I’ve finally got my new blog up an’ ready. It’s strange. I wanted to start this up for the longest time, for at least half a year now, but now that it’s up… I don’t know what to do with it. I mean, my first entry. Earlier I had all these thoughts about what I wanted to write down; maybe I took too long and I’m just too tired to think, now. Swam, chatted with neighbours in the jacuzzi, prepared the Crock-Pot, bathed… I don’t know if I want this to ever “devolve” into a daily log of what I did on a day-to-day basis. That’s not what I want.
It’s starting to come to me now, what I wanted to write about, as tired as I am (it’s just before 1 AM now)... So, John Oliver and his Last Week Tonight crew did an episode on AI slop, and its flooding of the Internet with misinformation, and sometimes active disinformation. It’s not just the wannabe-viral crap that concerns me. Because you’ve never needed AI to lie to people, you can just use lies told by real people, omission of inconvenient facts… Just because it comes out of a real person’s mouth, doesn’t mean it’s real. It sucks to look at the state of the world now, and I bet you don’t even have to go that far—you can see it in your personal lives.
The Internet has just made everything a lot faster. Too fast, there isn’t time to digest anything. To look over and question and ask if what you’re seeing and what you’re even being told makes sense, and who benefits from the story that you’re being told. I kind of wanna get away from everything. I miss the days when “the Internet”, for me, just meant playing games on Postopia, looking at art on DeviantArt, and reading way too much Wikipedia articles and discussion pages. The whole thing now just feels like an information battlefield where even the most innocuous of publications are just fights for clout.
I want people to be honest and principled, but maybe that’s too much to ask. I don’t really feel “at home” on the Internet anymore.