Notices by sara@xoxo.zone

Every time you write a post about saving democracy, defending worker rights, or fighting fascism and the imagery you incorporate is generative, you undermine your argument.

Hire an artist. Make it yourself. These tools were built by the very people eroding the world; built without any consideration for the harms—and in many cases built to cause harms for the benefit of the powerful.

The WPA and the Civil Rights movement moved hearts through human centered art.

Align your principles, please.

@annika 💛

I sometimes think about, what if websites were by every default, like podcasts? You download one, and it’s there in your little collection, on your little device. You can get a fresh copy or “pull” in an update. But largely it can’t be taken from you. It’s all this little hermetic thing.

And, yes, I know we have caching; but that’s not the same UX. That’s not holding a website like a book, being your own little Internet Archive.

I wonder how this might change what and how we create?

@clarity yeah I’ve tried saying this for a while to colleagues/peers, and it’s been surreal watching people go from, “uhhh, that’s a little extreme” to more recently, “oh, mmm, yeah, it’s looking concerning isn’t it, I just didn’t think that…”

I marvel at how people can imagine all the “wonders” of “AI”, but balk at the very rationally laid out harms and core destructive motives. It’s Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. “It’s so new, let’s be open minded!”

The motivations aren’t new.

@annika be careful I’m pretty sure this is copyrighted by the NYT!

There should be a protocol, which all browsers have already implemented that lets me click a little button and send money from me to the person/org/persons operating a website, without either of us needing the others personal info.

In 1872 you could do this over a Telegraph.

And for the last 10+ years we’ve let cryptocurrencies runs scams, remake the fintech landscape, and take billions of dollars to build something that never once got close to this?

I fear the future of the web is a division between two philosophies. That it is a place where people go to find things made by people who care OR that it is a slowly stagnating database to be queried, mined, and deconstructed so that a person can be given something generated by a machine run by people who don’t care at all (except for money).

The further we let the line between author and material drift the more we get just “content”. And the closer we get to the second nightmare.

The slow dehumanizing uncaring drift we’ve seen occur from author to “content creator”, has shaped a world where the “content” matters most, where the person is ignored and unsupported. And once they’re just a “content creator” they no longer have any value in being human. A machine “content creator”, a generative model, becomes easy to accept and reach for. And the process of severing author from material is complete. Only the content remains, any route of support to the creator is now gone.

Via @kottke

“We need more tools for it. We need simpler tools for it. And we need to make installing and using them trivially simple.” https://gilest.org/indie-easy.html “

I am so in-line with the author here and have been working away at some things that I hope/think will fit right into this spot this year!

It’s just so nice to see someone else see what you see, ya know?

I’m just one little person, but feels to me like one way to show solidarity to all the negatively threatened artists across industries is to STOP playing with the current batch of generative models, stop putting it in your work, stop baking it into things, stop sharing the funny/cute/weird outputs. Stop giving it oxygen.

All the major models are built on extractive exploitation, with zero consideration of systemic harm. All designed absent the “should” and only caring about the “could”.

Generative art has been around for DECADES, but this current batch models is conceived in a way that’s utterly flawed, to put it mild.

There is a social contract in the communities of the web, and the communities of artists, and legality and ethics plays a role; but that contract is about more than what’s legal or ethical—it’s about respect and empathy for each other.

Current models have broken the social contract.

I am not fully convinced that the bulk of the folks making things on computers haven’t forgotten that they’re making it for real human beings?

This week alone is full of examples of building tech that’s ignorant or hostile to people. We could ascribe malicious motives, but how much of it is a complete disconnect from the actual world people live in?

How much is hammers seeing only nails?