You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

This is just the practice of invasive data harvesting taken to its natural conclusion, which any tech savvy user or computer geek brought up in the pre-postmodern social media era of the Internet (before Facebook) could have seen coming decades in advance. The only winning move here is not to play, accepting the unfortunate consequence that you will need to "limit the reach of your profile just to avoid participating in the new technology" - because nothing on the Internet is ever forgotten, and can (and will) be used for any purpose.

Adding a few magic words to bewitch the AI into not scraping your profile is the new superstition of the digital era, a cousin to the pseudolegal "no copyright intended" incantation often seen on pirated YouTube videos of yesteryear. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, for there is a fundamental tradeoff between privacy and convenience as popularized by Schneier, 11 years ago. [0] You must stop using the platform and do something other than continue to consume vapid social media nonsense; yet no one ever listens or cares, for the revealed preference of the masses is to continue to not be users of the system but to be used in exchange for "free" access to these platforms.

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/trading_priva...

The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance

> For the time being, though, avoiding A.I. is up to you. If it were as easy as posting a message of objection on Instagram, many of us would already be seeing a lot less of it.

It's true that it is quite hard, but there are ways to reduce it for sure. Here is what I have done:

1. I've deleted accounts for websites that promote AI. I have already deleted LinkedIn, Github, Medium, and a few others.

2. I have stopped supporting businesses that use AI/support ones that are against AI. For example, the company behind the Procreate iPad app is 100% against AI so I support them. Also, in my professional life, I have already refused to collaborate with three separate companies due to their promotion and use of AI.

3. I've deactivated any tools that could be AI based like assisted writing tools in Gmail.

4. I do not click or read any articles with AI-generated images or text. Nor do I watch any videos any more.

5. I am reconnecting with friends and share with them through email and other means.

In my opinion, the internet has gotten WAY worse with the introduction of generative AI. Generative AI itself is not the root cause of course: the aggressive capitalistic takeover of the internet is, but AI is the apex tool for that and it makes the internet a rather horrible place.

I thought it was going to be about escape generative AI output online.

Personally, I run a large-ish niche FB group and I haven't seen a threat of bots taking over there or other online spaces. Is there anywhere that people have seen the bots crowding out the people? My guess is Twitter but that place would already/always a sewer.

I think one could hypothetical create a preamble invisible to human which would overload the LLM reading one's article.

Like Rick and Morty did in simulation.

At least it would cost a lot more to harvest one's article for the harvesting company

"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

-Mark Zuckerberg.

> hundreds of thousands of Instagram users posted a block of text to their accounts hoping to avoid the plague of artificial intelligence online. [...] “I do not give Meta or anyone else permission to use any of my personal data, profile information or photos.”

Actually, you did. What you didn't do is read the fucking terms of service.

But sarcasm aside, it is a general failure of the system that things have gotten to this point. The amount of naivete like is seen above is tremendous, yet somehow we and everyone who understands this crap have failed to deliver the memo.