Readers no longer see news articles from the journalists they chose to follow on Twitter as the site downranks any posts that link offsite. When they search on Google, they’re bombarded with error-ridden AI facsimiles before reaching the higher-quality underlying work. 

I enjoyed listening to the podcast version, feeling smug as a long time RSS reader. Spells out lots of new reasons for using RSS. Watching Ewan Macintosh use NetNewsWire on a train, before Wifi on trains, before smart phones, changed my digital life. I though then it might change everyone’s, maybe still will?

Irresponsible AI companies are already imposing huge loads on Wikimedia infrastructure, which is costly both from a pure bandwidth perspective, but also because it requires dedicated engineers to maintain and improve systems to handle the massive automated traffic. And AI companies that do not attribute their responses or otherwise provide any pointers back to Wikipedia prevent users from knowing where that material came from, and do not encourage those users to go visit Wikipedia, where they might then sign up as an editor, or donate after seeing a request for support. (This is most AI companies, by the way. Many AI “visionaries” seem perfectly content to promise that artificial superintelligence is just around the corner, but claim that attribution is somehow a permanently unsolvable problem.)

A good post to read or listen to at the beginning of  Scottish AI in Schools week . The article does not want the stable door closed.

Likes Fighting for our web by Molly White.

We can build the web that we want to see, and we can return to that place where the web is a place of wonder, where all of us feel that same burning feeling of excitement as we push the web back towards the wonderful, beautiful, joyful place it ought to be.

I enjoyed listening this morning.