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Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

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Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#21

Post by alexjplant »

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/

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#22

Post by delichon »

>> AI assistance empowers an author to level up — to make their ideas clearer, for example, or help them express themselves in a second language

> And also, I vehemently disagree with this statement. Flaws express personality.

So for the same reasons, does he wish to not read content that has been assisted by spelling or grammar checking? Or an editor, proof reader or fact checker? Or a thesaurus or dictionary? Or is he only concerned when AI is applied to those roles?

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#23

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

andersco wrote: post #4

This seems like too much of an absolutist stance regarding AI. AI is a tool and as such has both good and bad uses. For example, maybe I have something I feel important to share with the world but I am not a very good writer. If AI can help me express my own ideas more clearly and clean up my grammar, that to me is a great use of AI. On the contrary, letting AI just churn out articles wholesale to me would be an abus…

Medium's policy does allow accounts where AI can churn out articles wholesale, they just can't monetized. And the author does make the point that he would rather read imperfect human writing than AI assisted or otherwise 'the flaws make the personality'.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#24

Post by Telemakhos »

ksec wrote: post #5

What other simple blogging platform alternative are there?

There's Google's blogspot, but that's not trendy. There's Wordpress, but that's not trendy. There are a host of blogging tools out there, but they're not trendy.

The question isn't what other simple platform is out there: the question is what blogging software do you want to be seen using. People don't want blogspot.com at the end of their domain names, and they don't want to look like they're using blogspot.com. They didn't mind Medium, and that's the difference. It's not a question of technology, which has existed for decades; it's a question of marketing and brands.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#25

Post by wkat4242 »

erickhill wrote: post #7
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #2

Leave and go where. Seems like a losing battle, eventually all platforms will be co-opted to feed AI. Even if you have a private web site (blog), it can be scraped, and how are the little guys going to fight it?

Can we not put lines in our robots.txt files to block being crawled?

Yeah and even better: share blocklists of known AI crawler IPs so we can just block them. Robots.txt is too voluntary.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#26

Post by joshstrange »

Why this writer ever thought Medium ever cared about specifically human-written stories is beyond me. Medium is a bad idea for many reasons but AI doesn’t make my list at all. Also the stanch anti-AI stance is incredibly off putting, saying things like they won’t even read an article with an AI-generated image or AI-assisted (as if they can actually tell with certainty). AI (LLMs) are a tool, nothing more, no different than technology itself is a tool. I find all these anti-AI takes extremely tiring and repetitive.

My eyes about rolled out of my head reading through this.

My money is on either this writer fading into obscurity or using AI tools in the future when they realize their stance was silly.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#27

Post by ayaen »

andersco wrote: post #4

This seems like too much of an absolutist stance regarding AI. AI is a tool and as such has both good and bad uses. For example, maybe I have something I feel important to share with the world but I am not a very good writer. If AI can help me express my own ideas more clearly and clean up my grammar, that to me is a great use of AI. On the contrary, letting AI just churn out articles wholesale to me would be an abus…

I think it's a personal stance so the degree of absoluteness doesn't matter. It's what he prefers. We can tell him it's too harsh when he feels the pinch of cutting of all writers using LLMs. As far as use of LLMs to clean up ones language usage is concerned, there's a difference between editing the content it generates, and learning grammar patterns and word usages from it and applying them while writing on your own. When the latter is done, no one can tell.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#28

Post by timkq »

ayaen wrote: post #16
TekMol wrote: post #3

Ice delivery guy goes on strike. Demands ban of fridges.

I am sorry, the analogy is completely lost on me. Care to expand? Thanks.

I'll add another analogy of my own: "guy harvests his own ice, is mad at others for buying it from the store"

He is mad at others using AI on his favorite blogging website. I think it is an insult to himself, because most AI produced articles etc. are unreadable and full of useless filler information - I think the guy can do better.

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