I’ve struggled more and more with the idea of posting things on the internet as of late. I’ve kept a reasonably high bar on personal stuff (thank you gifs for your terrible quality), but the reality is that it’s not high enough. Beyond privacy, I’m questioning why even toss nicely curated & authentic pieces of information into the sewer, I enjoy doing so less and less. Algorithms seem to gain new exploitative dimensions every few years, making everything you posted before a retroactive liability. The advent of AI clearly is one such evolution. Where social media fed off our attention, the fuel for AI is authenticity. Just as I absconded from social media early on when its extractive nature became clear, I seek to avoid fueling models, nor do I want them used against my family.
I don’t think I want fractions of our lives to be digested and regurgitated, this is especially true as my kids are getting older. I do realize the same was said about nascent photography, and I know it’s a funny thing for me to criticize generative models given my work with markov chains. That is how I feel nonetheless, and don’t get me wrong I love AI, just with someone else’s data in it :).
This blog has definitely turned into a bit of a personal journal over the years, and I don’t want to lose this as I often refer back to it. But in reality, there’s a lot I refrain from journaling here because it’s too public, and now more than ever it also feels dirty for a myriad of reasons all stemming from the current state of the internet.
I’m in a pickle, how does one filter for reasonable humans? Well, on this imperfect internet, the least bad solution I can find is to password protect some posts. And so I’ll do this from now on, and I’ll have to be better at segregating personal content from what is meant for public consumption. It’s unfortunate really, the projects I work on are deeply intertwined with our life, and will be more dry separated from it.
If you’re a reasonable human and you know me, the password when used is where I worked from 2003 to 2004.