Can confirm that the most significant impact of AI on the cultural heritage institution I work for—BY FAR—has been the staff time and technical cost required to defend against the constant, uncoordinated, and wildly inefficient harvesting of our open data.
Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦@merz.bsky.social · 7h ago#AI #LLM Something I've not seen commented on is the explosion of bot-impeding pages (e.g., via Cloudflare) that now appear before web pages load. The cumulative time waste for human users has got to be in the billions of person-hours. An immense burden imposed on everyone by the AI-bro assholes.
![screenshot from the linked-to essay that reads:
I admittedly cannot vouch for any of the aforementioned writers, as I’ve never heard of them before. But over the weekend as I was writing this, Kat Tenbarge — a writer I am familiar with and respect — released this video in response to her being falsely accused of using AI by [checks notes] Ozzy Osbourne’s son. Apparently, Osbourne thought an article Tenbarge wrote about the Tate brothers was written by AI because it included (in his words) “whatever they’re called, like the big hyphens” (aka, em-dashes). Tenbarge’s video includes proof (via Google Docs of drafts of her article saved along the way) that she wrote it organically. And she cites OpenAI itself who said, “AI writing detectors don’t work.”
So why does Jack “whatever they’re called, like the big hyphens” Osbourne care if some Rolling Stone article was written by or with AI? Well, I’d wager he doesn’t. Especially, since he doesn’t even know what em-dashes are! The most likely scenario is that he raised the issue because he is either 1) pro-Tate brothers and wanted to smear a journalist who wrote about the case against them, or 2) he knew a video smearing said journalist would be clickbait for the rabidly misogynistic Tate fanbase. (Notice how this is not a list of three, but two.)
In other words, we have entered the age where people who disagree with what authors have to say — the facts we raise and the arguments we make — will be inclined to simply claim that our articles and books were “written by AI,” regardless of whether they are or not.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:jegl5qdhv2obobhr326womff/bafkreicpyufzo6smmvvvsd3fdzbwwclefjfmc4s57nb32mqth4oilk4ibu)
