Ads, Scraping, and Generally Pleasurable Reading Experiences

Terry Godier on his blog this morning:

Writing this, I feel something else. I’m angry at the extractive bastards who own a platform and then treat the people who write there like shit. Taking their words as collateral to run ads against. Deciding whether anyone sees what they wrote based on whether it’ll keep someone else scrolling. Manufacturing the anxious return to doomscroll more.

Enough. We’ve all had enough of that. I hope a thousand other sites pop up where the deal is just the deal: words written by people, delivered to whomever they intend to read them. Where creation isn’t a means to anything else. It is the thing.

A couple of feelings are spurred by this. This is talking about social media without mentioning it by name. I’m again in one of those states where I’ve deleted algorithmic social media services off my phone. Only Mastodon remains. One thing I’ve noticed of late is I’m seeing ads of things I just wrote about, despite not giving these apps permission to track me. They just do it anyway. Either they’re scraping the information directly off my device or they’re snooping on my this site to see what I’m posting.

Either way, that’s annoying and a bit creepy. I don’t like the idea of being stalked in any way, shape, or form. But, by using these services, we are adhering to their terms of service, which gives them a sort of permission to these things. But, even if you didn’t have a profile there, they’re profiling you anyway.

This also fires up my thoughts on scraping by AI companies. Most of them have no shame in doing so. Most of that group will also rarely source where their content is coming from. Much of that same group also has no shame in where their tech is used, say, for example, assisting automatic weapons systems for the US government, despite how half-baked all this shit still is. We’re all part of the alpha and beta testing. Why even lean into any kind of devious shit at the moment? Oh yeah, money. It’s always the money.

Then, there’s the memory shortage brought on by so many of these companies being all about generative AI, which is where they do the art for you. That’s a very intensive task, especially at scale, so a lot of memory is needed, not to mention other resources like electricity, so who in the hell knows just how bad for the environment having an image made for you is, but it’s not good.

With that in mind, I do use Claude AI. They’re staunchly against generative AI and are actively suing the US government for punishing them for not giving into the whole weapons thing. About the generative part, I’ve been using Claude as a writing coach. I shoot it things I’ve written and it critiques me, telling me where I should go more into depth and where I’m adding things that steer things off course. But, it absolutely refuses to do the writing for me, literally saying things like “you know your voice better than I do”. That’s frankly comforting.

In the process, my writing has gotten better and that means something to me. Art should be left to being art, created by humans. If AI wants to assist, fine, but I’m not a fan of having it do it for you. I want my words to be my words.