7 ms·

Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

42 points by vouaobrasil 2y ago

FrustratedMonky 2y ago
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?
- erickhill 2y ago
  Can we not put lines in our robots.txt files to block being crawled?
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Yeah and even better: share blocklists of known AI crawler IPs so we can just block them. Robots.txt is too voluntary.
  - CrazyStat 2y ago
    AI companies are ignoring robots.txt in the race to slurp up the entire internet [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/multiple-ai-companies-bypassing-web-standard-scrape-publisher-sites-licensing-2024-06-21/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/m...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - cjf101 2y ago
    There was a bunch of reporting on how AI companies and researchers were using tools that ignored robots.txt. It's a "polite request" that these companies had a strong incentive to ignore, so they did. That incentive is still there, so it is likely that some of them will continue to do so.
    - Ukv 2y ago
      CommonCrawl[0] and the companies training models I'm aware of[1][2][3] all respect robots.txt for their crawling. If we're thinking of the same reporting, it was based on a claim by TollBit (a content licensing startup) which was in turn based the fact that "Perplexity had a feature where a user could prompt a specific URL within the answer engine to summarize it". Actions performed by tools acting as a user agent (like archive.today, or webpage-to-PDF site, or a translation site) aren't crawlers and aren't what robots.txt is designed for, but either way the feature is disabled now. [0]: https://commoncrawl.org/faq https://commoncrawl.org/faq [1]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots [2]: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthr... [3]: https://blog.google/technology/ai/an-update-on-web-publisher-controls/ https://blog.google/technology/ai/an-update-on-web-publisher...
      - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
        Robots.txt is a suggestions. As is reporting on using it. The companies that are ignoring robots.txt, are also probably the companies not advertising that they are ignoring robots.txt.
        Ukv 2y ago
        The EU's AI act points to the DSM directive's text and data mining exemption, allowing for commercial data mining so long as machine-readable opt-outs are respected - robots.txt is typically taken as the established standard for this. In the US it is a suggestion (so long as Fair Use holds up) but all I've seen suggests that the major players are respecting it, and minor players tend to just use CommonCrawl which also does. Definitely possible that some slip through the cracks, but I don't think it's as useless as is being suggested.
        FrustratedMonky 2y ago
        Technically, robot.txt isn't enforcing anything, so it is just trust. ""OpenAI CTO doesn't know what data was used to train the company's video generating platform, Sora"" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AYbZG3h14w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AYbZG3h14w Funny. If I can browse to it, it is public right? That is how some people's logic goes. And how OpenAI argued 2 years ago when GPT3.5/ChatGPT first started getting traction.
  - rvbissell 2y ago
    Someone who doesn't care about polluting our corpus is not going to care about your robots.txt
TekMol 2y ago
Ice delivery guy goes on strike. Demands ban of fridges.
- happytoexplain 2y ago
  Why be so snide and dismissive regarding people's livelihoods?
  - poszlem 2y ago
    We have been through this exact scenario hundreds of times with different technologies. As usual, someone's loss is another's gain. For example, people who have ideas to express but are not native English speakers, or those who struggle with expressing themselves in writing, will absolutely benefit from this technology.
    - consteval 2y ago
      > We have been through this exact scenario hundreds of times with different technologies Yes, and we left people behind repeatedly. You'll notice people who may have intellectual or learning disabilities can no longer find a job with a decent wage in the US. Previously they could, because manual labor jobs were plenty. Now those are automated. When we further automate and automate, we raise the barrier to entry, because robots or AI can perform the bottom most tasks. So, people who are not capable are left behind, and eventually there will be nobody to work jobs. If the average job requires reading and writing, most people can do it. If the average job requires a high school diploma, less can do it. If the average job requires a degree, even less can do it, and so on and so on.
      - TekMol 2y ago
        More and more work being done by technology and people having more and more leisure time is a bad thing? Isn't the end result - all work being done by technology and all people having all of their time to spend on fun activities - a pretty nice situation?
andersco 2y ago
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 abuse rather than good use. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that also is consistent with Medium’s policy.
- coding123 2y ago
  Some things that may seem simple may actually be the cause of some people's demise.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  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'.
- ayaen 2y ago
  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.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  I don't really think AI actually helps people express their ideas. I think it makes them less human and so it's not even them expressing ideas any more.
ksec 2y ago
What other simple blogging platform alternative are there?
- S0y 2y ago
  From the top of my head: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/
- mulhoon 2y ago
  https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev
- alexjplant 2y ago
  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/ https://gohugo.io/
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > 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.
    - alexjplant 2y ago
      Edited to reflect that it's my workflow specifically.
- Telemakhos 2y ago
  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.
S0y 2y ago
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.
- stonethrowaway 2y ago
  Assuming it answers the problem, what’s the issue?
  - tempfile 2y ago
    The answer is probably wrong?
  - sofixa 2y ago
    It wastes your time because it's full of cruft. And you cannot assume to trust it will solve your problem, so you're risking losing even more time.
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      While I'm not about to defend AI blog spam, what you just said it completely applicable to human-generated blogs as well. You should not just assume something is trustworthy or will solve your problem just because it was written by a human. And I have read plenty of cruft-filled blogs/articles/etc. from humans.
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        > While I'm not about to defend AI blog spam, what you just said it completely applicable to human-generated blogs as well. It kind of depends on the subject. If the blog is about politics, say, then you may assume that the human author is likely to be willing to lie. If it's about a non-contentious subject, though, then it is highly unlikely the human author will lie, and if they don't know, then, well, okay, _some_ people will write articles about stuff that they don't understand, but it's not common. Most non-psychopaths, if they don't know the answer, won't just make something up. Whereas the magic robot will very happily spew nonsense on any subject.
ziddoap 2y ago
>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 author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted?
- happytoexplain 2y ago
  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.
  - tempfile 2y ago
    It's coherent (just) for something to be an affront to humanity and helpful for some tasks. It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it.
    - happytoexplain 2y ago
      I disagree. Generically speaking that's true, but specifically speaking, AI has a wide variety of use cases, and they do not all, from the perspective of a normal user, appear to help spread what they perceive to be the bad parts. Obviously if we could somehow separate the good from the bad, we should, but it seems like an intractable problem. This dichotomy (polychotomy?) is also aggravated by the fact that when people talk about AI, they are probably 99% referring to generation of prose, art, and code (as opposed to e.g. medical diagnosis).
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        > they are probably 99% referring to generation of prose, art, and code That was what I took TFA to be speaking about. It's ambiguous, probably because author didn't expect an audience of HN readers, but most of the enumerated concerns and uses cases are specific to "AI as replacement for human creativity, in artistic endeavors."
McBainiel 2y ago
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 piece but I get where he's coming from. AI writing is unpleasant to read. And I hope Medium reverses their decision.
- poszlem 2y ago
  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.
  - happytoexplain 2y ago
    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".
    - pxc 2y ago
      It takes too long to get anything said and it has a very weak sense of topicality that it papers over with repetitious use of literal words and phrases from the things it's asked. Afaict, it's 'high quality' only in the sense of not containing many grammatical mistakes or spelling errors, which of course is not 'high quality' so much as 'basic literacy'. I think I know what you mean about other elements of the tone (staid and obsequious) not necessarily being related to style but they don't quite form a clear identity for me. The defects of the writing are still more marked than its personality.
  - jprete 2y ago
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
What about LinkedIn? They just added policies about how they’ll use your content for AI. But I doubt most users are in a position to leave.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  I deleted my account when AI content started coming out of LinkedIn.
stonethrowaway 2y ago
Just rest and vest brah. In all seriousness though, there isn’t a competitive platform out there that won’t adopt AI or any other technology if it meant making money. If they chose not to, they would be giving ground to someone who would. That’s capitalism in a nutshell. You aren’t their customer. It’s the eyeballs they’re after and, any particular authors word isn’t really precious. Enough authors/writers out there who are willing to replace you. Remember kids: “Content” is the word for things _between_ the ads. Cheers.
delichon 2y ago
>> 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?
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Well, I think that a spell-checker is a lot different than AI because AI can change the entire tone of an article whereas a spell and grammar checker generally does not.
joshstrange 2y ago
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.
- stonethrowaway 2y ago
  Was the author ever not-obscure?
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  > My money is on either this writer fading into obscurity or using AI tools in the future when they realize their stance was silly. I will never use AI tools, never. And I am more than happy to fade into obscurity. I just want to make enough money (without AI) so I can take care of my family in peace, and also articulate my ideas against AI to whomever will listen. I am absolutely not concerned about becoming famous.
yawnxyz 2y ago
But all the other non-AI slop that Medium put up over the years were fine with him?
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  I agree with what your saying, and actually that is another strike against Medium for me, but I was willing to tolerate the platform because at least there was a small subset of writers trying to go beyond hype headlines.
imranq 2y ago
I see where the author is coming from - like any new technology, AI is getting abused significantly: Better scams, stealing creator IP, developing thought crutches, emotional dependencies on artificial companions, vast energy usage, and the collapse of personality and knowledge across the societal mean. Some people say that LLMs make you more productive, but guess what? The value captured by your productivity will only enrich the companies that employ you. Companies will hire fewer people and eliminate positions all for "shareholder value" and to give a small raise to a C-suite executive. But at the same time, we could definitely envision a world where these models accelerate human creativity - smaller high performance LLMs working on the edge, responsible usage for learning and skill development, helping people build their own voice. The key is to identify the subtle line between dependence and empowerment, and to know when one is accruing AI-debt at the expense of their own abilities.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  > But at the same time, we could definitely envision a world where these models accelerate human creativity I feel like the scarcity and difficulty of creating something is part of the charm of art, instead of it being a matter of mass production. And for what? To show more ads?
mulhoon 2y ago
The quality of Medium articles (and comments) has really gone down over the past few years. Lots of attention grabbing headlines “5 ways to X” “Stop doing X” and less well-written content overall. I’m not sure if most writers hopped over to Substack but it feels like a cheaper place than it used to be.
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  There was a brief period where seeing a Medium article in a search result made me excited. Now, I avoid them, because of too many experiences with shallow, incorrect, or LLM-generated articles.
causal 2y ago
> 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.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  The industry only has itself to blame for this, because, for a decade or so, anything 'AI-ish' has almost always been branded as ML (presumably due to the previous AI winter, where the term 'AI' became poisonous to VCs). If people equate AI with generative AI, it is only because, well, _so does the industry_.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    The neural nets of the industry have been retrained: https://xkcd.com/2173/ https://xkcd.com/2173/
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  I avoid AI whenever I can, including machine-learning assisted noise reduction. But my argument against AI is not against specific technologies, but the conglomerate of technologies that represents an ideal that pushes efficiency beyond what I consider useful. Contrary to your accusation of being rage-blind, I have studied this topic in detail and have carefully thought about it and read many articles in philosophy about it. I am still trying to articulate my ideas but my general feelings go way beyond emotions.
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
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
axegon_ 2y ago
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.
josefritzishere 2y ago
I feel the same way about AI. It is virtually all downside, no upside, at least on a species level.
helboi4 2y ago
I sort of love that he takes a strong stance here. I think even if you think there are some applications for AI, you should be able to strongly state where it is not useful. Having AI churn out bloat text in the form of terrible blogposts and misleading listicles that makes it harder for genuine information to be found online, is not a good use case for AI. If you want to ask ChatGPT to summarise a topic for you, you can literally just ask ChatGPT to do that. There is zero benefit to having a third party pumping that into websites that we go to to find real human opinions and hopefully a few genuinely great, expert articles - neither of which ChatGPT can produce.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

42 points by vouaobrasil 2y ago

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?

erickhill 2y ago
Can we not put lines in our robots.txt files to block being crawled?
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah and even better: share blocklists of known AI crawler IPs so we can just block them. Robots.txt is too voluntary.
- CrazyStat 2y ago
  AI companies are ignoring robots.txt in the race to slurp up the entire internet [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/multiple-ai-companies-bypassing-web-standard-scrape-publisher-sites-licensing-2024-06-21/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/m...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- cjf101 2y ago
  There was a bunch of reporting on how AI companies and researchers were using tools that ignored robots.txt. It's a "polite request" that these companies had a strong incentive to ignore, so they did. That incentive is still there, so it is likely that some of them will continue to do so.
  - Ukv 2y ago
    CommonCrawl[0] and the companies training models I'm aware of[1][2][3] all respect robots.txt for their crawling. If we're thinking of the same reporting, it was based on a claim by TollBit (a content licensing startup) which was in turn based the fact that "Perplexity had a feature where a user could prompt a specific URL within the answer engine to summarize it". Actions performed by tools acting as a user agent (like archive.today, or webpage-to-PDF site, or a translation site) aren't crawlers and aren't what robots.txt is designed for, but either way the feature is disabled now. [0]: https://commoncrawl.org/faq https://commoncrawl.org/faq [1]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots [2]: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthr... [3]: https://blog.google/technology/ai/an-update-on-web-publisher-controls/ https://blog.google/technology/ai/an-update-on-web-publisher...
    - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      Robots.txt is a suggestions. As is reporting on using it. The companies that are ignoring robots.txt, are also probably the companies not advertising that they are ignoring robots.txt.
      - Ukv 2y ago
        The EU's AI act points to the DSM directive's text and data mining exemption, allowing for commercial data mining so long as machine-readable opt-outs are respected - robots.txt is typically taken as the established standard for this. In the US it is a suggestion (so long as Fair Use holds up) but all I've seen suggests that the major players are respecting it, and minor players tend to just use CommonCrawl which also does. Definitely possible that some slip through the cracks, but I don't think it's as useless as is being suggested.
        FrustratedMonky 2y ago
        Technically, robot.txt isn't enforcing anything, so it is just trust. ""OpenAI CTO doesn't know what data was used to train the company's video generating platform, Sora"" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AYbZG3h14w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AYbZG3h14w Funny. If I can browse to it, it is public right? That is how some people's logic goes. And how OpenAI argued 2 years ago when GPT3.5/ChatGPT first started getting traction.
- rvbissell 2y ago
  Someone who doesn't care about polluting our corpus is not going to care about your robots.txt

TekMol 2y ago

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

happytoexplain 2y ago
Why be so snide and dismissive regarding people's livelihoods?
- poszlem 2y ago
  We have been through this exact scenario hundreds of times with different technologies. As usual, someone's loss is another's gain. For example, people who have ideas to express but are not native English speakers, or those who struggle with expressing themselves in writing, will absolutely benefit from this technology.
  - consteval 2y ago
    > We have been through this exact scenario hundreds of times with different technologies Yes, and we left people behind repeatedly. You'll notice people who may have intellectual or learning disabilities can no longer find a job with a decent wage in the US. Previously they could, because manual labor jobs were plenty. Now those are automated. When we further automate and automate, we raise the barrier to entry, because robots or AI can perform the bottom most tasks. So, people who are not capable are left behind, and eventually there will be nobody to work jobs. If the average job requires reading and writing, most people can do it. If the average job requires a high school diploma, less can do it. If the average job requires a degree, even less can do it, and so on and so on.
    - TekMol 2y ago
      More and more work being done by technology and people having more and more leisure time is a bad thing? Isn't the end result - all work being done by technology and all people having all of their time to spend on fun activities - a pretty nice situation?

andersco 2y ago

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 abuse rather than good use. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that also is consistent with Medium’s policy.

coding123 2y ago
Some things that may seem simple may actually be the cause of some people's demise.
Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
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'.
ayaen 2y ago
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.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
I don't really think AI actually helps people express their ideas. I think it makes them less human and so it's not even them expressing ideas any more.

ksec 2y ago

What other simple blogging platform alternative are there?

S0y 2y ago
From the top of my head: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/
mulhoon 2y ago
https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev
alexjplant 2y ago
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/ https://gohugo.io/
- sofixa 2y ago
  > 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.
  - alexjplant 2y ago
    Edited to reflect that it's my workflow specifically.
Telemakhos 2y ago
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.

S0y 2y ago

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.

stonethrowaway 2y ago
Assuming it answers the problem, what’s the issue?
- tempfile 2y ago
  The answer is probably wrong?
- sofixa 2y ago
  It wastes your time because it's full of cruft. And you cannot assume to trust it will solve your problem, so you're risking losing even more time.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    While I'm not about to defend AI blog spam, what you just said it completely applicable to human-generated blogs as well. You should not just assume something is trustworthy or will solve your problem just because it was written by a human. And I have read plenty of cruft-filled blogs/articles/etc. from humans.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      > While I'm not about to defend AI blog spam, what you just said it completely applicable to human-generated blogs as well. It kind of depends on the subject. If the blog is about politics, say, then you may assume that the human author is likely to be willing to lie. If it's about a non-contentious subject, though, then it is highly unlikely the human author will lie, and if they don't know, then, well, okay, _some_ people will write articles about stuff that they don't understand, but it's not common. Most non-psychopaths, if they don't know the answer, won't just make something up. Whereas the magic robot will very happily spew nonsense on any subject.

ziddoap 2y ago

>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 author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted?

happytoexplain 2y ago
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.
- tempfile 2y ago
  It's coherent (just) for something to be an affront to humanity and helpful for some tasks. It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it.
  - happytoexplain 2y ago
    I disagree. Generically speaking that's true, but specifically speaking, AI has a wide variety of use cases, and they do not all, from the perspective of a normal user, appear to help spread what they perceive to be the bad parts. Obviously if we could somehow separate the good from the bad, we should, but it seems like an intractable problem. This dichotomy (polychotomy?) is also aggravated by the fact that when people talk about AI, they are probably 99% referring to generation of prose, art, and code (as opposed to e.g. medical diagnosis).
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      > they are probably 99% referring to generation of prose, art, and code That was what I took TFA to be speaking about. It's ambiguous, probably because author didn't expect an audience of HN readers, but most of the enumerated concerns and uses cases are specific to "AI as replacement for human creativity, in artistic endeavors."

McBainiel 2y ago

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 piece but I get where he's coming from. AI writing is unpleasant to read. And I hope Medium reverses their decision.

poszlem 2y ago
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.
- happytoexplain 2y ago
  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".
  - pxc 2y ago
    It takes too long to get anything said and it has a very weak sense of topicality that it papers over with repetitious use of literal words and phrases from the things it's asked. Afaict, it's 'high quality' only in the sense of not containing many grammatical mistakes or spelling errors, which of course is not 'high quality' so much as 'basic literacy'. I think I know what you mean about other elements of the tone (staid and obsequious) not necessarily being related to style but they don't quite form a clear identity for me. The defects of the writing are still more marked than its personality.
- jprete 2y ago

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

What about LinkedIn? They just added policies about how they’ll use your content for AI. But I doubt most users are in a position to leave.

vouaobrasil 2y ago
I deleted my account when AI content started coming out of LinkedIn.

stonethrowaway 2y ago

Just rest and vest brah. In all seriousness though, there isn’t a competitive platform out there that won’t adopt AI or any other technology if it meant making money. If they chose not to, they would be giving ground to someone who would. That’s capitalism in a nutshell. You aren’t their customer. It’s the eyeballs they’re after and, any particular authors word isn’t really precious. Enough authors/writers out there who are willing to replace you. Remember kids: “Content” is the word for things _between_ the ads. Cheers.

delichon 2y ago

>> 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?

vouaobrasil 2y ago
Well, I think that a spell-checker is a lot different than AI because AI can change the entire tone of an article whereas a spell and grammar checker generally does not.

joshstrange 2y ago

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.

stonethrowaway 2y ago
Was the author ever not-obscure?
vouaobrasil 2y ago
> My money is on either this writer fading into obscurity or using AI tools in the future when they realize their stance was silly. I will never use AI tools, never. And I am more than happy to fade into obscurity. I just want to make enough money (without AI) so I can take care of my family in peace, and also articulate my ideas against AI to whomever will listen. I am absolutely not concerned about becoming famous.

yawnxyz 2y ago

But all the other non-AI slop that Medium put up over the years were fine with him?

vouaobrasil 2y ago
I agree with what your saying, and actually that is another strike against Medium for me, but I was willing to tolerate the platform because at least there was a small subset of writers trying to go beyond hype headlines.

imranq 2y ago

I see where the author is coming from - like any new technology, AI is getting abused significantly: Better scams, stealing creator IP, developing thought crutches, emotional dependencies on artificial companions, vast energy usage, and the collapse of personality and knowledge across the societal mean. Some people say that LLMs make you more productive, but guess what? The value captured by your productivity will only enrich the companies that employ you. Companies will hire fewer people and eliminate positions all for "shareholder value" and to give a small raise to a C-suite executive. But at the same time, we could definitely envision a world where these models accelerate human creativity - smaller high performance LLMs working on the edge, responsible usage for learning and skill development, helping people build their own voice. The key is to identify the subtle line between dependence and empowerment, and to know when one is accruing AI-debt at the expense of their own abilities.

vouaobrasil 2y ago
> But at the same time, we could definitely envision a world where these models accelerate human creativity I feel like the scarcity and difficulty of creating something is part of the charm of art, instead of it being a matter of mass production. And for what? To show more ads?

mulhoon 2y ago

The quality of Medium articles (and comments) has really gone down over the past few years. Lots of attention grabbing headlines “5 ways to X” “Stop doing X” and less well-written content overall. I’m not sure if most writers hopped over to Substack but it feels like a cheaper place than it used to be.

Vegenoid 2y ago
There was a brief period where seeing a Medium article in a search result made me excited. Now, I avoid them, because of too many experiences with shallow, incorrect, or LLM-generated articles.

causal 2y ago

> 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.

rsynnott 2y ago
The industry only has itself to blame for this, because, for a decade or so, anything 'AI-ish' has almost always been branded as ML (presumably due to the previous AI winter, where the term 'AI' became poisonous to VCs). If people equate AI with generative AI, it is only because, well, _so does the industry_.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  The neural nets of the industry have been retrained: https://xkcd.com/2173/ https://xkcd.com/2173/
vouaobrasil 2y ago
I avoid AI whenever I can, including machine-learning assisted noise reduction. But my argument against AI is not against specific technologies, but the conglomerate of technologies that represents an ideal that pushes efficiency beyond what I consider useful. Contrary to your accusation of being rage-blind, I have studied this topic in detail and have carefully thought about it and read many articles in philosophy about it. I am still trying to articulate my ideas but my general feelings go way beyond emotions.

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

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

axegon_ 2y ago

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.

josefritzishere 2y ago

I feel the same way about AI. It is virtually all downside, no upside, at least on a species level.

helboi4 2y ago

I sort of love that he takes a strong stance here. I think even if you think there are some applications for AI, you should be able to strongly state where it is not useful. Having AI churn out bloat text in the form of terrible blogposts and misleading listicles that makes it harder for genuine information to be found online, is not a good use case for AI. If you want to ask ChatGPT to summarise a topic for you, you can literally just ask ChatGPT to do that. There is zero benefit to having a third party pumping that into websites that we go to to find real human opinions and hopefully a few genuinely great, expert articles - neither of which ChatGPT can produce.

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