My Apprehensions About Blogging

It’s been a while since my last post, and much has happened. I’ve been in a bit of a quandry about what I want to blog about, and the direction I want the blog to go in. The original intent of the blog was to make up for a lack of social media presence by sharing my thoughts and snippets from my projets, so that curious folk could get a glimpse of my personality and interests. However, because of recent life changes which have given me a different perspective, I no longer feel the need to “perform” for any kind of audience. I am more comfortable just being me, unapologetically.

I don’t see my previous posts as performances, but they were somewhat restricted as I was always fearful of saying the wrong thing, or being perceived the wrong way because of something I wrote or didn’t write. Fear of judgment, censorship, and even ridicule kept me bound. I’ve however come to a place where I no longer fear judgment, censorship or being black balled because of my views. While most of the apprehensions which hindered my blogging have been resovled, one still remains, and it’s about AI and the unbridled intellectual theft perpetrated at its hands.

As the tech world glories in the increasing ascendancy of AI, little thought seems to be given by its developers to the theft being carried out to develop it. In order to train LLMs, the web and other sources have to be scraped for text and images to be used as training data. Most of this data is taken without the express permission of its authors or creators, and little credit or compensation is given by the companies who then benefit from the improvements in their LLMs this stolen loot brings them. Derivatives of original thoughts and ideas taken without care from others, are then spewed forth by the likes of ChatGPT and its AI relatives, and then posted by those who have chosen the path of cognitive offloading in order to appear more knowledgeable or competent than they really are.

It’s funny how someone can write something, and sometime later after it’s been ingested during an update of an LLM, the idea can be seen regurgitated as pretend, original thought in someone else’s online content which they’ve used AI to generate. I’ve seen a suspected instance of this happen with a blog post I’d read which would have been written a few years before generative AI tools were released to the public. I actually saw a more recent blog post on the same subject which had clearly been AI generated with some of the quotes lifted from the earlier post I’d read. It was clear to me that the more recent post was just a rehash of the older post with bits from other sources added in.

Seeing this reinforced the conclusion I’d drawn a while ago that as it stands AI has no capacity for original thought, but is really good at reconstituting ideas and facts into something which appears to be novel and different, but really isn’t. And it made me think about the fact that my posted thoughts and musings have become “food” for LLMs to consume in the quest for better AI tools and eventually AGI. This has had the effect of making me feel like not blogging because I know with a certainty that my work, however good or bad, will be fed to the “beasts”.

For me this brings back memories from elementary school of being sat next to what we back then would call a “copy cat” i.e a fellow student who wouldn’t do their own work but was content to copy yours and pass it off as their own. The raw feeling of someone stealing what you’d worked so hard to do even though at that time it was just answers for simple addition and subtraction problems, or words for a word game, is what I get when I think of my writing being fed to LLMs. You don’t really have a choice. They just take it.

So the question as I thought about these things and the way they made me feel was, do I continue to blog or do I stop because my writing could be used to train AI? I pondered and vacillated over the issue, and then came to the conclusion that I shouldn’t silence myself because of AI theft. There is a need for original human thought and perspective in the growing sea of mediocre AI “warm overs”. So I will continue to blog. As for the the LLMs feeding on my posts, I hope they choke on them.