Artificial intelligence really has sucked the wind out of my sails regarding publishing text online. These technologies are being improved at such a rapid pace that it gives the authentic author the desire to turn this computer off and go back to pen and paper and give up on all the rest.
Take those above 295 characters above, here’s a poem based on that text, done by AI:
The winds of change, they blow so strong, The tech and tools, they just go on, AI advances, so fast and quick, It’s enough to make me sick.
I can’t keep up this race, It’s taken away my place, Where I used to write and share, Now I’m left with despair.
My words and thoughts, they fade away, Lost forever in the digital fray, So I turn off this machine, And take pen and paper in hand.
In two years from this day, I feel like AI is going to creep its way into every facet of online published text by even the most prolific people whom I admire and adore. Nobody will flag the bottom of their posts with text that states clearly AI mostly wrote that their article. Over a long enough time-line I feel like “writing the old way” will just be considered “a boomer waste of time”. I’ve fed prompts to several of the various AIs available to working-class-nobodies like myself to write blog articles about various topics with very minimal input and got fed back full-blown articles that almost always check out. Imagine where this will be in 2033, 2043. Think about the same way you use the Obsidian command palette and in a couple years feeding it just three or four words and have things give you back articles for your website for the next couple of week based on the data it has in your vault. Your words and mine are going to loose their value at a pace I am unsure we are prepared to endure.
Before September 11th, I used to be quite the shutterbug. Obsessed with OG Flickr, despite never owning a particularly good camera, but I had an absolute blast. It was a point-and-shoot camera, because I never wanted to dedicate the time and energy into learning the more sophisticated technologies that exist in the photography world. Aperture, shutter speed, ISO.
After 9/11 it was super difficult to be walking around taking pictures of things. So photography sort of just fell along the way and writing was more of my focus. Knocked two NaNoWriMo’s out of the park, peaking at the second successful attempt, completing the 50,000 word requirement on the morning of Day 14. I read once that the author who wrote those Fifty Shades of Grey books that were all about sex and BDSM had started those books based on fan-fiction that they were writing about the Twilight series. Much in the same way I suppose, was my second NaNo win done in the same spirit. It was 100% fan-fiction for the Fallout series, which is based on retelling of American history and is in a post-apocalyptic setting.
Walking around taking photos isn’t necessarily getting you labeled as a terrorist anymore and the technological advancements that have occurred in this arena in the past two decades dramatically reduces the learning curve for a complete moron like myself. So we have committed ourselves to learning about these topics we have been ignoring our entire lives. Returning our creative output to a medium that isn’t as tarnished by the influence of inorganic thinking.
It is recognized and acknowledged how much of a bitter-old-man this makes me sound like, and, that the total saturation of artificial intelligence into every facet of our lives is inevitable. This is a hill that I refuse to leave, and will die on with no shame.
There are still plenty of lovely things on the internet to learn about and discover. When these things make themselves known to me, they’ll get posted about here at OpenPLUTO. We’ve switched off all social media platforms again, the same way it was before we got caught up in the PKM space. Not sure I will renew my Medium membership this year or not. Subscription-based models are getting out of hand. I ran a report in Rocket Money and my jaw hit the floor when I saw some of those numbers.
The tools I use today are the same ones I was using the day I joined Twitter to learn more about PKM. Obsidian and Todoist. Telegram Saved Messages acts as a bridge between my Linux machines and mobile devices when I’m on the move. Nothing has changed. I learned a lot of neat tips and tricks that I will never use and took notes on a lot of shit that I will never look at again. When I go back and re-read my highlights from the Reddit thread: “Is the Concept of Personal Knowledge Management Flawed?” I’m very much leaning on the Yes. Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks did not help!
Until we decide a proper format, and to keep momentum alive, a bullet-point link drops at regular intervals here at OpenPLUTO shall serve as a replacement for any relevant post I had been doing on social media. I will still post longer articles of text here but will keep them here and not post them on Medium or other platforms, despite the wider exposure that they get. I only really tried to point useful things out to people and help people find their ways to the same solutions that helped me. There are people doing that better than I am, and a majority of them benefit monetarily from those efforts. We will let them have their space in order to achieve those goals.
The ratio of AI/NON-AI plugins for Obsidian continually grows in favor of AI, so I’m unsure if there will be enough stuff to dig thru on weekly intervals in order to publish something specifically Obsidian related. Perhaps they should get allowed the freedom to have their own bullet-point link drop posts here as well!?
Whatever it ends up being, know that the content here is free of artificial influence and the thoughts and opinions expressed here are Certified Organic. 😏
