AI Policy

No AI

No generative “AI” is used on this site.

Why?

Large Language Models and Generative AI are anti-human technologies.

They are an attempt to enclose the cultural commons.

The corporations that create these things scrape every scrap of information they can find, in many cases, destroying access to that information for others. This happens through the literal destruction of books and also by scraping sites so frequently and so carelessly that they are forced offline. An art project that I had online for more than a decade was being hit by scrapers so hard that it was making all of my other websites unresponsive. Many other sites have had to resort to blocking humans and scrapers alike through cloudflare challenges or Anubis. These challenges impose a cost on the human visitors to those sites, externalizing the costs of scraping further.

What do these corporations do with the information they’ve collected? They attempt to sell it back to us. Like the Inclosure acts, this is taking property held in common and property held by many different holders and concentrating it in the hands of a few. This time around it is intellectual property and cultural heritage, not land.

These are not simply technologies, but a political project, and its politics are authoritarian.

These technologies shape the mindsets of those who use them. They encourage their users to diminish their own cognitive capacities and damage public goods like universities.