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Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

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Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#41

Post by happytoexplain »

poszlem wrote: post #18
McBainiel wrote: post #11

I've been thinking a lot lately about why I don't like AI and ultimately I think it's because of its tone. I don't know why OpenAI made ChatGPT so wordy and almost unctuous. I've realised I don't actually care about people using it for programming or brainstorming or whatever. It's just I feel so inslulted when I read something that is in the default AI voice. So I don't know that I agree entirely with the writer of…

The reason people "dislike AI because of its tone" is that they only recognize AI-written text when it's poorly composed. It's likely that you're already interacting with AI-generated text without realising it.

I disagree. The "tone" of the vast majority of AI to me has a clear identity, and is not related to poor composition. It is in fact "high quality", technically speaking, and is a separate problem from that of bad/strange genAI writing. In fact, some real people do write in a similar tone, which makes it hard to tell apart sometimes, which is the problem you describe, but that doesn't obscure the fact that it is the "AI tone".

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#42

Post by sofixa »

alexjplant wrote: post #21
ksec wrote: post #5

What other simple blogging platform alternative are there?

Several years ago static site generators were all the hotness. Around then I switched to Hugo [1] from Wordpress and it's been a good experience. I do all editing locally with the CLI then chuck it to Git to be built and hosted by Netlify. [1] https://gohugo.io/

> You do all editing locally with the CLI then chuck it to Git to be built and hosted by Netlify.

Or CloudFlare Pages, orGitHub Pages, or Firebase Hosting, or Fastly, or Vercel, or S3+CloudFront, or your own nginx instance.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#43

Post by causal »

> I am absolutely against artificial intelligence.

I'm curious where someone like him draws the line. AI is an ambiguous term. He's an author and photographer, so perhaps AI has just come to mean LLMs and image generators?

I might even agree with the thrust of his concerns, but this kind of diatribe always come off a bit rage-blind, and maybe brings the strength of the discussion down a little.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#45

Post by alexjplant »

sofixa wrote: post #42
alexjplant wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several years ago static site generators were all the hotness. Around then I switched to Hugo [1] from Wordpress and it's been a good experience. I do all editing locally with the CLI then chuck it to Git to be built and hosted by Netlify. [1] https://gohugo.io/

> You do all editing locally with the CLI then chuck it to Git to be built and hosted by Netlify. Or CloudFlare Pages, orGitHub Pages, or Firebase Hosting, or Fastly, or Vercel, or S3+CloudFront, or your own nginx instance.

Edited to reflect that it's my workflow specifically.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#46

Post by AndrewKemendo »

HTML only websites still work that you can host yourself trivially

These platforms are all the same: put your middling content here and you’ll be a star

In my experience most people have valueless content and target an affinity group audience. They produce enough content to have a viral hit, that viral hit will then become your first ratchet. You then adjust your content type based on the virality and then you just continue the ratchet. Iirc this is the playbook of eg MeBeast etc… and theres a deterministic outcome: create enough attention that marketing income consumes your lifestyle and drives all future ratchet iterations

If you have anything of value people will figure out how to get it but it won’t be fast and it will be mostly ignored

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#47

Post by pxc »

happytoexplain wrote: post #17
ziddoap wrote: post #10

> Unlike many, I don’t sit on the fence. I hate it with a passion. I think it’s an affront to humanity and will ultimately cause our downfall. If an article uses AI, even just for header images, I don’t read it. This seems just as silly of a take as the fervent supporters of sticking AI everywhere. AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) and is shitty in others (e.g. spam content). I wonder if the a…

I'm somewhere between the author and a true-neutral stance. Something can be "an affront to humanity [that] will ultimately cause our downfall" and also "help in some areas". Those aren't mutually exclusive, logically, despite sounding that way.

Indeed the latter is kind of a precursor to the former: AI has to be helpful enough for key use cases in order to become used in whatever critical ways cause it to serve as humanity's downfall.

Setting aside the apocalyptic prediction in particular, this sort of thing is already the case with many things that have become irritating or pernicious at scale, like automated phone systems and SEO. The latter of those examples already includes AI more and more. If AI weren't a helpful device for reducing writing costs, it wouldn't be playing a role in filling the web with worthless SEO-spam garbage.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#48

Post by nonrandomstring »

ziddoap wrote: post #10

> Unlike many, I don’t sit on the fence. I hate it with a passion. I think it’s an affront to humanity and will ultimately cause our downfall. If an article uses AI, even just for header images, I don’t read it. This seems just as silly of a take as the fervent supporters of sticking AI everywhere. AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) and is shitty in others (e.g. spam content). I wonder if the a…

I thought so too. But then I changed my mind [0]. Especially after asking some other people what they thought. In a nutshell it's about association. People see an AI image and start thinking... hey maybe the prose and video had a little 'help' too. Still haven't got around to replacing all the generative thumbnails. Once AI stuff get's into your content it's like pollution and a royal PITA to sieve out.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/nomoreai

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#49

Post by bil7 »

stonethrowaway wrote: post #30
S0y wrote: post #8

Semi related but, googling a problem just to stumble on an 100% written by AI Medium article as the top result, is the bane of my existence. So really, I can get behind the author.

Assuming it answers the problem, what’s the issue?

usually I expect an instructional article/blog post/etc to have actually been tried and tested. If it has the format of "I had x problem, chatGPT suggested solution y, it actually worked, here it is and a bit about why it works" then of course that's fine and good. But you'll only have to google a few times before you see a 100% synthetic SEO optimised useless article that does nothing but waste your time.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#50

Post by axegon_ »

I mean... It was bound to happen. The dead internet theory became a reality and I don't blame people for being disappointed. Twitter is full of ai bots(verified at that mind you), so is reddit and I recon most of social media platforms. Medium is no different in that regard - they want two things: content and engagement. AI gives them an ungodly amount of content. Crap content, no doubt about it, but currently they are still banking on quantity and not quality, which will bite them back sooner or later - selling 10 burgers for 50 bucks each is a much better financial decision and an easier execution than to sell 100 burgers at 5 bucks a pop. A lot of people(Medium included) don't get that. The sad part is that LLM's can only juggle concepts around by predicting the most likely following token, which would work in a static and unchanging world. I get where the author is coming from and I feel for him. The reality is that large platforms are becoming bottomless pits of ai-generated content and it would never pay off in any meaningful way to try and compete with a regular, consumer grade GPU that can spit out 20 articles an hour, while you spend a week writing a single one.

The way I see it, the only true solution(for both writer or reader) is to go back to the good old-fashioned self-hosted blogs, expose an RSS and rely on RSS readers(yes, those still exist). You will never be able to compete with the exposure that you'd get on Medium or any other platform but at the end of the day, I'd rather pay 50 bucks for a good burger than 5 bucks for a cheap bun from Lidl with some very questionable substances inside.

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