2023-12-07: ai generated garbage: now on the small web!

ai-generated images are funny: for all the supposed fidelity, there are weird tells, things that jump out at you. there's a picture of "olivia" on the main page. i looked at the picture and just felt it. i plugged it into is it ai?, and confirmed: 99.97% confidence that it's an AI image.

not that i really needed to confirm. i went to the recipes section, looked at the pictures. all of them had that sheen to them, the details that are a little bit wrong. the page's author was careless: one of the pictures had a fork, and one of the inner tines was long, curving sideways. in another, the space between the tines didn't blend with the plate underneath. the generator had treated the fork-head area as a single unit, rather than generating a fork overtop of the plate — of course, because these generators don't have ontological knowledge, they're essentially just very good curve fitters.

so what's the point of all this, anyway? why generate a weird ai site that seems to be roleplaying a white/blonde/auburn-haired family? i don't know, and i find it faintly offensive, too. neocities isn't perfect in anybody's world, but at least it's full of pages made by people. or was. we never used to have to worry about whether something online was created by a real person or not. that's not the sort of thing you want to think about for every page, every image, every interaction. that's exhausting. that's a slow death.

i guess i shouldn't be surprised that the garbage hose has now been turned on the small web. not content with poisoning the larger web, they've turned to the small web, the web of people, the web of trust. they won't be happy until they've finally destroyed that, too. the web is dying, but it didn't have to. it used to be a misfit's paradise. it was fucked up, flawed; but also beautiful, and good.

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