We are social animals, many or most of us need social interaction for our well being, but also survival purposes taking into account the socioeconomic system and globalization. If we cannot have that interaction in real life, we try to find that in the virtual space.
On that, there is increasingly use of AI for social interaction engagement online, most likely without our notice. Does that has any value for you as a social connection? Is it worth it using social media at all for social interaction (actually interaction with AI) at this point? Wouldn’t it better to just throw away all these interaction at this point?
Yea, I had a thought related to this (posted already on Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110093240178204572) … which boiled down to wondering if the fediverse is a solution to an old or superseded problem.
If AI is extracting value from everything we “work” to put on the internet, and it is going to invade the internet, then non-profit decentralised social media helps solve the problem(s) of private big-corp control of the internet, but, probably suits the new AI industry just fine.
If true (and I’m inclined to think there is truth to the above), then I’m inclined to agree with you. There may now be arguments for opting out entirely from participating public internet social media.
The alternative would be proper online communities (as distinct from social media), where I would propose the difference is walls and gate keeping. Nothing is public, as in the case of social media. Instead, content/communication etc is available only to the regulated membership of the community. If you want to post a public blog post advertising what you think or know … go for it. But it might make philosophical sense to start valuing cordoned off “humans only” spaces.
Against this AI moment and what may be coming, a decentralised replication of 10yr old social media platforms might just be a bit too passe in terms of what “taking back the internet” really requires, unfortunately.
On the other hand, maybe I’m just grumpy. And maybe the fediverse can easily adapt … I’m not sure would could be done though apart from somehow embracing encryption like matrix and working hard to gate keep membership (somewhat how lemmy does it).
I understand what you mean about content-ownership…
To me, AI should be considered the same as a Public Library…
After all - the Library and the AI are just machines that feed our own content back to us!
If humans hadn’t spent the past 25 years writing books, blogs, and forums - A.I. would be useless!
It is built on decades of work by the people! (as you said)
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Then - if AI is free and available to everyone - content creators can keep the gates open (posting publicly, not hiding from AI crawlers).
This is like keeping all books in the library - the overall knowledge increases, and all humans can improve.
So, in my opinion, that’s what we should be pushing/voting for:
Free (subsidized, non-profit) AI for everyone, everywhere.
Then there are zero issues with content ownership.
In principle sure, great idea. But capitalism is going to have different opinions.