Context: There seems to be excitement about the recent announcement that several AI companies have agreed to adopt the Machine-Readable Training Preference Signal. And so, in the spirit of The Onion…
Bandits Hail Own Historic Pledge To Respect “Keep Out” Signs On Barns They’ve Already Emptied
After breaking down multiple barn doors and stealing all the horses, the bandits trade association (BTA) has agreed to honor the giant signs on the barn doors reading “Private Property: Keep Out!”- but only if owners rephrase their signs to read “Private Property: We Prefer That You Keep Out,” and add small text at the bottom reading “This Means You.”
“Frankly, signs reading ‘Private property’ and ‘keep out’ are vague and open to interpretation,” said BTA spokesperson Henry Plummer. “Does ‘property’ refer to the barn or the horses? Who exactly is supposed to keep out?
The agreement, which the BTA described as a breakthrough in cross-bandit cooperation, is expected to be widely adopted over the next several years. It does not address horses already taken, which Plummer noted had been “fully integrated into our herd” and could no longer be told apart from one another.
“We’re hopeful this lets everyone put the whole ‘horse theft’ conversation behind us,” Plummer added. “At the end of the day, this whole problem was really caused by poor signage”
Critics of the agreement note that several prominent BTA members have encouraged the agreement but have not yet signed it, saying they are waiting to evaluate it against a competing protocol by the World Wide Wranglers Consortium (W3C) that promises even more precise semantics and a formal ontology of barns, livestock, and theft. This fast-tracked standard is expected to be finalized in 2032.
Despite the skeptics, the livestock market rallied on news of the agreement, which analysts said further justifies valuing the bandit industry at ten times the sum total of everything in the economy it has already stolen.
Geoffrey Bilder
(2026, November 3).
Bandits Hail Own Historic Pledge To Respect 'Keep Out' Signs On Barns They’ve Already Emptied.
Retrieved from
https://doi.org/10.59347/1gy01-k3d32