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I asked ChatGPT who William Lise is, and it came back with this in just a few seconds.
It believed everything I say about myself on my own website. Good for ChatGPT. It slipped up, however, by including, ostensibly as a photo of me, a photo of a guy who died in New Zealand a few years ago. Nice try. I am still around. A translator in Austria, Michael Bailey, helped me with this, probably by using image search.
Recently, I had two images on my parent business website that I generated using AI, meaning that I am guilty of causing the associated energy use to create non-essential images. I have taken them down and commit to not using AI-generated images (AI-generated anything) in the future, and there is one such image in another blog post that will be removed shortly.
Oh, and unlike countless people active in cyberspace, I do not steal images of any sort and unlawfully republish them in cyberspace without permission of the owner.
Unlawful use of copyrighted material—including images—is rampant in cyberspace. The almost guaranteed anonymity and unreachability of the offenders has led people to make their peace with, meaning surrender to, this unlawful behavior, and I don’t think a system with accountability is going to appear any time soon.
Cyberspace is a lawless land, and that lawlessness destroys trust and fattens the bank accounts of cyber-oligarchs with no demonstrable socially redeeming qualities.
There is a great deal of discussion these days about silicon-based AI helping carbon-based individuals write. I do not use any of the many available online writing assistants.
While I wasn’t looking, however, Apple installed just such an AI feature right on my iPhone. Now, when I write a note off-line, I am presented with the option of having it rewritten, including selecting one of a few styles, and even giving the writing tool my own instructions on how to rewrite what I have written.
As a test, for one note, although it was not a plea for assistance, I told it to “make this sound like a plea for assistance.” It worked, but the result was written in a style that is not mine and with expressions that I never use.
The availability of such functions on a device that almost everybody already owns raises the specter of a world in which many people are able to write things that, well, they not able to write, and in a way they are not able to write them (or write anything, perhaps), and this could suggest a persona that they cannot rightly claim as theirs. Essentially, it is AI-assisted persona authenticity spoofing.
This does not bode well for either people whose livelihoods depend upon writing or people who must judge others or make decisions based on what others write. Let the reader beware, and let the writer be real.
There has been a great amount of discussion recently about AI developers scraping copyrighted material from websites and using it to train AI. Some have said that prohibiting AI from learning from copyrighted material would be a death sentence for AI. One recent kerfuffle was caused by AI being able to convert user-submitted photos to images in the style of the well-known Ghibli anime studio.
One thing that appears to be slipping through a crack, however, is that just about everything uploaded to cyberspace has a copyright that is held by someone. It’s not just famous authors’ works, or images and movies that are commercially produced. It’s just about everything written or created and uploaded into cyberspace. including material that has been uploaded unlawfully.
Yes, in some jurisdictions the content needs to be registered in order to bring civil litigation, but most everything in cyberspace has a copyright holder, including the huge amount of material that has been unlawfully published. And a copyright notice is generally considered sufficient to at least indicate the intent of the rightholder. The actual establishment of copyright does not generally require registration. It comes into being the moment a work is committed to a tangible form, and that includes online content.
People appear to have become accustomed to—and by their silence, permissive of—theft and unlawful publishing of copyrighted material in cyberspace, and in particular on social media platforms. Perhaps this has made the general public more willing to accept or be resigned to the next step in the enterprise of stealing content—scraping of content for AI learning.
As someone who has twice had a considerable amount of my company webpage content stolen and unlawfully published by thieves in China, this is of personal concern to me.
So, what about protecting content from scraping? When I searched around for methods to do that recently, I found some strategies. However, I also found a lot of strategies for defeating those protective strategies. Essentially, there were people telling others how to scrape websites without being detected or blocked.
It could be that the only ultimate solution is not to publish anything in cyberspace that you don’t want stolen and unlawfully used. If you want to learn what someone has written, thinks, or creates, you might ultimately need to ask them for the related content. The proliferation of unlawfully published or otherwise used material looks like it is taking the Internet in a direction not envisioned by its creators.
The heliopause is the point in space, outside of our solar system, beyond which the solar wind from our heliosphere can no longer counteract the incoming flow of interstellar wind.
We can imagine an “authentipause”—somewhat similar to the concept of the heliopause—which is the point beyond which the flow of reality and facts flowing outward from our real world of carbon-based sentient beings—I will call it the “authentisphere”—can no longer successfully counteract the force of fake things flowing in from the outer sphere (the illusionosphere or fake-osphere), which is populated by AI and AI-generated illusions, essentially a world of fake nonsense generated by computer code running in silicon-based entities, but still, as of this writing, under the nominal control of their carbon-based owners. That might change sometime.
The authentipause is clearly moving inward at an accelerating pace, effectively shrinking the authentisphere we have become used to inhabiting and enveloping us in an environment in which fake overtakes real. That is already becoming the case in numerous online venues, and social media, a great promoter of fake AI-generated nonsense, is helping that happen.
The authentisphere. Enjoy while you can. Not too far in the future, we may look back on it fondly in the rear-view mirror.