the enshittification
Sometimes I wonder if my technical posts don't gain traction because people think its AI generated. I know ChatGPT and other LLMs write a certain way, but Iβ β have a strange writing cadence and I'm not sure if people know that (or if they care.) None of my writing is AI generated, and I feel like i'm drowning in an enshittifying internet and my technical analyses are going to be glanced over at redditors and summarily ignored (my "wall of text" writing certainly doesn't help.)
I realize that I'm competing with robots in a slowly enshittifying internet to spew out "high quality" technical information or poetry that I so desperately want to share w/ others outside my immediate circle, but it just feels like an uphill battle. Looking on other blogs, I see the "not made with AI" tag and finally figured out how to use it, so now I have one for all 3 of my blogs! I know a part or all of my work has been scraped and jammed into the next iteration of computerized slop. It's only a matter of time before my thesis gets blendered in as a primary source in some other internet nightmare.
But there's a deeper question at hand: whyβ β do I even want to share these things? I already have a nasty habit of oversharing personal details, and in the age of the surveillance state, this growing pile of personal details is only ever going to get me in trouble. A growing digital footprint isn't a good thing, and maybe that's why I obsessively silo my works, as much as I want to share things. As much as I want β βto share the deepest depths of myself, it will only bring me problems in the long run, just like it did in high school. I guess I love yapping about everything to everyone, and it brings me joy.
Even still, I think about what "human-generated" work is. There are works that are generated entirely by people (e.g. acapella, oral storytelling, finger-painting) and then works that are entirely generated by a machine with only a prompt as the human imput. In the practical sense, it's work that's created primarily from human input, but still. How much automation can I insert into my art before it becomes more machine than man?
Take astrophotography for instance. While my first shots were just taken with a night vision device and a cell phone, my current setup involves a computer controlled mount, and my input in imaging is setting up, cleaning up, telling the mount where to point, and optical calibration. My image processing uses computer tools (that have recently started advertising themselves as AI tools) for image processing, and without automation my work simply would not be possible. I suppose, automation is an enabler of human work, since I still need to go out and take images, but there are certainly systems that work nearly autonomously to gather data (e.g. space telescopes)
I don't know much about AI or automation. My experience is mostly limited in using perplexity as a means to gather research materials and high school robotics (as a fabricator.) There are memes about the bell curve over technological embrace, and I can't figure out if im smart or stupid for a deep-seated mistrust in any automated home gadget. I certainly don't know enough on the computer science end, and my laboratory experience tells me if there are surface-mount components or integrated circuits, the device is too far gone and I've got no shot at fixing it.
All I know is that the world is enshittifying at a rapid pace, and my 3 blogs I have is my way of fighting it.