One of the things that has bothered me most about ChatGPT is that it’s data was scraped from the Internet, where a fair amount of writing I have done resides. It would be hubris to think that what I wrote is so awesome that it could be ‘stealing’ from me, but it would also be idiotic to think that content ChatGPT produces isn’t derivative in a legal sense. In a world almost critically defined by self-preservation, I think we all should know where the line is. We don’t, really, but we should.
I’m no lawyer, but I’ve had my own ‘fun’ with copyright.
In fact, New Tech Observations from the UK (ntouk) seems to have caught ChatGPT lifting the plot of Alice in Wonderland without any attribution. There are legal issues here that seem to have been ignored in most of the hype, where even reusing content from ChatGPT could be seen as contributing to the infringement.
That hasn’t really stopped anyone since most people don’t seem to take copyright seriously unless they work for an organization that takes copyright seriously, and even when they do take copyright seriously, it’s only within specific contexts. This is why I point out where I have used a large language model such as ChatGPT for anything, since I’m citing it citing nobody – and even then, I don’t use it for generating content other than some interesting images.
Entities with deep pockets are protected by their deep pockets, but the average person writing on the Internet has less deep pockets – and there are more of us. I’ve had content ‘borrowed’ without attribution. It can range from mildly amusing to outrage, particularly when some schmuck just borrowed to create a popular post without citation so that they could ‘produce’ content that they didn’t actually produce. And Copyright is implicit.
Privacy is a partner to Copyright as well. I’m wondering when the question will be raised about text scraped for these training models by some publishers that deal mainly with text rather than images – because the image lawsuits are happening.
For now, I suppose, don’t put anything online that you wouldn’t want anyone regurgitating without attribution.
…In July 2020, immediately after the Covid lockdown, four publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley and Penguin Random House – decided to bring a major lawsuit against the Internet Archive, claiming it had ‘infringed their copyright’, potentially cost their companies millions of dollars and was a threat to their businesses. Last month the New York court found – predictably – in the publishers’ favour, rejecting the IA’s defence of ‘fair use’, and ruling that ‘although IA has the right to lend print books it lawfully acquired, it does not have the right to scan those books and lend the digital copies en masse.’…
The article goes on quite a bit exploring it in what seems to me to be a fairly comprehensive and balanced way. Even so, I looked around through the news about it and found a few other things.
Today’s lower court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve. This decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere…
Having read all of this, I find that there are good points on either side. As far as the legalities of the specifics of the case, I am not a lawyer and do not pretend to be one on the Internet, so I can’t comment on that. I can say that as someone who reads a lot, even though I have gone back to paper books for the most part, these publishing models seem antiquated and have not allowed much room for the rights of people to access information, be it a romance novel or scientific papers. The big wheels have turned too slow on this.
…“The publishers believe that digital lending should essentially be a right that they license to libraries and that every time a library wants to loan something to a reader, the publishers should get paid a licensing fee,” Sinnreich told Marketplace.
Public libraries use different licensing models, but the most common is the two-year license, explained Alan Inouye, leader of the American Library Association’s public policy and advocacy office…
…Librarians have chronicled journal price changes over the years, finding that some titles could cost between about $50 and $220 in the 1980s. Now, those same titles range between about $18,900 and $40,300.
Inouye said he thinks both libraries and individuals have fewer rights in our digital environment…
There was a time that present generations may not remember where we lent friends books that we had. Given it was one physical copy, we could only share it once, and the same was true of libraries. If a book you wanted to read was checked out, you couldn’t get to it until it was physically returned. If a library had paid for more than one book, it could lend more than one book because of the physical limitations.
Now, with electronic books, it’s possible to share things a lot easier, but the intent of publishers is not for the books to be shared. The intent of public libraries is to share information for the public good. The intent of readers varies, but in the broad strokes it’s access to information, sometimes permanently (buying the book) and sometimes temporarily (borrowing the book from a library). The balance of all of this is at issue and has been for some time, and let’s be honest: Publishers have been making their own rules and lobbying their own legislation for some time. You can read about this in Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture”, which you can legally download as a PDF from the Library of Congress.
All of this is a centuries long negotiation between people and those that publish. Oddly, it has little to do with the content creators themselves other than the fact that they are beholden to publishers to publish their works… in an era when self-publishing is possible. In return, they get help producing, marketing and protecting those works.
…What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining, motley aggregate and then try to recreate it. They are undeniably good at it and getting better, but mimicking speech does not make a computer sentient…
As I pointed out in a post on ChatGPT and large language models, such as ‘A Chat With GPT on AI‘, I recognized that it was meeting my cognitive bias. In that regard, I recognized some of myself in what I was getting back, not too different from when I was playing with Eliza in the 1980s with the only difference being that the bot has gotten better because it has access to more information than what the user types in. We were young, we dreamed, but tech wasn’t ready yet.
Of course it’s a mirror of what ourselves in that regard – but the author didn’t take it to the next step. As individuals we should be seeing ourselves in the output, but we should also understand that it’s also global society’s mirror as well, and all the relative good and relative bad that comes with it. We have biases in content based on language, on culture, on religion, and on much more. I imagine the Amish don’t care, but still they are part of humanity and we have a blind spot there, I’m certain, never-mind all the history that our society has erased and continues to erase, or has simply ignored.
Personally, I find it a great way to poll the known stores of humanity on what it’s biases believe, no matter how disturbing the results can be. And yet, we’re already likely diluting our own thoughts reflected back at us as marketers and bloggers (not mutually exclusive) churn content out of Large Language Models that they will eventually train on. That’s not something I’m comfortable with, and as usual, my problem isn’t so much technology as society, a rare thing for me to say when so much technology is poorly designed. Am I ‘victim shaming’?
When the victim is the one abusing themself, can it be victim shaming?
I’ve been looking for angles on how to write about this latest lockdown in Trinidad and Tobago. I considered writing something for TechNewsTT.com about the technology aspects, but the article always fell short in my mind and seemed to dance just a bit beyond a technology aspect. Then, too, writing anything critical in Trinidad and Tobago is like threading needles – plural – while riding a rollercoaster because of politics, because of what I perceive as a culture that demands progress but does it’s best to work against it with cultural inertia… And so there has been a bit of paralysis in my mind as this all plods along.
And plod along it does. Social media has been drowning in disaster porn. The government of Trinidad and Tobago adds it’s deluge onto that with daily statistics that are confusing to those that don’t understand how they are created, and frustrating those that do. Imagine that the testing laboratory is closed on weekends, and always lags on Mondays, and how that skews statistics – but then, too, imagine so many being tested that to require staff to work weekends would be a bridge too far. It is fair to say that the Ministry of Health has been overwhelmed and performed well given the circumstances, but it is also fair to say that the fact that the Ministry of Health has been overwhelmed speaks to decades of stagnation in many regards. Health records immediately come to mind in a country that has de facto free medical care, to a point, and at some points pointless.
So then we get into threading one of the needles where we don’t criticize the people in the system but the system themselves, much like National Security in how it has had to deal with the State of Emergency which has not been invasive, to the chagrin of some who think that everyone who breaks the rules should be tossed in a cell somewhere – as if tossing them in cells doesn’t create new problems in a pandemic. Where do you house them? How do you feed them and handle basic necessities for them? It’s not so easy.
Meanwhile, the hunt for vaccines became a political stew and an international one at that, while all the time the local politicians hold press conferences on each other rather than the actual issues because, really, what do you do when decades of lack of progress in so many regards comes to a head in such a situation? While the pandemic is a new experience and has wreaked it’s own sort of havoc across the world, that havoc was largely made possible by failures in systems that were perceived as robust to the voting publics. In this regard, Trinidad and Tobago is not that different, but anyone familiar with modern history of Trinidad and Tobago will look back to the 1960s and 1970s and think of all the money just wasted and stolen rather than invested, with every government since working with less and less while the challenges become greater and greater.
So how does one even begin to write about this properly? Facts and figures aren’t enough because there is context, and there are so many contexts. Economic, education, medical, national security… How does one write about all of this without blessing or condemning anyone in government? While it’s popular to apply faces to blame, it’s almost never right – the odds of complete incompetence of any individual in any bureaucracy is limited by the bureaucracy, but it is also magnified by the bureaucracy.
I have spent months observing and reflecting on it and I have yet to find the right threads to begin tugging on when it comes to this tattered rug that has not been dealt with since the time of my grandparents, when it should have been, when it could have been.
But I have this parting note. Recently, I noted to some former classmates that when we graduated Secondary School, regardless of where our paths would take us, we lead with this thought that we could somehow make a difference… and some of us have, probably more than think they have, but when I look at the world and consider someone now that age looking at this tattered rug… somehow, it just doesn’t seem to measure up.
It’s a lot like the Law in Trinidad and Tobago that leaves whether automobile tinting is too dark and thus illegal – it’s at the discretion of someone in positional authority.
Positional. Sex Toy. Umm.
If only someone with journalistic integrity and maturity would delve deeper into this issue for the ladies – and I suppose at least some men.
For lack of anyone with these attributes, I decided to do it myself.
Before I left for Tobago, I went on Amazon.com and searched for what might be considered an ‘adult toy’ for women – men tend to take things in hand – and was amazed at the wide…. array… of things available to women. My. Word. Ladies, I had an idea, but my word, are you catered for.
Since I’m presently not in a relationship and have no idea what a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ one might be, I opted for something that might be less likely to be fingered by Customs and Excise. After all, though I was making sure I had a vacation in between, I wasn’t too interested in being called a ‘rogue’ or ‘vagabond’ over this, and I certainly didn’t want to spend 2 months among hardened criminals:
“What are you in for?”
“Customs…”
“Smuggling?”
“You could say that…”
So I did a search related to internal massage. Given the number of orifices on the average human – are you counting right now? – I thought that might be more likely to pass the test versus, “BIG LIFELIKE —– VIBRATING D–D- WITH MOUNTING SUCTION CUP”.
I ordered it. While it spent it’s time in a box being shipped, I considered the possibilities. Should I do a faux interview with it about Customs and Excise should it make it through? I decided it should have a stutter, but since it was made in China I wasn’t sure how to do the voice. It took a while, but it got here . When I spoke with the young female clerk when I picked it up, she confirmed my suspicions.
It’s really about what you call it.
What’s more, it seems that they threw in a ‘finger massager’ as well. I didn’t even know that was a thing.
So ladies – and I suppose some men, too – just be careful with what it’s called. ‘Discrete’ shipping is typical with such items, I saw, but what they call it might mean the difference between pleasure and pain.
Items for this research have already been donated to a suitable… charity.
One of the things that makes the rounds in the blogosphere as a ‘truth’ is that you have to blog every day.
In a niche, if you follow another ‘truth’.
This leads to all kinds of crap content. Really. People reblog other people’s blogs, trying to capitalize on something someone else wrote in the hope that they can write it in a more popular way so that their blog can get traffic so that…
Take a breath.
That’s the newspaper business model. That’s the 24 hour news business model. It’s driven by advertising, as many blogs are, and that incentive can actually cause a decrease in quality.
An example: I picked on sex toys in Trinidad and Tobago recently. The story the newspapers carried was rushed, was not well researched, and of course provocative. When Finance Minister Colm Imbert called it fake news the next week, I laughed – because, of course, he pointed out that there’s no definition of what a sex toy actually is. In the video interview, it was even said that a woman had her edible underwear seized by Trinidad and Tobago Customs. The joke from the peanut gallery was that it was a snack. My joke would have been that Customs didn’t know how to use edible underwear- you don’t seize it.
As it turns out, a company named Websource had simply sent out a circular stating that imported sex toys could be confiscated, and were not permitted through their service. The government’s alleged ban was hearsay. Hearsay is heresy in factual reporting.
Waiting, sometimes, is the best thing to do. You don’t have to be the first to publish. You can simply aspire to getting it right before you publish.
So it is with any kind of writing, any kind of social media posting, any kind of sharing of information – even in person. You don’t have to fill what you perceive as voids with inaccurate or incomplete information.
You can wait.
More often than not, you should.
Write frequently, write well, and don’t focus on being first.
This will be a long post, so come back with coffee, tea, something else, or not at all. It’s meant to be linked from the ‘About‘ page.
I’ve been going back and engaging some of Renard Moreau’s ongoing conversations – it’s a nice blog Renard has – and it’s healthy to pause for a bit and think about what, how and why I write what I write.
But I’m more than that now, as people who follow can see. There’s a story there that, as much as I hate writing about myself, is a good story and one worth telling as I begin to connect different writing I have been doing in different ways.
Early Writing.
I had some poetry published while I was in my teenage years – nothing particularly great, I think. Writing was something I did every day – we all do, some more than others – but I was focused on the way out of my own prison, which at the time was computing. So I wrote logical code for systems that did exactly what I wanted.
As training goes, that’s pretty horrible training for a writer.
It did, however, get me out of Trinidad and Tobago and out of a house I wanted no part of. It got me to Irving, Texas, where… well, let’s say I enjoyed parts of the childhood I did not have while growing up. While paying my bills. While going to college. And then, while not going to college.
Then, as a sailor, I wrote logs where creativity was not considered… appropriate. No one found it funny when I logged in a Soviet Submarine into a lake at NTC Orlando, and they did not let that pass. They did, however, allow me to log rats in and off the compound without complaint.
Then, there were the SOAP notes in hospitals as a Corpsman – good training on observation, but again, creative writing was frowned upon.
It wasn’t until I got back into software that creative expression was allowed – not so much in the code (oh, the comments I left!), but in that new thing that they had come out with. Email. Not everyone enjoyed my emails, but those that didn’t were usually on the receiving end of some acerbicly made point.
Around this time, I restarted creative writing, largely as an attempt to reconnect with my late mother. We read our poetry at various places in St. Petersburg, Florida – I may even make it up there in 2019 for a CAMs reunion party. And there a conflict began within me – to pay the bills or keep writing. Pragmatically, I continued doing things to pay the bills.
Poetry was fun for a while. Then short essays. And so on.
Later in the 90s, I was able to do some creative and technical writing for a site called Brainbuzz.com, which later became Cramsession.com, and now I think it’s in the ether with study guides still floating around. And in those very late 90s, I began on a new platform.
I began blogging back in 1999. Almost 2 decades ago.
The Blogging Years – Present.
Writing at first in the medium, I was focusing on a lot of self promotion – as many bloggers do. However, I had a heavy distaste for self-promotion – I believed then, and still do now, that content should stand on it’s own. That it doesn’t is an entirely different topic.
Later, I would tire of that. At the request of my father, I returned to Trinidad and Tobago – and it was a time ripe with opportunity. Trinidad and Tobago was to be an Internet hub for South America and the Caribbean. Internet businesses had proven themselves, and my memories of Trinidad and Tobago were optimistic. Too optimistic. The infrastructure wasn’t there, the cost and quality of bandwidth at the time was below reproach, and people I thought I could count on were instead people who wouldn’t spit on me if I was dying of thirst.
So I did what I always did, what I still do with a more mature outlook: I tried to solve the problem. Call it an exercise of futility if you will, I call it an exercise of youth – much the same thing. And so I learned about why all the problems I did not think I should have were there, and tried to bypass them – to no avail. This took years. It introduced me to very quality people inside of Trinidad and Tobago and outside – as well as some people who only recently I found out were the people ripping off my ideas and selling them as their own. Mea culpa. The difference is that they were selling the golden eggs; I am the duck.
I wasn’t making enough money to feed my reading habit. I read a lot of Gutenberg.org back then, and it broadened me some more. The humanities I had kept from myself came flowing in. The world as I saw it shifted into something broader, with more meaning than silicon.
Before I knew it, I was being invited to conferences on culture and ICT – which I honestly thought I had no business going to, but even when I said as much, they still paid for me to go. With their confidence in me, I dedicated myself to what we discussed, and ended up broadening myself further and further – enough so that even years later, I still get messages asking me what I think about things.
WorldChanging/Alert Retrieval Cache.
I was writing for WorldChanging.com for a while.
Then the South East tsunami hit, and I had an idea, the Alert Retrieval Cache (ARC) – one guy, Dan Lane, fleshed it out in amazing ways. That idea later became more of a problem than a solution because of humans and distrust and reasons why humans should distrust.
It also made me leave WorldChanging.com – don’t let anyone fool you, that was a very odd place to communicate with people. There were disputes with the third party involved who also wrote for WorldChanging.com – I simply wanted it to work, he wanted to capitalize his ego with it. The powers that be were Canadian about it, wanting peace instead of progress. I left. Screw that Utne.
One thing became clear: I wasn’t just a technologist anymore. I had been given the opportunity to see the world in more ways. It was very exciting, and I ended up traveling in Latin America and the Caribbean afterwards – not the tourist stops, but in the homes of people who lived there who showed me not what their tourism boards wanted me to see, but what people there wanted me to see. I had traveled a lot before, but every place I stayed gave me new insights into a world that so many of us take for granted.
Another thing had become clear: I had unrealistic expectations of people. They weren’t motivated by the same things as I was, and my world unraveled before my eyes. I put it back together again, every international disaster another stitch in that fabric as people asked me – pleaded with me – on setting up that ARC. There was anger. There was distrust in humans.
And I wrote. Mostly unpublished, in journals on a shelf not far from where I sit. My distrust in humans became more of an acceptance, and I became better at dealing with people and their quirks – their motivations. I grew. The alternative was simply not worthwhile.
The Land Period.
When my father died, I returned to Trinidad and Tobago to settle his estate. That took years. And then I tried to do things with some land I had inherited which required me to deal with people on it. This was another growth experience; even more writing on a shelf – and it was enough to get by, what I did, but it was not enough to get ahead.
I tried my hand at agriculture, which I wasn’t terribly bad at, but it just wasn’t enough.
The Return to the U.S.
I returned to the United States with the idea that I could make enough money to get back to that land and do something of worth with it. In the downturned economy, with the shifts in technology, I made ends meet. I saw very clean parallels between, as an example, Beloit, Wisconsin, and the Caribbean as far as not advancing and why.
I learned a lot more about the world, but in the end I broke even. I was getting to that age where people weren’t sure whether they wanted to hire me, I was at that age where I wasn’t sure I wanted to be hired by them.
Long gone were the days of the code monkey for me, but everyone wanted a code monkey so that they could play their silicon organ. Attempts I made to get past that failed. Honestly, I could probably be doing code for some company in the U.S. right now if I really wanted to, but I don’t – I turned down one huge company twice, and a slightly smaller company twice. They’re names you know, but they’re not names that will make a difference here. They’re not important to me, and that’s the point I’m getting at.
There was more to technology. I’d already been reading everything all this time. It was all beginning to make sense, and I read then – as I do now – to get the language to communicate things. To make simple what seems so complex at first. To see things work.
I made my way through jobs – even getting to work at a company that did Emergency Communications, learned more about telephony than a sane person should, and left.
To return to Trinidad and Tobago, to finish some things with the land, and ultimately, to write full time.
And Back To Trinidad.
Agriculture again, and dealing with land issues – pushing hard, harder than others. Adjoining landowners were useless despite being related. So I changed the paradigm.
And now I’m back to writing – connecting things beyond just technology, looking at things and seeing what needs to be fixed. I write about it. And also, I’m writing other things, unpublished…
I’m paying much more attention to my writing these days and, stepping back for a moment last night, I realized that some of the things I’ve been writing are to fill voids.
There’s the issue of purchasing land in Trinidad and Tobago, which isn’t actually hard, but it is something a significant amount of people I have encountered in the world and social media have not gotten right. When so many people are screwing something up, one has to wonder why that is. It’s easily dismissed as people being stupid, but it’s improperly dismissed that way. People simply don’t know. Despite writing that article, there’s a demographic that will still screw it up – but I’ve done my part.
That lead me to wonder why local media hasn’t successfully addressed the problem, if at all. Of course, they may have covered it – I spend less and less time reading local media – but the problem persists. So if that article helps one person, it will have done it’s job. If it helps 100, it’s a success. If it influences 1,000 people to do things properly, it will be slightly awesome. It will have served a purpose.
There are things people need to know. In the world, information like that is guarded for no real reason, and it keeps people back.
In a world of information, we have information fiefdoms guarded by gatekeepers. There’s no reason for any of this to be hard or difficult other than the highest priority of a gatekeeper seems to be self-preservation.
The truth is, I like the voids. As a software engineer, I fell in love with the problems no one else could solve, even with the advent of the Internet and search engines – the bleeding edge.
There’s plenty of bleeding edge outside of technology, too – we tend to think of things on the horizon when that bleeding edge is instead getting people to tie their shoes so that they don’t trip on the way there.
Having tripped on my shoelaces so often while staring into a void, I do not find it amusing to see other people do it.
We live in a world where there’s video, where there’s audio… and there’s the writing.
Many people write every day. Some, not at all. Writing, like everything else, takes practice.
I got a message today from a close friend:
How do you write so seemingly effortlessly? I’ve been trying to write a simple staff bio for a website for the past 8 hours and I have one sentence.
Years ago, I would have looked at this and been astonished that anyone thought that of me – that I could write ‘seemingly effortlessly’. Nowadays, I’ll take what I get. So I responded to her, told her to just write and write and write about anything – leave, then look at what you wrote. It’s called ‘free writing’…
Sadly, I don’t think my advice helped that much. Her response was that she was going to mow the lawn.
I’ve been there. I think any writer has been there.
And I think anyone who has had to write an awful bio about themselves most certainly has been there. The Geneva Convention should have something to say about that.
Bios are horrible. How do you want to be seen? Who will be reading it? What will they think of me? What’s the line between pretentious and confident? And what do they mean 3 paragraphs? Or just one?
How can you possibly boil yourself down into one paragraph? Or three? I think that most autobiographies started off as bios where writers didn’t stop.
But a bio is not too hard, really. Clearly you can’t show people the entirety of you in one paragraph – there’d have to be a very unimpressive you. So stop thinking about who you want to be seen as.
Instead, ask yourself, “Who would these people want to know?”
That’s the secret. Generally, people want to feel confident about the person that they’re trusting with… something. So, if you’re writing a bio related to baking, you might want to write how long you’ve been doing it, what sort of baking you’ve done, and where you’ve done it.
Don’t say, for example, that you collect frogs. I did that once and it went sideways. I had a few plagues of frog related things from people for about a decade. Maybe you like photography. Maybe you read. Maybe you write. Maybe you spend time with your kids, or your nephews and nieces, or maybe you like to simply sit down and read a book.
So, here’s your bio so far:
[Insert name here] has been with the company for [?] years, and has been baking for [?] years. She spends her time reading Baking Technology websites and playing with her dog, Mr. Cupcake, who also requires gluten free pastries.
There. You have a basic bio. You could add some edge to it, depending on the company or organization, but edgy cuts both ways.
It’s not hard to flesh that out from there if they want a longer bio. Play with those two parts, stretch them, and then see what is worth keeping.
And don’t be too hard on yourself. That someone wants you to write a bio typically means that they think you should have one – so do your best.
In all of this, we focus on the lack of truth. Yet, where we find truth we find precision, and where we find precision, we find error. When we talk about fake news, we’re really talking about the innocuous stories fed to the media – social and traditional – that spread not because they’re good, but because they’re catchy. ‘Sticky’, as marketers would say.
The Basics
Truth itself is a fickle thing. We seek objectivity in our subjective experiences of life, and only when we master these subjectivities do we diminish error and improve the precision. Again, where we experience precision, we experience error – they cannot exist without each other.
It’s all trigonometry to an extent, which fuzzy logic measures by weight, but it’s there – particularly when reconciling two versions of the truth. When we get three versions of the truth, it gets more complicated. When we get 10 versions of the truth, it’s even more exponentially complicated. So we do what humans do – we simplify when we’re overwhelmed. When we’re scared, it might become about race or about people ‘over there’, a wide net that catches innocent and guilty simply to catch the guilty.
Aggregating Truth
All of this used to be more manageable when we had fewer versions of the truth. The Internet came along and gave us the metaphorical 10,000 monkeys typing out their own versions of Shakespeare all over the Internet. Most monkeys simply regurgitate the same stuff they read somewhere else, hoping to make their audience click around their site to get a little bit more advertising revenue. When you drill down, there are actually very few monkeys that come up with the best versions and they’re not the same all the time.
But the monkeys that come up with the most popular versions aren’t necessarily the best – and the best versions are not always popular. Network powered societies amplify this and we’re network powered, so much so we cannot truly conceive versions of truth as easily. Facts have become croutons on a low carb salad – almost extinct, if not extinct.
And it all happens faster. Where we might have gotten news once a day with the printing press, twice a day with the television, thrice with the radio, we have versions of truth on tap 24/7, where the first to cover something gets the prized advertising revenue no matter how uninformative and perhaps wrong the coverage is.
We find in life that when the people around us make better decisions, we ourselves get better choices. We find that when we make better decisions, those around us get better choices.
And we find that the opposite is also true.
Rethink where you get your content. Re-assess your connections in what they share, reassess what you read and if none of it makes you uncomfortable, you’re not reading facts but your own fiction, cherry picked from the 10,000 monkeys including the ones who take joy in feeding nonsense to the masses.
Go find Shakespeare. Don’t trust the monkeys. An if you’re one of the monkeys, my word, at least try to get something in with the filler.
One of the things that has bothered me most about ChatGPT is that it’s data was scraped from the Internet, where a fair amount of writing I have done resides. It would be hubris to think that what I wrote is so awesome that it could be ‘stealing’ from me, but it would also be idiotic to think that content ChatGPT produces isn’t derivative in a legal sense. In a world almost critically defined by self-preservation, I think we all should know where the line is. We don’t, really, but we should.
Most of the people around me are completely unaware of the 
The article, “
KnowProSE.com 
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