sending anyone to click a link.

    Cloud Infrastructure vs. the Power Grid

    Machine learning isn’t just a software problem. The massive energy demands of data centers pushing GPUs to their limit became a real infrastructure challenge this year. We saw:

    • Idle data centers waiting for electricity capacity to catch up
    • Experimental approaches like repurposed jet engines and space-based solar projects
    • Real worries about quality of life when computing giants annex local power grids

    The future of “compute anywhere” suddenly looks a lot more tied to where the electrons actually come from.

    New York Showed the Rest of the Country

    Living in this city means Local often becomes National. In 2025 New York city was a microcosm of the larger cultural and political shifts:

    • A mayoral election turned on cost of living and democracy reform
    • Community voice battled casino development bids on the East River
    • Neighborhood tech events and decentralized meetups flourished alongside big conference circuits

    The city didn’t just make headlines — it embodied the tension between grassroots citizen engagement and centralized power.

    Tech Week, Brand Conversations, and the (Un)Informed Public

    2025 also saw a subtle but unmistakable shift in how technology and culture engage:

    • The growing success of events such as NYC Tech Week and Tech:NYC AI Demos which felt less like corporate showcases and more like community patchwork gatherings
    • Branding in an AI-driven world became less about identity and more about trust and permission
    • Conversations about Google, Perplexity, and discovery technology moved from technologist circles into mainstream debate

    It’s hard to overstate how much that matters. When ordinary people begin arguing about the future of search and discovery, the underlying structure of the web itself has already changed.

    Personal Notes from the Year

    Beyond the geopolitical and technological, 2025 was also a year of small perspectives — hikes, travel, and moments that reveal a deeper truth about why culture still matters even when platforms shift.

    Whether it was a hike near Kamakura or a rumination on a slow waterfall (ed. this is a pretty funny interpretation of this post), these personal essays reminded readers that tech is not just code — it’s lived experience.

    Looking Ahead to 2026

    If 2025 taught us one thing, it’s this:

    • The open web is not going quietly into the night — it’s being re-defined.
    • Access now has a price tag, and that price is up for negotiation.
    • The people using the technology are just as important as the companies building it.

    The next year won’t be about whether the web changes — it’ll be about who gets to shape that change.

    Here’s to the debates, the fights, and the small stories that make it all worth caring about.

  • Sitemaps for AI

    Sitemaps for AI

    Last week, I was double-booked in conferences. Wednesday & Thursday I was in Philadelphia for the beginning of the Online News Association conference, a gathering of journalists who work with words online. Friday & Saturday, I was in Washington DC for WordCamp, a gathering of people who work with WordPress, the CMS software that powers many of the websites journalists use to publish their news online.

    Hopping between these two worlds, the editorial and technical, gave me a unique perspective of the change sweeping online media. Everyone agrees that AI Chat Bots, specifically generative AI from Large Language Models (LLMs), will have an enormous impact on what we read online. But, depending on who you’re talking to, it’s going to result in either the horror or something wonderful.

    It’s still very early but a long Amtrak train ride home gave me some time to project out where we’re headed and ponder what we might need to make it work in a way that both publishers and AI Chat Bot companies feel comfortable.

    Those that fear AI view it as something that will strip mine websites of their facts and process them into the bland, robotic responses that power AI Chat Bots. This characterization echoes the publishing industry’s initial reactions to Google search. In 2006, French and Belgium newspapers demanded to be removed from Google News only to come back begging for inclusion in 2011 after they experienced a precipitous drop in traffic.

    Are we seeing the same thing play out with AI? Isn’t an AI chat bot just the conversational form of the Google SERP? Microsoft Bing Chat and Google Bard are crawling the web for tidbits to power their conversational engine. Concern about Bing and Bard abstracting facts without sending users back to a publisher’s site exposes a flaw in the publishing business model where a website is compensated by readers looking for answers on a page in adorned with advertisements designed to distract and harvest attention.

    Dare Obasanjo on threads.net

    It’s time to upgrade this business model. Instead of asking people to browse a bunch of search links, AI Chat Bots bring information to the reader, aggregated, summarized in a conversational tone. To a certain extent, this is an evolution of what has been happening for years.

    Google Knowledge Graph

    When Google Knowledge Graph launched in 2012, many publishers felt the Knowledge Panel (as it came to be known) did not provide enough attribution. Sound familiar?

    If the reader no longer goes to the publisher’s site, they will end up spending time with the product providing the answers, not the source. Back then it was Google, today, it’s the AI Chat Bot.

    The AI Chat Bot is the latest step in a journey that was started a long time ago. Bringing answers into a conversational UI is just improving on user experience for those in search of quick answers to their question.

    Bing Chat AI

    This new conversational UI is under rapid development. I’m not even sure a conversational is where we’ll end up. Microsoft is leading the way with Bing Chat AI results sprinkled with attributions that give credit and links back to the source material. From what I can tell, Microsoft is also is paying for this attribution in an early experiment in what I would call “licensing of facts.” Google’s Bard is following Microsoft’s lead and is also starting to add attribution to its SGE results, something that was missing at launch. I’d be curious to know if they are paying publishers for these links.

    Microsoft is embedding Bing AI in not only into their Edge Browser but has also announced extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Bing Chat is also available as an Enterprise service as well as on their mobile app and Skype.

    The pressure is on and Google is responding in kind with their version of generative AI chat, SGE, which is running in Google Labs.

    If generative AI is the next generation of search, I can think of a number of things that are needed to build a relationship between the publisher and AI vendor that is transparent, trustworthy and thus, sustainable. Allow me to riff a bit.

    Honor Robots.txt
    Open AI already announced that they would honor robots.txt and not crawl sites that declare themselves off limits. This is now extended to optimize which sections of your site you want to make available to the AI Chat Bots. The New York Times, CNN, and others are already adopting this method to control what they make available.

    This is a step in the right direction as it builds trust but more granular control over what is made available for the crawl is necessary. Within a restaurant review, maybe the address & phone number will be valued one way while the reviewer’s opinion valued another way.

    Sitemaps for AI
    A sitemap is a file that instructs a web crawler where to look for new pages. A sitemap for AI could be an intentional declaration by a site owner of what specific facts and information you want to make available and what link you want to serve up for the attribution. Addresses can be fielded and formatted one way, quotes another way so that they travel along with the name of the person quoted.

    Ads.txt was developed to make programmatic advertising more transparent. What I’m thinking of is something in between a sitemaps.xml and ads.txt, a lightweight, machine-readable way for publishers to declare what they make available to the Chat Bot crawlers.

    Real time Fact Exchange
    The technology that enables the real time auction for ad impressions on sites in milliseconds is some the most impressive technology developed for the internet in the past couple of decades. The incredible revenue machines of the ad industry have fueled the advancements in this technology.

    It’s time for a similar exchange for the facts which will be the new commodity. When looking for answers via a chat bot that has access to everything, maybe the deciding factor is the quality of the information or the party that is making it available. If every fact is distinct in the aforementioned Sitemap for AI, why not also attach a value to that fact that can inform the AI chat bot which information it can afford to share. If it’s a high value reader then more expensive information from higher quality sites might be presented. We are already headed down this path as both search results and social media links that go to paywalled sites attempt to capture subscriber budget.

    Is it finally time to create a marketplace of micro-transactions brokered by the Chat Bot UI? Instead of subscribing to a bunch of subscription sites, maybe the AI is where “pay” for tidbits of information with either advertising or payment tiers and that revenue is shared by the Chat Bot companies with the companies providing the information?

    In order for the Chat Bot AI ecosystem to grow, the publishers need to be fairly compensated and the Chat Bot vendors need a marketplace for the content they need to provide a quality experiences. Maybe the Real Time Fact Exchange is a far-fetched but I would have never thought the simple banner ad would have evolved into the complex ecosystem we have today.

    Further Reading:
  • White-label AI Bots

    White-label AI Bots

    I’ve been playing around with a hosted Chat AI offered by Chat Thing that was recently announced on Product Hunt. Seth Godin has indexed 5M words from his blog [Seth’s Blog bot] and Dave Winer uploaded his 30+ years of daily posts from scripting.com [Scripting News bot]. Both bots are instructive and give you a real-world example of how these bots can be used to leverage your readers to pull up and share “observational snippets” gleaned from the archives. I decided to play.

    Here are some screenshots. You can see from the responses that it really is a new way to search. Here I ask the bot how Seth Godin, a marketing genius, would run a presidential campaign.

    Transcript from Seth’s Blog bot

    Here is the post the bot is referring (it would be nice if it provided a link as a footnote). Incidentally, searching on Seth’s blog for “presidential campaigns” yields a different result that may be tangentially relevant but not as specific a response as what came back from the bot.

    On the Scripting News bot, I compared what the OpenAI Chat GPT bot knew to his white-labeled bot to see if I could find out Dave’s favorite basketball team.

    OpenAI really had no clue. I know that scripting.com was used as training material from the WaPo story but apparently it hadn’t retained any particular tidbit of knowledge about his basketball preferences.

    Transcript from ChatGPT at OpenAI

    Over on the Scripting News bot I had a much richer exchange. Chat Thing uses Open AI as the backend but they’ve figured out how to “focus” it to the data added to the index, in this case, all of scripting.com.

    Transcript of conversation with Scripting News bot

    Again, it would be great if it linked directly to the source articles. I’ve put that in as a feature request on Chat Things’ Discord Server.

    It’s still a bit buggy yet (sometimes it echos back an earlier response, like a broken record) but the team is moving fast and adding new features almost daily.

    Two weeks ago you had to export your archives and convert them to Markdown before you could upload them to get indexed. Today they announced that you can add your site to be crawled and add your RSS feed to keep the index fresh.

    Chat Thing data connection sources

    As of today, the RSS feed link just pulls in links off your RSS feed. Hopefully they’ll get more precise in the future and let you upload just the relevant sections of your feed or use an API to add specific tables in a database. It would be nice to have more control over what gets indexed into the training set.

    As Seth says, “You’ll have no trouble tricking it” and we all know how generative AIs hallucinate; there are a lot of kinks to be worked out but these early experiments offer up an entirely new way to unlock the value of archives that we haven’t seen since the early days of search.

  • ChatGPT Fun

    ChatGPT Fun

    I went to today’s State of the Word presentation in person (woohoo, so nice to attend in-person events once again!) and one question was about the dreaded “build-to-launch gap” where you build a website for a client and then it takes them months to post anything into the beautiful container you built for them.

    There was some suggestion of using ChatGPT to automatically generate content to fill the gaps. While it’s debatable that a boring prompt will lead to boring text, there is some use in using tools such as ChatGTP to automatically write website copy, the output of prompt with just a little bit of flair can be quite inspirations.

    While sitting there listening to the question and answer, I fired up ChatGPT and had the AI write something before my eyes. I unfortunately have only a screenshot of the first attempt which I showed to the amazement of the person sitting next to me as we saw the thing get typed up in real time.

    Just to try and re-create the scene so you could see how quickly it worked, I did it two more times. The first time it changed gears with the same prompt and wrote a sonnet about why you need to change your oil.

    The Prompt: Write a blog post about how important it is to change your oil every 3000 miles in the style of William Shakespeare

    Lend me your ears, fair readers, for I come bearing news of utmost importance. ‘Tis a tale of lubrication and maintenance, of the crucial role played by a humble substance in the wellbeing of your trusty steed.

    I speak, of course, of oil – that most vital of fluids, without which the inner workings of your car would grind to a halt and your journeys would come to a swift and unfortunate end. And yet, despite its importance, it is a substance too often ignored and neglected.

    Forsooth, I implore you – do not make the mistake of believing that oil needs changing only when your car begins to show signs of distress. Nay, ’tis a task that must be performed regularly, with the utmost diligence and care. The recommended interval, you ask? Why, every 3000 miles, without fail.

    Some may claim that this is an unnecessary expense, or that modern cars require less frequent oil changes. But I say unto you – the cost of a simple oil change pales in comparison to the expense of repairing the damage caused by neglecting this vital task.

    Think of it thus: the oil in your car is like the lifeblood that courses through the veins of a living being. It keeps all of the moving parts functioning smoothly, preventing friction and wear. Over time, however, this oil becomes contaminated and degraded, losing its ability to do its job effectively.

    When this happens, the various components of your car are left to fend for themselves, rubbing and grinding against one another with no protective barrier. The result? Reduced performance, decreased fuel efficiency, and a heightened risk of costly and inconvenient breakdowns.

    But fear not, dear reader, for all is not lost. By changing your oil every 3000 miles, you can ensure that your car is always running at its best. It may seem like a small and insignificant task, but trust me when I say that it can make all the difference.

    So take heed, and do not neglect this most essential of maintenance tasks. Your car will thank you, and you can rest easy knowing that you have done all that you can to keep it running smoothly.

    Related: I live-blogged this year’s State of the Word on my old tumblr account just for giggles