Blaugust: Retreating into the Future

I’m joining Blaugust this year because the internet of the future looks like a return to the internet of the past. An article in The Verge exaggerates the current situation, but not by much:

Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with “AI-generated junk.” 

Elsewhere in The Verge, James Vincent has drawn parallels between auto-generated text and geofoam, a synthetic material stuffed into “the empty spaces that progress leaves behind.” Generative text has made it increasingly difficult to connect with people and websites that share useful information; the internet’s largest platforms have become hollow exercises in mass-produced content for monetizing web traffic. 

This decline of great powers has played out elsewhere in literature and history. Eleanor Janega sees parallels with the collapse of Twitter and the cascading failures of the Roman Empire:

In reality the “fall” wasn’t because outside forces wanted to destroy Rome – they just wanted to control it. There was a slow and steady degradation of the services that the Empire could offer, and people began to respond to this with smaller and localised communities.

Online, a shift towards smaller, more localized communities looks like a return to internet communities of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s: webrings and niche resource pages curated by passionate individuals. In the Fediverse, people are being encouraged to post more on their personal websites:

I found Blaugust, the Festival of Blogging, through my Mastodon account. The festival promotes a similar idea, encouraging people to publish more blog posts on their own sites during the month of August, and I’m hoping that it can help me overcome some of blogging’s emotional obstacles. 

(In addition to getting the idea of emotional obstacles from Tracy Durnell, I have also been thinking about her point that blog posts don’t have to be long. Both of those concepts have helped me address some of my own concerns about publishing material that doesn’t feel like it’s “good enough.”)

Michael Crichton Predicted Our Response to ChatGPT

No, it wasn't in his explanation of Chaos Theory. 

It’s his description of Gell-Mann amnesia:

“You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well [….] You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. [….] you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

Most of the breathless hype about ChatGPT seems to come from people asserting that it will radically disrupt the work of someone else. When experts evaluate ChatGPT in their own disciplines, the same optimism is missing:

• Musician Nick Cave has received “dozens” of ChatGPT-created songs that attempt to emulate his work. He is not impressed.
  
  
• Stack Overflow, a website for programmers discussing code, found ChatGPT answers to be “substantially harmful” (emphasized in the original statement) for users who want correct information.
  
  
• Journalists at Futurism looked at CNET's use of ChatGPT for creating news stories, and they found “a series of boneheaded errors.” 
  
  
• In cybersecurity discussions, observers have pointed out that ChatGPT can’t do the actual work required for a successful attack. 
  
  
• One app tried using ChatGPT responses in its online mental health services, and the experiment ended because “messages just felt better” when they were written by humans. 

When it comes to overblown predictions about ChatGPT’s effects, it’s odd to see credible sources change gears and forget what they know. At least Michael Crichton can explain what’s happening. 

TL;DR Just invoke Betteridge’s law when an article asks you “Can ChatGPT fill in mentorship gaps for Gen Z workers?”