This has sort of been a thing since I first relaunched an instance on the ActivityPub network in my efforts to govern my own space, and also get away from bad administration and moderation on past instances (hackers.town to name one, forever banned for telling a bully to shut his face, literally).
Basically, I don’t like “AI,” I don’t like that every model of current “artificial intelligence” operates on a zero consent structure. Scraping content from creative people, from writers, from artists, from those who make the world a more vibrant place, in order to replace those people. Replace them with zero effort, hallucination-esque, garbage.
And, just like with the NFT grift, there are people who have and do die hard for automated content theft.
Flash back to my instance, I have strict rules against the usage and posting of any and all ai-generated content on my instance, and those I federate with. In that, no questions asked, if you post that sort of thing, you become invisible to my instance. Which, not many people should have an issue with? It’s my instance! It affects almost no one but me if I decide I don’t want to see creatively bankrupt digital vomit.
But I do speak out about this at times, on regular intervals. And when I silence people on an instance-level from my end, I do a courtesy report to the instance they came from … just in case the moderators and admins of other instances want to follow-suit and scrub the fediverse (the fediverse are all the linked servers hosting websites and social media that utilize the activitypub protocol) of anti-intellectual content.
This, of course, pisses random people off. But they don’t speak to me directly about how pissed off they are. Instead, they do underhanded, weird things. Like “filing” fake DMCA takedown notices against my avatar profile photo to my system host, or by sending in “abuse” reports against my posts, to my instance, i.e., to my own inbox.
It’s very much, “I don’t have the spine to speak to you directly, but I have to defend the destruction of creativity and intelligent thought somehow!”
In writing this post, though, I’m not really asking these people to come to me directly. I’m more or less simply documenting, on my own personal website, that this is a regular occurrence. And if I write about it again in the future, you’ll be able to reference back to this post and go, “Oh, well dang, this has been going on for a while, huh? Maybe us other instances should take further steps to rid the fediverse of these grifters?”
Just a penny for your thoughts!
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