cartoon for Inktober : Arctic

Not sure how many of the folk submiting to Inktober realised there are no penguins in the arctic, just lots live on the antarctic. Those in the arctic must be lost

 

Living in the AI Slopocene

Alvin is getting concerned about a few things to do with our reliance on technology, the Internet, and particularly AI, specifically large language models (LLMs). The information gained from the Internet is not as reliable as it once might have appeared, and people’s confidence in science and reliance on proper sources of truth, such as reliable journalists, well-researched papers, and other references, is being eroded.

 At the same time, those in control of many of these internet-based resources are making vast profits from our distraction and often exhibiting less than fully ethical behaviour. They’re just in it for the profit rather than the betterment of society. So it’s not a surprise that I don’t have an answer to these questions.

Norm, Alvin's creator, came across a great term for these times we were living in, the AI Slop-o-scene. This conversation article gives a great definition of “Slopocene” a term that’s been used to describe overproduced, low-quality AI content. It also hints at a speculative near-future where  "recursive training collapse turn the web into a haunted archive of confused bots and broken truths". 

Not a place Alvin wants to visit or trust.

Norm: I’m using this post to hold an interesting experiment. There are actually two blog posts one here and the other on Wandering in the Light They both express the same ideas, but one is an original written by Norm and the other is a reinterpretation by an AI.  Could I ask you to read both? Then leave a comment on the article you believe is generated by the AI (Claude Sonnet 4) and the other post written directly by me.

Alvin worries posting small images may not stop the scrapers

 

Akvin starts to feel that the strategy of only posting small images may not deter the scrapers looking for AI training images, but he is certain it would annoy his social media fans.

Alvin's Not So Smart Web-Trap

Alvin starts to realise his smart Web-Trap (using robot.txt) to block webcrawlers etc, stops his website being indexed and thus no one can find him, and the AI scrapers can just choose to ignore it.

So probably not such a great idea.

Has Alvin been trained?

 

Lila is a bit sceptical about trying to train Alvin, But has an AI been secretly scraping his web footprints?

Find out if your work has been scraped with the link below

https://haveibeentrained.com/

Lila looks for ways to avoid scraping for AI Traininbg?

A promising development is the creation of tools that embed changes in image files. These alterations are invisible to humans but can disrupt AI training, potentially "poisoning" the dataset. Glaze and Nightshade are two such tools,

Alvin comes out of social media retirement

 

Alvin has kindly come out of the shadows on the net to help Norm, look into Cara as an alternative to Instagram and perhaps a way to stop the aggressive scrapping of data and images for Neural Network training. He is starting by asking "Is the creative commons sub-licence NO [no derivative] enough to stop AIs scrapping him?"