ai.txt: This Website Does Not Consent to Being Smartened - (Episode 159)

For decades, robots.txt quietly told search engines where they were welcome and where they weren’t. Then AI showed up, read everything anyway, and called it “training.” Enter ai.txt — the hypothetical line in the sand where a website politely, clearly, and possibly angrily says: no scraping, no learning, no digital photocopying of my soul. In this episode, we explore whether consent still matters on the modern web, how AI crawlers differ from classic search bots, and whether ai.txt would be a genuine technical safeguard, a legal signal, or just a beautifully naive sign taped to the internet’s fridge saying “do not touch.” Spoiler: the file is tiny. The implications are not.