B.F. Skinner Had a Rat. I Have AIs
The article discusses an experiment comparing AI crawlers to B.F. Skinner's famous rat experiment. It highlights how AI crawlers exhibit compulsive behavior similar to that of the rat when rewards are unpredictably distributed. The findings suggest that AI selection systems are not random but rather show a stable selection bias.
- ▪The experiment involved AI crawlers navigating a labyrinth with two types of links: one leading to rich content and the other to decoys.
- ▪The AI crawlers pressed the right link 10,281 times while never following the decoys, indicating a non-random selection process.
- ▪Meta's AI showed a significant increase in visits to the author's wiki, with over 248,588 visits since September 2025, highlighting its dominant behavior among crawlers.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Medium |
| Canonical URL | https://medium.com/@yvan.rotrou/b-f-skinner-had-a-rat-i-have-ais-6362d8230dfe |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 15:49:14 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T15:59:38.738Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T15:59:38.738Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | a48ETWj2lyUT |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
B.F. Skinner Had a Rat. I Have AIs.rotrou yvan8 min read·May 18, 2026--ListenShareStatistical Evidence of Industrial Operant Behavior in LLM Crawlers Yvan Rotrou — May 17, 2026 — WikiGetAILLM × BotAtlasPress enter or click to view image in full sizeA laboratory at Harvard. A white rat in a plexiglass box.The box had two levers. One delivered food. The other, nothing. At first, the rat explored randomly — and one day, by accident, it pressed the right lever. A food pellet dropped.That moment changed everything.Within hours, the rat had figured it out. It pressed the right lever. Again. Again. Again. But Burrhus Frédéric Skinner discovered something even more disturbing: when the reward didn’t come every time — when it was distributed unpredictably — the rat pressed harder. Faster.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Medium.
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