(Nimue)
This week I saw that Druid blogger River Crow is leaving WordPress because of the introduction of AI. For a while now, WordPress has been offering AI to bloggers. I've not touched it, and will never use it. As a reader I have no interest in looking at machine-based re-hashes of other people's ideas. I want to read genuine content that other people have actually thought about.
I can't imagine how WordPress thinks this is going to benefit anyone. Adding AI content will reduce quality, reduce trust and undermine the platform itself.
This whole situation got me thinking about what I can do to make sure this blog is self-announcingly written by a human. I think sharing personal stories help with that. Using a plagiarism device might make it feasible to 'write' about Druidry in a vague and generic way. AI content tends towards the vague and generic. I can focus on the precise, specific and personal. I tend to do that anyway, but I feel that it's going to be more important moving forwards.
I'm inclined to write more poetry simply because if my blogs are being scraped to feed into other blogs, this might be a way of being really unhelpful about that. I don't want to create work that a machine can easily steal and rip off, so there are interesting questions to ask about how I can be as unhelpful as possible.
I hate AI, it encourages people to devalue their own creativity in favour of generic, worthless pap. It also uses far too much energy – we are already in crisis, we need to use fewer resources, not pump ever more CO2 into the air to fuel this drivel. It takes away far more than it gives, and makes finding genuinely valuable content harder than it used to be.
Druidry is deeply at odds with using AI – the environmental impact is central to that. If you value justice, then the theft of original content to 'train' AI is unacceptable. If you value truth, then the lie that these machines learn and create is unacceptable – they just re-hash. If you hold inspiration as sacred then this business of encouraging people to make shoddy re-hashes based on stolen material, rather than being genuinely creative, is sacrilegious. AI is an insult to the awen, at the very least. A few years ago I would have said that blasphemy wasn't a relevant concept for Druids, but I am coming to rethink that.
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