Since the arrival of Chat GPT and Dall-E into some of our lives, it seems that writing on the internet has become far too easy. In fact, at the end of every sentence I type here I have to stop myself from copying and pasteing it over to Chat GPT to see if it could be improved. 'Dear ChatGPT, make this blog post funny'.
It may be no surprise to many readers that I have been leaning quite heavily on the various AI platforms out there. I've used ChatGPT to write copy for the website. I've been using Dall-E to create images to post on Instagram to accompany the somewhat fictionalised version of The Occasional Sloth workshop that I try to present to the world. In this world, anthropomorphic sloths work on organic cotton graphic t-shirt designs, printing and marketing, wearing tweed suits and wool cardigans from a workshop in Dublin city centre. While I can't say for sure that the people working on The Occasional Sloth are not genetically modified sloth people, I have my suspicions that it's not the case. (All the sloth art featured on The Occasional Sloth apparel is hand-drawn though!)
And what's the problem with that? Why shouldn't I use these fun AI generated images? So aside from the likelihood that many of the source images that derive the AI output are sequestered from people who have not consented to the theft of their art, it seems that the algorithms that choose whether to promote/boost posts, stories, websites, blogs etc absolutely HATE it!
Google and Instagram are not keen on an internet full of AI generated content, and are working pretty aggressively to develop counter algorithms that can detect where material has been AI generated, and make sure that it gets shown to as small a group of people as possible. Have you noticed that despite AI content generation exploding, you're not seeing that much AI generated content on your feed... unless you are following The Occasional Sloth Instagram very closely.
This is an attempt by these platforms to discourage the use of AI generated content, as it does not represent anyone's ideal view of the internet. Based upon a lot of the material I have seen generated, it has a long way to go to reach an equivalency with human generated art, copy or literature. Any Seinfeld episode I got it to write was repetitive and uninspired. Any image of a sloth it made, couldn't quite figure out the claws. And ask it to do a word count of a piece of text and remove ten percent of the words, and you'll find yourself having an extended argument with an algorithm that you would be embarrassed to show anyone.
If I do a spellcheck on this before I post it, will Google punish me, or is spellcheck still ok? Maybe better to be safe than sorry.