Thank you to each of you who writes your own toots, hand crafts your own blog posts and stories, draws and paints your own art, and makes your own music.

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

Thank you to each of you who writes your own toots, hand crafts your own blog posts and stories, draws and paints your own art, and makes your own music.

I have long liked people's own personal blogs and websites - the indie web - but I guess that, until the increasing proliferation of slop, I had not really appreciated just how much I valued human creativity overall.

I know that the overbearing tone at the moment is that we should all be using AI, so I am most grateful to those of you who resist, and continue your own creativity.

[manchicken@masto.hackers.town]

@neil aww, thanks buddy. Thanks to you, too, for keeping space for human creativity as well. Nobody can do it alone.

[bdubertret@mamot.fr]

@neil Let's just wait for AI labs to try and be profitable. All this craze stems from their intent to seduce customers through heavy cost killing. A $200 ChatGPT subscription is said to cost $14000 to OpenAI. Once this ends, the craze will probably end too, and we will finally go back to being creative on our own.

[slothrop@chaos.social]

@neil Thanks, Neil! Beautifully said.

Each of those individual acts of human creativity also encourages others to do the same: not to submit to the drive for “productivity” and “efficiency”.

What we get is many individuals, creating together. And it’s very weird and beautiful!

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

There are a lot of polished creators. Talented, practised, experienced, whatever. And that is wonderful

But it is not a competition. Be you, even if that is not (in your view) the best.

Sharing whatever you create is wonderful and very much welcome.

And *especially* don't feel that you need to compete with someone's "AI-assisted" output. Anyone can turn out slop.

[nerdinand@swiss.social]

@neil one other thought that keeps me from contributing text to the web sometimes: “nobody is interested in that” or “everyone knows this already”. Just because i can imagine people who know a thing doesn’t mean my way of writing about something doesn’t contribute in a meaningful way. It’s hard to get this thought out of my head at times.

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@nerdinand

I can relate to that!

If it helps, much of my personal blogging is written for an audience of one: me.

Either because I am writing myself a reminder of what I did, for future me, or simply because I felt the urge to write something.

I have no blog stats or analytics, and I do not chase numbers or views. I blog because I blog.

[nerdinand@swiss.social]

@neil sounds like a good way of thinking about it. My only “blog” right now is this mastodon account and that’s probably enough for me for now. I don’t want the mental load of “oh do i toot about this or write a post?” or “ah damn, i haven’t written anything in a long time”. It’s however good to see that some people seem to enjoy my toots here, especially my very low-key “travel blog” about my cycling…

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@nerdinand

That makes sense.

I tend to keep longer form stuff separate to my microblogging here, but it is the same principle: I am me, and I post me stuff.

[slesa@social.saarland]

@neil F AI

[hiisikoloart@writing.exchange]

@neil I started doing mini writing blog in my art kofi, since that seemes to be the best way to share info about my books.

It hasn't really taken off, but I am determined to do it every week now. And once I am in the rythm of writing again and begin editing the next book, I will share snippets there. And art.

[cohentheblue@ohai.social]

@neil There's no other form of creativity. LLMs generate, not create. Until AGI truly arrives (or aliens) there's no competition if talking creation.

[b_rain@troet.cafe]

@neil Thank you for appreciating that!

[sarahw@mastodon.green]

@bdubertret @neil
I'm convinced this AI bubble will burst. There is no way this is sustainable financially, let alone environmentally.
Too much money is being invested, it's like the emperor's new clothes.

[alice_pea_3526@mastodon.social]

@neil You're welcome.

My personal blog site is getting daily #DDoS attacks by greedy #AI scrapers. Residential IPs, generic user agents, ignores robots.txt, I even caught a mercenary web scraper company joining in on the attack as well.

I had to upgrade my VPS plan, implement custom fail2ban rules, and null route entire subnets.

This is getting annoying. I pay for hosting and DNS, refuse to display ads, refuse sponsorship, and this is what I get for it? Stupid #clankers are #APTs ffs...

[alkatraz_200@mastodon.social]

@neil I think Neocities is a great place for the indie web.

[lobster@ieji.de]

@neil

Dear Friends of the indie, AI slop free web,

As we may know:

1) With no responsibility, comes big corp spidering CEO's
2) There is no business like sham/shame business
3) Our Actual Intelligence (AI) is real, changes and makes guesses - not money for the useless

For example try having a cup of tea with an AI companion. You would be better off with a dummy. (I knew I had a use)

🫖

[annehargreaves@ioc.exchange]

@nerdinand @neil I find it helpful to think of "putting an idea out there". Most likely nobody will take any notice of it, but there's nothing lost, it's only a tiny bit of data. All these ideas go to make up the fedi.

[annehargreaves@ioc.exchange]

@neil Thank you for yours! We know you crafted them by yourself.

[bdubertret@mamot.fr]

@Sarahw

Of course it will bust. There's no possible way for it to be profitable. Let's not talk about environmental and labour impact. The goal of its creators is getting rid of human workers, which always complain and are too costly in their eyes. But they miss where value is from : human workers. LLMs try to mimic human produced value, but are deemed to fail. The best they can do is look like what they were trained with. Which is often stolen without consent by AI labs, btw...

@neil