Tagged: ai

Seeing a prominent voice in the web community for years go dark because of AI is depressing.

Two things happened recently:

The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).

The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford. Virtually all of it comes from AI crawlers, so there is no ad income.

Finding a sustainable way of compensating authors for their work in this world where bots are scraping it all so aggressively for their own commercial gain is one of the most important problems to solve on the web.

Jeremy writing about Clearleft's current conclusion around so-called "AI":

There’s no way that we’d use this technology to generate outputs for clients, but we certainly might use it to generate inputs.

I think this sums up the way I've been feeling about it so far (though struggling to phrase it as succinctly).

Like most, I've played with ChatGPT, Midjourney and similar things, purely out of curiosity, and I've paid attention to the example outputs I'm seeing from others. For me, the output continues to fall into that camp of "pretty good for a piece of technology but definitely has a distinct 'smell' about it".

The results from Joy Buolamwini's research on facial recognition accuracy are disappointing to say the least.

Microsoft’s error rate for darker-skinned women was 21 percent, while IBM’s and Megvii’s rates were nearly 35 percent. They all had error rates below 1 percent for light-skinned males.

Those are bad numbers, but they shouldn't be surprising—not when we're training these algorithm's with a poorly constructed data set.

One widely used facial-recognition data set was estimated to be more than 75 percent male and more than 80 percent white, according to another research study.

The stakes are just too high for us to continue to build technology without making sure we're taking off our blinders and accounting for our biases. Oversights like this leave people out, at best. At their worst, they are capable of doing even worse.