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Double down on being human (No, I don't want to train your AI model) (meandmymonsters.substack.com)

submitted 4 days ago by meandmymonsters@piefed.social to c/writing@sh.itjust.works

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I started writing mostly for catharsis. This week I write for resistance.
Words, grammar and spelling mistakes are 100% human made.
Does anyone feel in a similar way?

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[–] Libb@piefed.social 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Does anyone feel in a similar way?

As an analog note note-taker/writer and as an analog reader too (don't underestimate how your ebook reading habits can be also be used/monetized) I can understand how you feel even though I'm not hostile to AI per se: I'm hostile to corporation/privately-owned AI, raiding human knowledge to feed itself and then poo... sell it back to us for a profit, and I'm hostile to AI being sold as the solution to everything.

If I may ask , don't you think there is a higher risk using Substack, than some website/blog you would fully control and own, to see your content being force fed to AI without yout consent? I mean, like it happened with reddit, right?

[–] meandmymonsters@piefed.social 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That is a good point. To be honest I just started using substack because it was the first option I thought of to create something quickly. Do you have any platform suggestions that don't require a long time to setup?

[–] Libb@piefed.social 4 points 4 days ago

Do you have any platform suggestions that don’t require a long time to setup?

There are many good platforms to host content but you should be keep in mind any platform you rely on, no mater how good it is today, can turn around and switch policies at a whim (see how reddit changed its policies and has now become what it is).

A better approach would be to aim to own and control your own tools. That doesn’t even have to be complex, but it does require a little more setup/configuration work. Imho, that's the price to pay to keep control. What is required? To own a domain name (you will need to pay for that), to have a small web hosting space (selfhosted on a computer you own, or rented which is much simpler to do but seldom free), and some tool to help you create the actual website.

There are many creation tools. Ranging from writing HTML by hand to using tools like WordPress (the same WordPress that is being used worldwide by many pro websites), or use those little things called ‘static website generators’. Depending your background and willingness to learn new stuff the right tool will not be the same ;)

I had been using WordPress since it was first introduced in the early 00s, and before that I used to write my own pages ... by hand, but now I use a static website generator. It's called Hugo but there are many others like it. This will require some more work to set it up (not that much depending what you want to do, you can create your first website in maybe a couple hours but you may also spend weeks reading docs to get it fine tuned). The great thing is that once it's done you don't have to worry about it ever (unlike with wordpress).

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago

unless the masquerading humans write poorly with all sorts of spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes. What then?!

[–] moopet@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 days ago

This is a great piece of writing.

[–] whitemonster@lemmy.today 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I genuinely enjoyed reading this. I’ve been in a similar headspace and have felt an increasing desire to go back to a simpler way to use tech. are there any other ways in your life you are trying to resist AI?

[–] meandmymonsters@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago

Good question! I realize now that I didn't put in anything concrete to do. Perhaps I should write a follow up piece with actions... Anyway, things that I am trying to do:

I never ever click on the AI assistant button (unless it is a mistake)
I write, proofread and edit by myself. I try to use these as a learning moment, looking up synonyms or grammar rules so that I can commit them to memory for the next time. I have an open source tool called Obsidian to store my notes on markdown.
I research on my own, look up multiple sources for things, try to make connections and come up with new concepts. This means looking up more than one result for each search. I use the search engine Kagi with all the AI turned off.
At work, I try to write my own notes for meetings, when possible in a physical notebook, so that I can commit things to memory. I write my own documentation, and I troubleshoot things on a whiteboard.
I try to limit the amount of time I send on platforms that 'learn' from me and show me algorithmic results tailored for me, like TikTok and Youtube, and instead I am trying to move to sources curated by humans, like this forum, radio for music, recommendations from friends.
I have a 'dumb' keyboard on my phone. Predictive text takes away my capacity to type without typos, decide what it is I actually wanted to write, and to top it off it sends all my data to tech companies.
The last big one, which kind of touches everything else is to move away as much as possible from platforms that use my data to train AI or try to force me to use AI. This is massive, and I am going really slowly. I have a phone with GrapheneOS, and I am slowly moving out of Google. I will move all the PCs I can to Linux. I am moving to open source software where I can that doesn't have AI assistance. I try to turn off/uninstall AI from all the other places. Trying to convince all my friends to move out to Signal too.