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A very Happy Easter, and two-four day weeks to you. I landed back in the cold North East yesterday. I threw myself back into the final week of my New Writing North fiction course, and unexpectedly found myself on the wrong side of the camera. Is this payback for all the times I’ve dragged people into the same situation? We’ll soon find out.
The bar has been raised
The days of keyword-stuffed SEO content are long gone, at least if you’re looking for any actual benefits. But now AI is raising the bar for what can be considered high quality content by the search engines, and by humans. The proliferation of AI copy creation tools mean its easy to churn out 800 word pieces of legible content that regurgitates existing information. So what’s next? Step forward Rand Fishkin to explain.
The ethics of AI content generation
Ok, we’re wading deep into AI this week and with good reason. AI opens up a world of possibilities, but it also creates a whole host of ethical questions. If AI is scraping and repurposing content, don’t those content creators deserve credit and even compensation? A recent Guardian piece zooms in on the controversial use of AI-generated models in fashion. Brands claim they supplement diversity which would not otherwise be possible. Does this then benefit the ‘mainstream’ model choice who continue to be used for live shoots, while diversity becomes a computer-generated trait? Should the AI-generated images, created by scraping images of real models, compensate the models it is based on? With artists suing image generation tools for scraping and imitating their style, is AI simply plagiarism on a grand scale?
The week online
This week I’ve been wrapping my head around the ‘fediverse’ as I dived into Mastodon for an upcoming piece on Practical Ecommerce. The Verge have a great interview with founder Eugen Rochko where he discusses the Patreon funding model, decentralised set up and more.
Finally, would we even be on the internet if we hadn’t been playing around with the Barbie selfie generator?
