Wired wrote an article about Amazon’s dream of having its AI buy stuff on behalf of customers. I am not going to dignify this inane, anti-competitive idea with my patented full analysis. Instead, I will note that Amazon’s current AI summaries of product reviews, most of which are probably fake anyway, are not ringing endorsements of the company’s prowess in this area.
Tag: ai
My Take on Blogging and AI
I came across an interesting take on blogging and AI by Greg Morris, an independent blogger. He states that while he sees the issue of AI language models training on internet writing without compenstation or authorization, he is not personally bothered by it. From his perspective, “once I publish something online, I’ve pretty much let it go. It’s out there in the wild, free for anyone to use, maybe even to profit from. And I’m okay with that. It’s a part of the deal you accept when you decide to publish online.”
I concur in part and dissent in part.
I concur with him that there is nothing anyone can do from keeping their writing or media from being used by language models or scraped for other nefarious purposes. There are ways to limit exposure, but once one puts his or her writing online, he or she cannot fully control what happens with it. While I accept this, however, I disagree with Mr. Morris’ take that it is not a problem because “[y]our work s both yours and not yours at the same time.” I think my work is mine unless otherwise explicitly stated. I just accept that we live in an imperfect world and I do not think some of the bad or annoying things on the internet should deter people from building their own digital homes.
Linkedin’s New AI “Features”
I have never used Linkedin. I have also never been tempted to use Linkedin. But what if Linkedin added some new feature to make me sign up? I quote from a report by Mr. Mauricio B. Holguin on AlternativeTo: “LinkedIn has introduced new AI-powered features aimed at improving professional networking, simplifying networking tasks such as making connections, job searching, and content sharing.” While using AI to help guide users’ Linkedin network interactions will surely (operative word) make Linkedin a better (other operative word) place, I will continue to sit on the sidelines.