Ai

Yesterday I read what some might think is good news. Tabloids in England are firing human writers because Google AI summaries are undercutting human reader traffic to their sites. To this I have two comments.

Before every newspaper was pay-walled I would browse to The Guardian, the Independent, Le Monde, Le temps, Le Matin, and dozens of other newspapers. With time every one of them brought up a paywall and you might think “They’re right to, they deserve to be paid for the work they do but it’s worth remembering that for over a century, and during our lifetimes you could go to a newspaper stand or magazine shop and buy a newspaper and read all of the day’s stories, or you could buy a magazine and read all of the week’s or months articles. Now you’re expected to pay either for a single article, or per month, or per year.

This morning when I was opening windows to try to cool a Minergie building that was designed for cold winters that no longer exist I had a thought. That thought was that AI is nothing but a glorified photocopier.

What I mean by this is that at the moment AI companies are buying tens of thousands, if not millions of books, removing the spine, scanning the books and then pulping the remains. In so doing Ai companies are hoovering enormous amounts of data and destroying books that could be donated to libraries, schools, universities and more.

It’s worth considering a new rating system for AI generated content such as books. According to an article in The Atlantic AI written slop in the form of Daggermouth is best selling AI fiction and my first thought is that this is awful. It’s awful because AI can generate books far faster than we can read them, but it also means that we have a highly wasteful way of generating books.

Recently Strava added MCP AI decorations, with the idea of making workout feedback more interesting and dynamic. In practice when Garmin Suunto and Runna did that they forgot a key aspect. Allowing humans to add real context.

AI is a guessing algorithm, not true intelligence. It will look at data, but it won’t understand it. It will only correlate it to other data and provide a guess according to other contextual information.

For two days I have been migrating my blog from Hugo to Eleventy via the markdown pages, and the photos via Ghost Export for Wordpress. In the process I achieved a goal, and then AI broke things, so I achieved them again, and then AI broke them again.

The favourite thing for Ai, and Gemini, in particular to break was the logic that took the markdown titles, matched them to a json file, and then helped 11ty marry the photo with the correct post. When it worked it was brilliant, but when it broke I would spend half a day trying to fix it. By the third time this happened I decided to ask Gemini to help me write a script to hard code the image path straight into markdown pages.

Every day I spend one to two hours thinking about what to write for my blog. Yesterday I noticed that Wordpress wants to get AI to draft the first version of posts using the AI model of our choice, as long as it’s American, and take away the hours of blank page syndrome.

If you’re working towards a deadline, and you’re writing for work, that might make life easier, but it might also make blogging less niche, less interesting, and more kitsch.

It’s interesting that my use of Immich has evolved with my adoption of Gemini. I know that the cool thing would be to vibe code an Immich clone, and then show off about it to the world. I don’t want to do that. I don’t find it interesting to re-invent the wheel. I think it’s more interesting to get a model such as Gemini to help me make Immich stable on a Pi 5.

Today I decided to download and play with Meta AI but I didn’t use my Facebook or Instagram accounts. I used a brand new account with no connection to me. I don’t trust Facebook and the Meta “pattte blanche”, especially with AI, given how AI can manipulate us without us realising.

I asked it about Mindf*ck and genocide and it answered to both questions without skirting them. It did try to confuse me with a disambiguation question with the book. Initially it felt as if it wouldn’t answer, until I clarified that I meant the book, rather than swearing gratuitously.

Imagine that you’re out for a walk. You’re looking at the landscape and taking photos with your camera or phone. At the same time your GPS watch, or phone app is recording your location every second. What remains of the walk is a gps track that has a resolution of one set of gps co-ordinates per second, and photos when you took photos. Most of the walk is “lost” because to record video of the entire walk would be too consuming.

Nine to Five Mac wrote an article about “AI coding tools may be the end of freemium utility apps”. If the last three weeks are any indication of whether AI written apps can replace freemium apps the answer is both yes and no.

The Yes Illusion

Let’s start with the illusion that AI can vibe code your app. If you’re doing something like a task list or snake, or similar then the answer might be yes, to some degree but in that case it requires preparation.