This is exactly what I did this year, moving photo backup to Syncthing and using Immich. So far it has been a very rewarding trip, even if the home server it runs on is not the fastest.
I am guessing there is some kind of political incentive to create stealth inflation (though it's literally 'deflation'), which is largely unrecorded, vs. traditional inflation, which is a vote-loser.
Sometimes AI's contributions may be diffuse, and more akin to the suffusion of a tea-bag, or even a drop of tincture, than the addition of an extra cookie on the plate. In such cases there is usually no distinct section that you can wall off and say 'AI did this'. In spite of this, it may have made a rather modest than overwhelming contribution to the work.
I don't know - the 'great enshittification' of Substack seems an inevitable event, for which reason I have stayed away from using it as a platform, except for a few experiments. It was initially populated by refugees from Medium, itself enshittified, and there seems no reason that Substack refugees won't eventually become a thing for the same reason. Reminds me of that Twilight Zone (or was it Night Gallery..?) episode with the guy who keeps moving from one sinking ship to another (Titanic, Lusitania, etc.).
The main reason I used Medium was that, for a period, I had personal stuff in a company newsletter and cross-posted stuff on Medium seemed more official than a personal blog. Haven't used it in years.
I do have a Substack account but have zero interest in monetizing and, after a fair bit of back and forth, I just put all my stuff on a Blogger account I've had for years.
Yes, it was polluted with multiple 'Not just [x] but [y]' examples - the most obvious tell of AI-generated text, among other aggravating examples. It was hard to read, but I was interested enough in the subject to slog through it.
"A straightforward, honest, zealous officer doing his duty in the most laborious manner—that’s my style. No Frills. No fancy work. Just honest perspiration. Stolid and a bit stupid—that‘s my ticket."
Yes, LLMs certainly learned these tropes somewhere. I'm just surprised that different models and different pre-processing methods arrived at the same dominant cliches.
Agreed. I always hated the 'two part', 'payoff'-based drama of titles like these, even before the LLM era. If it was lazy before (it was), it now comes off as 'one-click' lazy. Sadly, The Guardian has become infested with this style lately.
This is interesting. Until autumn of 2024, when the company was subsumed into a better-heeled AI-VFX concern, I worked for probably the best-known and earliest all-AI VFX house, whose ethics department was headed by a philosopher, though the company struggled to place him to practical advantage.
The only comment I can make on the general trend is that it's apparently good PR for cash-saturated startups. Ultimately what AI 'means' is certainly not the business of those making it (who are arguably least-qualified to comment); and insider insights offer no benefit that I can discern.
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