This week I’ve seen quite a bit of noise about how our culture is starting to set its boundaries with AI. Governments are moving very slowly on legislation (OMG guess who gives them loads of money?????), so the rest of us are having to take things into our own hands.

Here’s some human-first doings.

Human = USP

iHeart podcasts now have a ‘Guaranteed human’ tagline before every show. I need to look into whether this includes the scripting, but it’s a great sign that businesses are starting to use ‘human’ as a selling point.

Human = trust

Wikipedia has announced that it won’t approve AI content for new pages or for extensive rewrites, because it causes inaccuracies and mess. That’s brilliant news, because it will stand as one place you can rely on for objective fact.

BUT Wikipedia does allow LLMs to scrape its content for training via a paid API. It’s still benefitting from AI getting more powerful, just not in its own yard.

It’s very possible that Wikipedia found its human-only decision all the easier because it’s a great partner for LLMs that way (and Wikipedia is quoted a LOT as a source in LLMs). Even AI companies don’t want to train their models on AI slop.

Human = beauty

Aerie is an underwear brand and they just brought Pamela Anderson on board for an anti-AI campaign. They had already made it clear they don’t retouch photos, and now they’ve announced that they won’t use AI to generate models.

This campaign is just a lovely brand tie-up with Pamela’s authenticity and makeup-free beauty.

Human = not publicly embarrassed by your clanker

The New York Times has publicly pilloried one of its freelance journalists (who’s also a published author and senior staff at an investment fund) because he used AI so badly, his book review contained cribbed lines from another review of the same book.

The Guardian: “most significantly a song of love to a country of contradictions, battered, war-torn, divided, misguided and miraculous: an Italy where life is costume and the performance of art, and where circuses spring up on wasteland”

NYT: “ultimately a love song to a country of contradictions: battered, divided, misguided and miraculous. This is an Italy where life is performance, where circuses rise on wasteland.”

A reader who’d also read the original review reported it to the NYT, who investigated and then had to apologise to The Guardian.

Needless to say, the journalist no longer writes for the NYT. I’m sure they’re making a bit of an example of him to warn others off shortcuts.

Poor guy might have to write another book to keep the lights on at his investment firm!

NO AI IN OUR ARTS AND HUMANITIES PLEASE.