Second: as someone who runs, and has run, all kinds of discussion forums for decades, I’m not in the least bit worried about being sued. I wasn’t worried even before Section 230. I’m not worried because I’m not deliberately doing stupid things — like designing and building an addictive implementation — and because I deal with problems (such as abuse) promptly.
Your web forum contains content, therefore, it is addicting because people might read it and want to read more of it.
Your web forum allows people to register and write comments. That makes your web forum addicting because it incentivizes the user to keep using it.
Your web forum allows people to send private messages to each other. Therefore, it is addicting because people might want to send more and more messages.
Your web forum has e-mail notifications. Therefore, it is addicting because it is drawing users in from their respective inboxes.
Your web forum may also have features that highlight popular posts (such as popularity icons, view counts, etc.), meaning it is addicting by design because users are being nudged towards specific kinds of addicting content.
When you get sued in this scenario, you are going to flip out at the absurdity of it all. The litigants are not going to give a damn because ruining your life is the goal to make for a better society in their minds. Nuance and reasoning will mean nothing to them. They took down Meta and several other major sites, you happen to be next in line based on overall popularity. Don't worry, because you cheered all of this on because it meant, in your mind, hurting Meta regardless of the consequences.
If you think it's hard for the reader to read how screwed up the world is becoming, just imagine what it's like for the writer in question. You know all the ins and outs and exactly how a particular development is going to continue to screw things up. What's more, you're going to be seeing a lot of things that the reader ultimately doesn't see because you can't write about everything on top of it all.
In the late 2000's (!!!), I was writing in an environment where two websites acted as rivals complete with writing staff on both. I ended up working for one and then writing for another, so I got to see WAY more internally than what most staff members ended up seeing.
The biggest reason people end up leaving the profession of writing news content online is stress. Whether it is keeping up with the volume of news content or the stress of the content that is being written on, most people end up leaving this role either directly because of those reasons or citing that as a contributing factor.
I tell people that it takes a very particular kind of person to be able to withstand all of this and continue to write about these things. Given that of the aforementioned two news staffs I worked with in the past and the fact that I am literally the sole survivor out of both of them in terms of continuing to write content, I think my experience is proof of this in action. How much crap can you handle seems to be a big determining factor of how long you can last.
Believe me, there were certainly days where I just wanted to let it all go and just leave all of this stress to some other random person interested in taking up the mantle. The problem is that decades of experience is being left behind if I did that, so I still continue to fight (even if it rarely gets recognized as an effort at all).
There's no shortage of people out there that love to shit on the writers work. Whether it is personally disagreeing with what the facts say, telling them that they are the worst writer out there because they disagreed with a stupid comma placement and can't be treated seriously, or in my case, not even being paid to do the work in the first place, the job of the writer in the world of news is WAY tougher than people realize. Us news writers don't get anywhere near the credit we deserve most of the time (TechDirt is a bit of an anomaly on that front).
Yeah, the YouTube copyright takedown system is a disaster. People who fraudulently abuse the system can get away with censorship all day long with little to no consequence while it is creators who suffer from it. So, I agree, the system desperately needs to be reformed in some way so that there is some semblance of balance. This highlighted incident shouldn't have happened.
I can admit I have been without hope for a few years now. Whenever I speak to people about trying to build a small business and help the local community, it is largely responded to with complete indifference. Whenever I talk about technology in general, I'm frequently looked at like I'm an idiot. I've run numerous experiments to increase my websites presence only to see very little in terms of results. I've invested money into advertising and it's starting to look like I might as well have burned that money in a fireplace. I've tried being out and meeting people only to be greeted by empty rooms with four walls. My family is dying out one member at a time.
I only continue doing what I've been doing because I don't know what else the heck I'm supposed to do. I've been given platitudes many times over the years like, "there's someone for everyone", "it'll all work out", and "success is just around the corner", yet despite my strides to keep going, I've gotten no shortage of emptiness after.
So, forgive me for my skepticism that things are ever going to get better. I've been told this sort of thing for well over a decade now.
That is very interesting timing. I was recently criticizing the CBC for publishing disinformation and when I questioned the CBCs decision, the response amounted to 'it's not our job to fact check stuff'. https://www.freezenet.ca/cbc-response-its-not-our-job-to-fact-check/
After running the article, I was told on another site that I was being a horrible person for questioning what the CBC did. So, there is a developing double standard where if a major media outlet publishes something that amounts to misinformation and disinformation, not only is that OK, but people who question it are the real bad guys at this point.
Hopefully, this trend doesn't impact you because the media deserves to get called out whenever they make screw ups like what you wrote about. I worry things are going to get nastier as time goes on because what I'm witnessing is a pretty recent thing as I've called out the media in the past without incident.
Granted, this is not something I actually looked into since my coverage didn't touch on it, but I legitimately had no idea that the water usage aspect of the AI debate was actually exaggerated. Happy to say I learned something today.
I also get tired of the “this kerfuffle over social media is just another moral panic” people claiming this is just like the hemming and hawing over rock n’ roll, violent videogames in the 90s and early 2000s, or D&D.
That would be because the comparisons are justified. Video games were supposedly going to corrupt the youth by turning them into murdering psychopaths who would be deadly effective because they train all day on their "murder simulators". That never played out no matter how many times the media blamed video games for anything violent.
The same is being done with social media. Social media is corrupting the youth because the youth will become distracted or have no sense of morality because they are seeing easily accessible pornography on platforms like YouTube (something that doesn't even pass the laugh test in my books).
If there are any fundamental differences between the two, I'm not seeing it. There was never really any evidence that video games were going to turn the youth into murder machines and there was never any evidence to say that social media will inherently destroy the youths moral compass, attentiveness, or whatever else the heck that is being fabricated by politicians and the media.
The irony here is that by making your argument, you proved Masnick's point about someone always insisting that "this time it’s different".
This still strikes me as more of a “all AI is bad” crowd grasping at lots of other things to buttress their pushback than anything else.
I think your over-generalizing the pushback. Yes, there's some of that, but there are a lot of people pointing out that the filter - and it is a filter at the end of the day - overrides the artistic intent of the character faces. A cartoon face does not need to have a filter that puts in peach fuzz hair and pores on the skin.
One of the examples that gets used a lot is the Resident Evil examples in the tech demo. The characters have a certain look to them that blends well with the overarching themes. The filter completely overrides it and makes one of the characters turn into a super model with the heavy amounts of air brushing that got applied (and likely part of the meme of photoshopping monsters and male humans and turning them into super models with large boobs with the label "DLSS5 Turns on").
The developers of these games are also split on this. Some are OK with it while others are not.
I think there are plenty of people that looked at the tech demo and concluded that the faces looked ugly. Are some of them part of the "all AI is bad" crowd? Sure. Are all of them part of that same crowd? I sincerely doubt it.
The only faces in that tech demo that looked like it was improved were the examples from Starfield. Even then, it was a very moderate improvement and nothing revolutionary.
I don't think it's speculative to say it's worse when people are reacting to what they see. If there was rumours of DLSS5 adding a filter onto things and no tech demo out there, then yes, you'd have a point that it's speculative. The reality is that there is a tech demo and people are seeing what it is supposed to be doing with their own two eyes. That's not speculating, that's reacting - and the reaction was negative.
Anyway, I think you are painting too many people with the same brush in a bid to dismiss the criticism outright. The reality is that there is nuance to the pushback that I think you are glossing over.
I hate to break it to you, but claims that AI has improved have been around for a year or two at least. Yet, the research continues to show either marginal improvement or a complete lack of improvement in the technology itself.
Actual research into AI as a software developer shows it's horrendously bad... like, only managing to complete software development tasks 15% of the time bad https://www.freezenet.ca/ai-cant-even-replace-software-engineers-so-why-the-hype/
In fact, more recently, AI was quietly blamed for the Amazon outage back in December: https://www.freezenet.ca/amazon-employees-blames-ai-for-aws-outage-in-december/
Saying AI has rapidly improved is just one of the many tired lines I hear from AI BS artists frequently.
Yeah, privacy is a huge reason why data sovereignty laws are as attractive as they are in countries outside of the US.
Right now, the US government is flooding the platforms with subpoenas in a bid to go after anyone daring to publish what amounts to thought crimes against the regime. This as they try and build a massive surveillance system on social media while hoovering up as much data as possible either for private vested interests of data brokers or by the US government trying to silence criticism. It makes no sense that other countries just allow their citizens data to get sucked up by the US surveillance industrial complex so that the US government can further their efforts to carry out human rights violations (deportations, murder, unlawful detention, etc.)
A robust federal level privacy law would at least be a good start, but at this stage, other countries are going to need more than that before even rationally thinking of just letting their citizens data to flow so freely. Ditching the dictator currently occupying the white house would be another step along with assurances that fascism is never going to take over like this ever again. That... is a very tall order, of course, but it would be an understandable ask these days given all that has happened at this point. You want our personal data? It's going to take a heck of a lot to gain that trust for rational people. Until then, data sovereignty laws it is.
When I was reporting that Australia's age verification has been a failure, I did have people tell me that I'm being too presumptuous and that I shouldn't be suggesting that all the failures of age verification at that point is an indication that age verification is a failure. After all, they argued, it's too early to tell whether or not it is a success or failure. You can probably imagine my "lolwut?" response to that.
I remember last year when Trump first got elected and things started taking a turn for the worst in the US. I knew I had to push through the devastation going on in the US and keep writing. This without letting such a government coarse me into silence by proxy. It was difficult, but for some of my readers who didn't exactly build up the level of tolerance I had built up over the years to awful news, it was probably worse for them.
On social media, someone in my feed said that they were contemplating suicide over all of this. I tried to respond by basically saying, 'don't do it', but the post was deleted before I could try to reach out.
Still, I knew suicide is something you just didn't fuck around with. So, for months, I put up disclaimers urging people who were thinking about it to use 988. I put those disclaimers both top and bottom of several of my articles because I knew what I was reporting was absolutely brutal.
At one point, someone actually messaged me and complained that I was putting up such disclaimers at all, saying that I was being stupid and dramatic at the same time. When I explained that someone popped up thinking about it and that I wasn't going to just sit by and let something like that happen, they didn't believe me and told me to knock if off.
I didn't. Anything that was stressful about US politics got that disclaimer and I did that for several more weeks, just to be absolutely sure. When it was very clear it was no longer necessary, I did eventually stop publishing disclaimers along with US politics related stories. I know some people would say it is an overreaction on my part, but I sure as heck wasn't even going to chance it.
Interesting. Well, if I have a moment in time, I might still run with this kind of experiment. In my case, I'll be doing it from the perspective of someone who doesn't use AI at all and coming in cold. Might be an interesting thought experiment to see how people with little to no exposure to AI content generation can run into problems and what thought processes can contribute to leading to certain outcomes (whether good or bad).
Crud. I was thinking of running a similar experiment to see how well it can handle a Freezenet post. TechDirt beat me to it. Ah well. Should've pulled the trigger sooner, but had a lot on my plate since I don't have staff helping me out with news writing like TechDirt does.
One of the things I had long suspected was that it is takes just as much time and effort to come up with a prompt that might make something somewhat passable. Interesting that this was one of the conclusions here.
One of the axioms I've heard over the years is "the Internet never forgets". The problem with that axiom is that it's not really true. It may be applicable for really popular content for a few years, but the internet does, in fact, forget. Digital rot is a very real thing.
Had I not preserved a whole stack of articles on my site, I'm willing to bet some of those articles would've simply disappeared from the web completely. I had a heck of a hard time finding some of them so I could repost them. Some were only available on an archived post on the WayBack Machine. Others were still lingering in Google cache. Some were only available on the other website while it was still alive (neither are alive any more). Still, I know some are probably lost forever because I didn't think of archiving everything I wrote when I was first writing news. Had a wrong mindset that the articles would always be there in some form or another. A really big mistake that I have since rectified.
I completely agree. It's why I personally refuse to put up a paywall on my site in the first place. I see a lot of news organizations paywalling their content and the well off smugly talking about how they happily read this stuff while everyone else does without thanks to the growing economic mess we are in. I see the damage done to society and I said, "Nope, not contributing to that rotten trend."
I also personally think TechDirt is on the same page on this one as well.
I remember one of the pieces of advice I was given was that I had to put up a paywall on my news site. I was told that if people wanted your content, then they would pay for it. Otherwise, my website would always be unprofitable.
I rejected that because I knew that news is always going to be a public good that needs to be accessible to all, not just for people who have a lot of cash to burn.
Heck, at one point, someone told me that I'm part of the problem of people expecting news to be free because I allow free access. I responded by pointing out that this is a conscious decision because I believed that news is a public good that all should benefit from.
Now, I'm sure those same people are telling others that AI is going to scrape your content as well if you don't put up a paywall.
In short, business types are putting a LOT of pressure on news websites to paywall EVERYTHING. It seems that they are, sadly, starting to succeed with others.
This is why I tend not to get particularly worked up by those who claim that AI is going to destroy jobs and wipe out the workforce, who will be replaced by bots. It just… doesn’t work that way.
At the same time, I find it ridiculous to see people still claiming that the technology itself is no good and does nothing of value.
I take a much different approach. I point and laugh at the people honestly believing that AI simply does everything better and getting burned by that terrible decision of just giving that work to AI - letting AI just do everything. I've been maintaining a running tally for a while now and that list just keeps growing. It's very useful for whenever people come out and claim that AI does everything perfectly.
This is, by no means, proclaiming that nuance is not allowed. This is just laughing at morons who suddenly consider themselves experts when they clearly are not. This while clearly demonstrating that you can't just 'leave it all to AI' which, honestly, is not a terrible message to be sending by any means.
If you think it's hard for the reader to read how screwed up the world is becoming, just imagine what it's like for the writer in question. You know all the ins and outs and exactly how a particular development is going to continue to screw things up. What's more, you're going to be seeing a lot of things that the reader ultimately doesn't see because you can't write about everything on top of it all. In the late 2000's (!!!), I was writing in an environment where two websites acted as rivals complete with writing staff on both. I ended up working for one and then writing for another, so I got to see WAY more internally than what most staff members ended up seeing. The biggest reason people end up leaving the profession of writing news content online is stress. Whether it is keeping up with the volume of news content or the stress of the content that is being written on, most people end up leaving this role either directly because of those reasons or citing that as a contributing factor. I tell people that it takes a very particular kind of person to be able to withstand all of this and continue to write about these things. Given that of the aforementioned two news staffs I worked with in the past and the fact that I am literally the sole survivor out of both of them in terms of continuing to write content, I think my experience is proof of this in action. How much crap can you handle seems to be a big determining factor of how long you can last. Believe me, there were certainly days where I just wanted to let it all go and just leave all of this stress to some other random person interested in taking up the mantle. The problem is that decades of experience is being left behind if I did that, so I still continue to fight (even if it rarely gets recognized as an effort at all). There's no shortage of people out there that love to shit on the writers work. Whether it is personally disagreeing with what the facts say, telling them that they are the worst writer out there because they disagreed with a stupid comma placement and can't be treated seriously, or in my case, not even being paid to do the work in the first place, the job of the writer in the world of news is WAY tougher than people realize. Us news writers don't get anywhere near the credit we deserve most of the time (TechDirt is a bit of an anomaly on that front).
Yeah, the YouTube copyright takedown system is a disaster. People who fraudulently abuse the system can get away with censorship all day long with little to no consequence while it is creators who suffer from it. So, I agree, the system desperately needs to be reformed in some way so that there is some semblance of balance. This highlighted incident shouldn't have happened.
I can admit I have been without hope for a few years now. Whenever I speak to people about trying to build a small business and help the local community, it is largely responded to with complete indifference. Whenever I talk about technology in general, I'm frequently looked at like I'm an idiot. I've run numerous experiments to increase my websites presence only to see very little in terms of results. I've invested money into advertising and it's starting to look like I might as well have burned that money in a fireplace. I've tried being out and meeting people only to be greeted by empty rooms with four walls. My family is dying out one member at a time. I only continue doing what I've been doing because I don't know what else the heck I'm supposed to do. I've been given platitudes many times over the years like, "there's someone for everyone", "it'll all work out", and "success is just around the corner", yet despite my strides to keep going, I've gotten no shortage of emptiness after. So, forgive me for my skepticism that things are ever going to get better. I've been told this sort of thing for well over a decade now.
That is very interesting timing. I was recently criticizing the CBC for publishing disinformation and when I questioned the CBCs decision, the response amounted to 'it's not our job to fact check stuff'. https://www.freezenet.ca/cbc-response-its-not-our-job-to-fact-check/ After running the article, I was told on another site that I was being a horrible person for questioning what the CBC did. So, there is a developing double standard where if a major media outlet publishes something that amounts to misinformation and disinformation, not only is that OK, but people who question it are the real bad guys at this point. Hopefully, this trend doesn't impact you because the media deserves to get called out whenever they make screw ups like what you wrote about. I worry things are going to get nastier as time goes on because what I'm witnessing is a pretty recent thing as I've called out the media in the past without incident.
Granted, this is not something I actually looked into since my coverage didn't touch on it, but I legitimately had no idea that the water usage aspect of the AI debate was actually exaggerated. Happy to say I learned something today.
It's only OK when they do it.
I hate to break it to you, but claims that AI has improved have been around for a year or two at least. Yet, the research continues to show either marginal improvement or a complete lack of improvement in the technology itself. Actual research into AI as a software developer shows it's horrendously bad... like, only managing to complete software development tasks 15% of the time bad https://www.freezenet.ca/ai-cant-even-replace-software-engineers-so-why-the-hype/ In fact, more recently, AI was quietly blamed for the Amazon outage back in December: https://www.freezenet.ca/amazon-employees-blames-ai-for-aws-outage-in-december/ Saying AI has rapidly improved is just one of the many tired lines I hear from AI BS artists frequently.
Yeah, privacy is a huge reason why data sovereignty laws are as attractive as they are in countries outside of the US. Right now, the US government is flooding the platforms with subpoenas in a bid to go after anyone daring to publish what amounts to thought crimes against the regime. This as they try and build a massive surveillance system on social media while hoovering up as much data as possible either for private vested interests of data brokers or by the US government trying to silence criticism. It makes no sense that other countries just allow their citizens data to get sucked up by the US surveillance industrial complex so that the US government can further their efforts to carry out human rights violations (deportations, murder, unlawful detention, etc.) A robust federal level privacy law would at least be a good start, but at this stage, other countries are going to need more than that before even rationally thinking of just letting their citizens data to flow so freely. Ditching the dictator currently occupying the white house would be another step along with assurances that fascism is never going to take over like this ever again. That... is a very tall order, of course, but it would be an understandable ask these days given all that has happened at this point. You want our personal data? It's going to take a heck of a lot to gain that trust for rational people. Until then, data sovereignty laws it is.
When I was reporting that Australia's age verification has been a failure, I did have people tell me that I'm being too presumptuous and that I shouldn't be suggesting that all the failures of age verification at that point is an indication that age verification is a failure. After all, they argued, it's too early to tell whether or not it is a success or failure. You can probably imagine my "lolwut?" response to that.
I remember last year when Trump first got elected and things started taking a turn for the worst in the US. I knew I had to push through the devastation going on in the US and keep writing. This without letting such a government coarse me into silence by proxy. It was difficult, but for some of my readers who didn't exactly build up the level of tolerance I had built up over the years to awful news, it was probably worse for them. On social media, someone in my feed said that they were contemplating suicide over all of this. I tried to respond by basically saying, 'don't do it', but the post was deleted before I could try to reach out. Still, I knew suicide is something you just didn't fuck around with. So, for months, I put up disclaimers urging people who were thinking about it to use 988. I put those disclaimers both top and bottom of several of my articles because I knew what I was reporting was absolutely brutal. At one point, someone actually messaged me and complained that I was putting up such disclaimers at all, saying that I was being stupid and dramatic at the same time. When I explained that someone popped up thinking about it and that I wasn't going to just sit by and let something like that happen, they didn't believe me and told me to knock if off. I didn't. Anything that was stressful about US politics got that disclaimer and I did that for several more weeks, just to be absolutely sure. When it was very clear it was no longer necessary, I did eventually stop publishing disclaimers along with US politics related stories. I know some people would say it is an overreaction on my part, but I sure as heck wasn't even going to chance it.
Interesting. Well, if I have a moment in time, I might still run with this kind of experiment. In my case, I'll be doing it from the perspective of someone who doesn't use AI at all and coming in cold. Might be an interesting thought experiment to see how people with little to no exposure to AI content generation can run into problems and what thought processes can contribute to leading to certain outcomes (whether good or bad).
Crud. I was thinking of running a similar experiment to see how well it can handle a Freezenet post. TechDirt beat me to it. Ah well. Should've pulled the trigger sooner, but had a lot on my plate since I don't have staff helping me out with news writing like TechDirt does. One of the things I had long suspected was that it is takes just as much time and effort to come up with a prompt that might make something somewhat passable. Interesting that this was one of the conclusions here.
One of the axioms I've heard over the years is "the Internet never forgets". The problem with that axiom is that it's not really true. It may be applicable for really popular content for a few years, but the internet does, in fact, forget. Digital rot is a very real thing. Had I not preserved a whole stack of articles on my site, I'm willing to bet some of those articles would've simply disappeared from the web completely. I had a heck of a hard time finding some of them so I could repost them. Some were only available on an archived post on the WayBack Machine. Others were still lingering in Google cache. Some were only available on the other website while it was still alive (neither are alive any more). Still, I know some are probably lost forever because I didn't think of archiving everything I wrote when I was first writing news. Had a wrong mindset that the articles would always be there in some form or another. A really big mistake that I have since rectified.
I completely agree. It's why I personally refuse to put up a paywall on my site in the first place. I see a lot of news organizations paywalling their content and the well off smugly talking about how they happily read this stuff while everyone else does without thanks to the growing economic mess we are in. I see the damage done to society and I said, "Nope, not contributing to that rotten trend." I also personally think TechDirt is on the same page on this one as well.
I remember one of the pieces of advice I was given was that I had to put up a paywall on my news site. I was told that if people wanted your content, then they would pay for it. Otherwise, my website would always be unprofitable. I rejected that because I knew that news is always going to be a public good that needs to be accessible to all, not just for people who have a lot of cash to burn. Heck, at one point, someone told me that I'm part of the problem of people expecting news to be free because I allow free access. I responded by pointing out that this is a conscious decision because I believed that news is a public good that all should benefit from. Now, I'm sure those same people are telling others that AI is going to scrape your content as well if you don't put up a paywall. In short, business types are putting a LOT of pressure on news websites to paywall EVERYTHING. It seems that they are, sadly, starting to succeed with others.
Tech Policy Press sucks and shouldn't be treated seriously. Hope you enjoy your answer. :)