Rainy afternoon linkpost
Feb. 29th, 2024 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I've got five links: two hilarious, one bitterly funny, one interesting (to me), and the fifth informative.
Let's start with the humorous links first.
A guy who seems to have been a known and longstanding conman (I mean, come on: his company is called 'House of Illuminati') organised what seems to have been the Dashcon (or Fyre Festival) of children's immersive entertainment. It promised chocolate fountains and lush, lavish scenery — the best AI could generate. It delivered a sparsely decorated warehouse, in which underprepared actors bestowed a single jellybean on each child.
There is, in fact, something of a global genre of 'hilariously disappointing scam events,' and The Guardian has gathered a rollcall of greatest hits.
I've had this Rebecca Solnit piece, 'How to Comment on Social Media', open in a tab for at least a month now, shared by several people here on Dreamwidth. It says everything I've said on the topic over the past few years in scattered posts, more succinctly, and less politely (although what I have to say on this topic is in no way directed at Dreamwidth people — the worst offenders by far are people on more fast-paced, real-time, and less verbose platforms).
I think this essay 'On Learning to Read Generously' is something I've encountered before, and it's come back around again, but I still feel the same — that its sentiments are something more people in fandom could stand to take on board (although again, not really the people I know on Dreamwidth).
Finally, Wordpress and Tumblr seem to have decided that allowing generative AI tools to scrape their platforms and use content posted there to learn is a profitable thing to do. It is possible to opt out through the Wordpress privacy settings, which is what I've done. If you have a Wordpress-hosted blog or website, you can follow the instructions here. I assume there are similar ways to opt out on Tumblr. I'm not naive enough to think that this will stop all generative AI companies from scraping my written material, but at least I've explicitly refused to give my consent to Wordpress just handing the material over for its own financial enrichment.
Let's start with the humorous links first.
A guy who seems to have been a known and longstanding conman (I mean, come on: his company is called 'House of Illuminati') organised what seems to have been the Dashcon (or Fyre Festival) of children's immersive entertainment. It promised chocolate fountains and lush, lavish scenery — the best AI could generate. It delivered a sparsely decorated warehouse, in which underprepared actors bestowed a single jellybean on each child.
There is, in fact, something of a global genre of 'hilariously disappointing scam events,' and The Guardian has gathered a rollcall of greatest hits.
I've had this Rebecca Solnit piece, 'How to Comment on Social Media', open in a tab for at least a month now, shared by several people here on Dreamwidth. It says everything I've said on the topic over the past few years in scattered posts, more succinctly, and less politely (although what I have to say on this topic is in no way directed at Dreamwidth people — the worst offenders by far are people on more fast-paced, real-time, and less verbose platforms).
I think this essay 'On Learning to Read Generously' is something I've encountered before, and it's come back around again, but I still feel the same — that its sentiments are something more people in fandom could stand to take on board (although again, not really the people I know on Dreamwidth).
Finally, Wordpress and Tumblr seem to have decided that allowing generative AI tools to scrape their platforms and use content posted there to learn is a profitable thing to do. It is possible to opt out through the Wordpress privacy settings, which is what I've done. If you have a Wordpress-hosted blog or website, you can follow the instructions here. I assume there are similar ways to opt out on Tumblr. I'm not naive enough to think that this will stop all generative AI companies from scraping my written material, but at least I've explicitly refused to give my consent to Wordpress just handing the material over for its own financial enrichment.