In this environment, where it gets harder to discern the veracity of information online, be it from newspapers, magazines and other types of information outlets, establishing trust becomes increasingly valuable.
Will this fact make us seek out more personal content from sources we can put a face and a name to? A personal web of trust that sharpens the line between content made by humans and AIs?
It might be to early to call it, but having pondered on these questions for a little while, it made me realize that my solution to this sea-change is to double down on collecting channels of information that verifies ownership, like personal websites, preferably on a domain name owned by that very person.
Maybe we could even make some kind of pact, a code of honor, a personal promise of integrity, that guarantees a site to contain 100% human generated content?
I've been mostly doing this for years now, because of the general decline in the quality of websites that has been going on for a long, long time.
> A personal web of trust that sharpens the line between content made by humans and AIs?
The problem, of course, is what you alluded to -- how can we know what's made by humans and what's made by AI? I think that my already limited use of the web is likely to decline to nearly zero because of that issue.
Why would I want to write high quality content if it's going to be sucked up by some AI, mixed with other lesser quality content, and vomited onto unsuspecting users with part of the attribution given to me?
No thanks. I'm pretty much ready to flip the off switch on technology.
Over the past few months, I've been working hard to craft a distinct writing style.
If you look at my selected essays on my /about page, you'll see that I'm trying to do things that can't easily be copied. Or if they are copied, people might attribute the style back to me haha
I also think it's going to be super important to foster genuine human-to-human connection as AI becomes more prevalent, so I'm starting a small tech conference!
Join us in Southern California this August! It's going to be a blast
AIs work because the web is "done". All of the information in the world has already been transferred to the Web.
People have long complained that the Web isn't as much fun as it used to be. They usually blame it on some kind of nebulous power that forces new stuff out, but I think it's because there just isn't that much new stuff.
There's always news and the march of technology. But radically new and important things don't actually happen all that often. People already consume far more news than is good for them, hoping for that dopamine rush of novelty.
So nobody cares about your 100% human generated web site, because it's just not all that interesting. How many things will you create in your lifetime that's really worth anybody taking note of?
We've already got aggregators, that try to look for a few interesting things every day. Somebody's art piece, some bit of news, some nifty project. But any individual home page is only going to be interesting on rare occasions.
The aggregator's job is to filter out the vast amount of crap that people generate hoping for attention. That's a problem that preceded bots. It has been listicles and memes and clickbait -- microscopic bits of novelty that people hype as if they were more.
The solution is not to certify the web sites, but to stop relying on the Web to provide you a constant stream of novelty. Rather than looking for something interesting, be interesting.
A few people will maintain their newsletters and Patreons, but that is paid content that isn't exactly personal.