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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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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