Thanks!

Dang, I suspected that might be the case.

I’m not sure your example is really about curating. It sounds like you’re most concerned with whether something is a faithful adaptation, which effectively means you want to collect the original version and whatever matches it.

As for how I curate things, I mostly don’t… the closest I get is building a collection based on “what do I like/find most impactful”. Or I guess sometimes I simply discard things I’m not using. I suppose I “curated” my bookshelf by adding books I like, giving away a few that I didn’t like or thought someone else needed more, and organizing the books in a way that only makes sense to me. Which is to say, I didn’t curate it at all. True curation would probably look more like a Goodreads account with notes about why I liked the books I gave 5 stars.

edit: my understanding of real curation is that it involves placing art in context. You present it in a way that is informative and maybe inspiring. Part of it is about choosing what to include/not include in a collection/display, yes, but a lot of it is about conveying what the art is about, using the art to tell a story or peek into how a historical trend developed, etc. Choosing what to keep is only a small part of it.

Nice to know that I was unknowingly contributing to AI training every time I saved an image I appreciated back in the 2010s, too. At least I put the wrong birth date on my account, I think.

I’m no longer surprised by this shit, but I’m never any less angry. Fuck these people.

Lots of “AI detector” tools for both images and text are AI, yes. People using them don’t realize the irony because everyone wants so badly to believe there’s a way to stop all the AI fakers.

edit: please, someone come up with an actually reliable way to detect AI art, something that’s not based on probabilities that will be skewed by real artists having their art used to train AI

Interesting, I had the opposite experience. The light would work for a few weeks or so and then something would randomly disconnect, so sometimes I’d try to turn the light on and end up with an obnoxious blinking light until I went through the whole pairing process again. It was like the app forgot the bulb existed.

edit: never mind, just realized that I mixed Govee up with a different brand/app. Govee has been fine in my experience. Feit’s the one that was a problem.

Man, that is a FANTASTIC response to someone saying something bad about themselves! I’m going to use that one if I can. Your friend is inspiring!

And if you can’t see anything that should leave the room, you know you’re doing pretty well!

That kind of thinking can work with anything, too. If I’m having trouble getting myself to do something, telling myself I’m just going to do a tiny part of it (put one dish in the dishwasher, etc.) often helps.

There are people in all kinds of industries claiming AI is helping them do their job 30% faster or whatever, so presumably you’ll be “left behind” if you don’t catch up to their pace. In reality, those “30% faster” people are often producing at least 50% worse quality work. So it may come down to whether you can persuade your potentially AI-obsessed boss that maintaining quality matters enough to not adopt a faster but far more problematic process. You might not actually be left behind in terms of producing valuable work, but your boss might decide your team is being “left behind” if you don’t use AI to generate workslop or meet increasingly unrealistic deadlines.

Save anything you think you might need that’s attached to a work account, like emails/contacts. You might be locked out soon.

Yes, but unfortunately it also poisons the text for people using screen readers. People with disabilities get locked out of too many things already, and I don’t want to contribute to that. I’m hoping someone will come up with a Shieldfont 2.0 that eliminates that issue, at which point I will happily use it.

As a writer and reader, I hate LLMs.

I hate the way they were built. I hate that my past writing has been used for LLM training. I hate that specific people I know have used LLMs to try to replicate something I personally had been doing, and they didn’t give a damn if the result was shitty. I hate that I can’t use some of my favorite punctuation and phrasing patterns anymore without people thinking my writing is AI-generated, because surprise, that’s what happens when AI is trained on text written by people like me. I hate that I can’t fully prevent anything I share publicly from being used for AI training, although I’m damn well going to try. (Hey nonconsensual AI crawlers, enjoy trapping yourselves in Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth honeypot after I publish my next blogging project.) I don’t want my writing to contribute to this BS.

I hate that the writing communities where I first shared my writing as a teenager are (a) now populated with a fair amount of obvious AI slop and (b) scraped for AI training. I hate that self-publishing spaces are inundated with AI slop. I hate that websites that previously paid writers are now paying less, or not at all, or using the writers’ work to train/build AI. I hate the way my search results are filled with articles “written” with AI instead of humans. I hate that I can’t trust that information is accurate from sources I might have trusted in the past, just because I don’t know who was using AI for “research” with less caution than I would want.

I hate the way people reply to me with AI slop text and don’t even check it over it first in work-related situations. I hate many, many other things about how it’s impacted my career that I won’t get into here.

I hate the way so many people no longer respect the art form I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I hate knowing how little people care about good information, creativity, or any consideration other than speed of “production.”

I hate that I can’t even avoid AI by disconnecting from the internet. I hate that I can no longer trust that books were written by a human, depending on where I get them. I hate the way certain apps constantly remind me of all this BS, because they just had to make a really prominent AI button instead of a normal or (better yet) removable button. I hate that my friend’s goddamn washing machine has an AI setting, even though it has nothing to do with LLMs, because the world can never stop reminding you about AI.

Believe it or not, I too was once somewhat excited about AI. I thought AI would free me from the boring tasks so I could spend more time lovingly creating and appreciating art. Silly me.

Huh, interesting. I might try it and just lurk for a while. Thank you so much for sharing!

We can abbreviate it to K-Dub! Or maybe kʷə for those either have an expanded keyboard or are willing to copy-paste or find the superscript tool in whatever app they’re using or whatever. Kind of like how people shorten the country’s full name to America or the USA or the U.S.

(edited)

Even the young people are nostalgic for a time when new technology was actually cool rather than mostly being a way to more effectively use everyone’s data against them.

There’s also that 30-year cycle phenomenon where things from 3 decades ago become trendy again, like how 80s stuff got more popular again in the 2010s.

Hi, thanks for this comment! I’m not a very technical person and am still trying to sort through what all of this is. If I’m understanding correctly, the tildeverse is a bunch of connected communities for people who are interested in exploring Linux and other unix-based operating systems, using servers built on those systems, right? I might try Linux in the future, but I probably won’t switch over until my hardware is no longer compatible with new versions of MacOS. At the moment, the tildeverse looks a little over my head. Maybe I’ll come back to this idea later!

Yeah, I really don’t want to contribute to the ongoing loss of accessibility. People with disabilities have enough crap to deal with. They don’t need random extra barriers on websites they’d like to read. Otherwise, I’d probably use that font.

I hate Cloudflare as an internet user, but maybe that’s the best option right now. The AI Labyrinth looks pretty cool! That’s basically the only use of generative AI I’m ok with right now. Does it cause any accessibility issues for humans using screen readers or other assistive tech?

How would Unreal Engine or Godot work for that purpose? I haven’t heard that idea before!

As for putting the text in an image, my understanding is that scrapers can automatically use OCR.