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When The Internet Eats Itself

~ Taran ~ 10 Comments

The recent news of Stack Overflow selling it’s content to OpenAI was something I expected. It was a matter of time. Users of Stack Overflow were surprised, which I am surprised by, and upset, which I’m not surprised by.

That seems to me a reasonable response. Who wouldn’t? Yet when we contribute to websites for free on the Internet and it’s not our website, it’s always a terrible bargain. You give of yourself for whatever reason – fame, prestige, or just sincerely enjoying helping, and it gets traded into cash by someone else.

But companies don’t want you to get wise. They want you to give them your content for free so that they can tie a bow around it and sell it. You might get a nice “Thank you!” email, or little awards of no value.

No Good Code Goes Unpunished.

The fallout has been disappointing. People have tried logging in and sabotaging their top answers. I spoke to one guy on Mastodon a few days ago and he got banned. It seems pretty obvious to me that they had already backed up the database where all the stuff was, and that they would be keeping an eye on stuff. Software developers should know that. There was also some confusion about the Creative Commons licensing the site uses versus the rights given to the owners of the website, which are mutually exclusive.

Is it slimy? You bet. It’s not new, and the companies training generative AI have been pretty slimy. The problem isn’t generative AI, it’s the way the companies decide to do business by eroding trust with the very market for their product while poisoning wells that they can no longer drink from. If you’re contributing answers for free that will be used to train AI to give the same answers for a subscription, you’re a silly person1.

These days, generative AI companies need to put filters on the front of their learning models to keep small children from getting sucked in.

Remember Huffington Post?

Huffington Post had this neat little algorithm for swapping around headlines til it found one that people liked, it gamed SEO, and it built itself into a powerhouse that almost no one remembers now. It was social, it was quirky, and it was fun. Volunteers put up lots of great content.

When Huffingpost sold for $315 million, the volunteers who provided the content for free and built the site up before it sold sued – and got nothing. Why? Because they had volunteered their work.

I knew a professional journalist who was building up her portfolio and added some real value – I met her at a conference in Chicago probably a few months before the sale, and I asked her why she was contributing to HuffPost for free. She said it was a good outlet to get some things out – and she was right. When it sold, she was angry. She felt betrayed, and rightfully so I think.

It seems people weren’t paying attention to that. I did2.

You live, you learn, and you don’t do it again. With firsthand and second hand experience, if I write on a website and I don’t get paid, it’s my website. Don’t trust anyone who says, “Contribute and good things will happen!”. Yeah, they might, but it’s unlikely it will happen for you.

If your content is good enough for a popular site, it’s good enough to get paid to be there. You in the LinkedIn section – pay attention.

Back To AI’s Intake Manifold.

I’ve written about companies with generative AI models scraping around looking for content, with contributed works to websites being a part of the training models. It’s their oil, it’s what keeps them burning through cash as they try to… replace the people whose content they use. In return, the Internet gets slop generated all over, and you’ll know the slop when you read it – it lacks soul and human connection, though it fakes it from time to time like the pornographic videos that make the inexperienced think that’s what sex is really like. Nope.

The question we should be asking is whether it’s worth putting anything on the Internet at this point, just to have it folded into a statistical algorithm that chews up our work and spits out something like it. Sure, there are copyright lawsuits happening. The argument of transformative works doesn’t really work that well in a sane mind when it comes to the exponentially higher amount of content used to create a generative AI at this point.

So what happens when less people contribute their own work? One thing is certain: the social aspect of the Internet will not thrive as well.

Social.

The Stack Overflow website was mainly an annoyance for me over the years, but I understand that many people had a thriving society of a sort there. It was largely a meritocracy, as open source, at least at it’s core. You’ll note that I’m writing of it in the past tense – I don’t think anyone with any bit of self-worth will contribute there anymore.

The annoyance aspect for me came from (1) Not finding solutions to the quirky problems that people hired me to solve3, and (2) Finding code fragments I tracked down to Stack Overflow poorly (if at all) adapted to the employer or client needs. I also had learned not to give away valuable things for free, so I didn’t get involved. Most, if not all, of the work I did required my silence on how things worked, and if you get on a site like StackOverflow – your keyboard might just get you in trouble. Yet the problem wasn’t the site itself, but those who borrowed code like it was a cup of sugar instead of a recipe.

Beyond we software engineers, developers, whatever they call themselves these days, there are a lot of websites with social interaction that are likely getting their content shoved into an AI learning model at some point. LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, annoyingly in the top search results, is ripe for being used that way.

LinkedIn doesn’t pay for content, yet if you manage to get popular, you can make money off of sponsored posts. “Hey, say something nice about our company, here’s $x”. That’s not really social, but it’s how ‘influencers’ make money these days: sponsored posts. When you get paid to write posts in that way, you might be selling your soul unless you keep a good moral compass, but when bills need to get paid, that moral compass sometimes goes out the window. I won’t say everyone is like that, I will say it’s a danger and why I don’t care much about ‘influencers’.

In my mind, anyone who is an influencer is trying to sell me something, or has an ego so large that Zaphod Beeblebrox would be insanely jealous.

Regardless, to get popular, you have to contribute content. Who owns LinkedIn? Microsoft. Who is Microsoft partnered with? OpenAI. The dots are there. Maybe they’re not connected. Maybe they are.

Other websites are out there that are building on user content. The odds are good that they have more money for lawyers than you do, that their content licensing and user agreement work for them and not you, and if someone wants to buy that content for any reason… you’ll find out what users on Stack Overflow found out.

All relationships are built on trust. All networks are built on trust. The Internet is built on trust.

The Internet is eating itself.

  1. I am being kind. ↩︎
  2. I volunteered some stuff to WorldChanging.com way back when with the understanding it would be Creative Commons licensed. I went back and forth with Alex and Jamais, as did a few other contributors, and because of that and some nastiness related to the Alert Retrieval Cache, I walked away from the site to find out from an editor that contacted me about their book that they wanted to use some of my work. Nope. I don’t trust futurists, and maybe you shouldn’t either. ↩︎
  3. I always seemed to be the software engineer that could make sense out of gobblygook code, rein it in, take it to water and convince it to drink. ↩︎

Paying To Whitewash The Fence of AI.

~ Taran ~ 5 Comments

I suppose a lot of people may not have read Tom Sawyer since it has been banned here and there. Yet there is a part of the book that seems really appropriate today and is unfortunate people didn’t read. It’s a great con.

It’s in Chapter 2 that Tom Sawyer gets punished and has to whitewash a fence for his Aunt Polly, and when mocked about his punishment by another boy, he claims whitewashing the fence is fun. It’s so fun, in fact, that the other kid gives Tom an apple (an initial offer was the apple core, I believe), and so Tom pulled this con on other kids and got their treasures while they painted the fence. He got ‘rich’ and had fun at their expense while they did his penance.

That’s what’s happening with social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

Videos, text, everything being generated on these social networks is being used to train generative AI that you can use for free – at least for now – while others pay and subscribe to get the better trained versions.

It’s a pretty good con that I suppose people didn’t read about. It’s a classic con.

Some people will complain when the AI’s start taking over whitewashing the fences, or start whitewashing their children.

Meanwhile, these same companies are selling metaphorical paint and brushes.

I suppose this is why reading is important.

Oddly, the premise of the ban of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” was “when librarians said they found Mr. Sawyer to be a “questionable” protagonist in terms of his moral character.”

Happy Painting.

Net Neutrality, Competition and Target Blindness.

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday I had the misfortune of attempting to have a conversation with someone who was certain that there was no problem with competition without net neutrality.

Instead, I explored their perspective. The only thing I could come up with is that when some people speak of competition, they think of competition between Internet Service Providers  (ISPs). They do not think of the ISPs themselves competing with services that are simply accessed through their network.

It’s mind-boggling to me that people don’t understand that issue of disruption within the Internet.

It also boggles me that such people are in regulatory frameworks, and these are people who define discussions had about such neutrality. It’s no wonder that assuring equity between companies providing services on the internet and ISPs is such a moot point at this time.

And therefore, we can’t get beyond network neutrality to the real crux of things.

Social Networks Don’t Make Sense To You?

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

3D Social NetworkingI was sitting by myself eating lunch, with only my Kindle as company, when I heard from a voice from another table say that they didn’t understand how to use LinkedIn.

A few other people agreed. One or two shook their heads in not-so-mock consternation. Having overheard this group before – beware solitary people with Kindles eating lunch – I knew that these were business folk. Marketers. Salespeople. And while there was a part of me that wanted to say something, I decided to be quiet and consider what they said.

After all, they’re right.

They don’t understand it. They owned that. In the grand scheme of things, that really isn’t a failure – social networks are hardly transparent in how they work, and they do allow people to think that it’s about the members of the community when the bottom line says it is not. There’s no shame in not understanding how social networks work, or don’t. There’s no shame in that at all, and coming to that conclusion within a moment or two, I listened some more.

I mean, really, social networks suck. They almost always show us things that we don’t want to see while somehow failing to show us what we need to see. Renowned sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, said that social networks are traps – and largely, they are.

This leads us to the first thing you need to understand.

Social Networks Are Not About You

I know, I know, we all would like to think so as we impress upon each other our politics, our perspectives and our silliness – not to mention kittens.

Follow the logic:

  • The social network belongs to a company. =>
  • The company isn’t altruistic, it needs to make money. =>
  • The company makes money based on advertising and selling what they find out about you. =>
  • You are the product that buys and whose information is sold.

An antiquated perspective would say, “Well, then we’re in charge!”. The idea that you could control what is bought of you and sold to you is a bit naive at best; at worst it’s a simple matter of giving yourself away in bytes.

So then we like to think that, like a casino or lottery, we will come out the winner when no one else is beating the house. A few do. The majority will not. Despite your best efforts, you’re likely to be a part of the majority rather than the minority.

If that sounds bleak, well, shucks, I apologize for being the guy who gives you the news, but I do expect you to thank me at some point when it sinks in.

Now that we have established that it isn’t about you, you’re ready for the second point.

Social Networks Are Not Designed For You.

Wow, I’m just pulling down your worldview. It’s a bummer, I know, but someone pretty intelligent said to me recently, “the person who reads the reports makes the decisions, not the one who uses the user interface” (take a bow, M.E.). That summarizes it quite well.

The people who pay for your data and who pay the owner of the social network to sell you stuff are the ones who drive the interface. You’re just a statistic. They might tell you that they’re warm and fuzzy human beings, but that warm and fuzzy goes away fast when the black line falters.

And yet, I must make the final point.

Social Networks Can Benefit You.

When you realize that you’re just a squirrel in their world trying to get your nut, you learn how to gather your nuts by paying attention.

The first rule of being popular on a social network – something I’ve never tried to do except professionally – is not to be like everyone else. Your posts need to represent what you want your digital shadow to be seen for.

If you have a business, you should stand out not just with better products and services – what do you mean you don’t have those? Go get them and then finish reading this– you have to stand out. The best and easiest way to stand out is to be yourself. Don’t just post things about your company. Post things that people find interesting, and if you have good salespeople and marketers, they can give you input so you can at least fake it to the demographics you’re looking for.

If you’re an individual, take the risk of being yourself. Don’t post pictures of your food. Don’t use a professional network to explore your love life candidly. Use the funny shaped thing inside your skull, equidistant between your ears.

You may not be popular.

You’ll have a presence, and really, that’s the only way to leverage a social network your way. Be interesting, or as close to interesting as you (or your company) can abide.

I encourage you to read this LinkedIn post as well:

Your Personal Brand and LinkedIn