The Grizzly Gazette

How does Bear Blog view AI?

Article written by suliman

The indie web is a place for those of us who do not feel welcome elsewhere in the digital sphere to find our own space. It's the natural habitat for those seeking freedom in their self-expression, from site design to overbearing moderation that frequently punishes the marginalized. But what happens when those homey spaces we create become home to the same type of people that alienated us from that “elsewhere”? This is a question that we'll have to contend with more often here on Bear as more of them find their way to us. In particular, what I would like to discuss here is whether the AI grift has grassroots support on the platform, seeing as blog posts about it are as rare as sand on a beach.

What got me to ponder this question were trending posts by one AI prophet and chemical hygienist (the same person) and another X-frequentee and Grok user making clear that their ideas may not be as fringe on this platform (anymore?) on grounds of their upvote count. Granted, the post that made Karpathy the designated Bear Blog AI prophet in my head was presumably crossposted to Hacker News which caused it to blow up. The “Chemical Hygiene” post with its fraction of the upvotes leads me to believe it acquired them organically on Bear Blog. Whatever the source of the upvotes, these two bloggers’ rhetoric—as my chosen examples—is increasingly encroaching all over Trending. So let's see what others, who I picked based on their posts’ popularity as well as their authority within our blogging niche, have to say about this technology and its propagation.

For starters, it is worth noting that we don’t know for sure who is upvoting which posts, whether they use the platform themselves or are just lurking, making it hard to base analysis on more than intuition. Nevertheless, we can infer based on the magnitude of certain posts’ upvote counts that their popularity likely didn’t entirely originate from within our community, but from elsewhere. In i'm tired of hacker news slop, Pirate said:

I'm not mad at the people who post something tech-related and it happened to get cross posted as was the case with Ava some time back. I'm talking about the posts that are primarily optimized for the hacker news [sic] platform. It never fails too, it's always glazing AI/LLMs.

He is not the only one offended by the use or discussion of AI in an uncritical way. Some even wonder who either the LLM output or LLM discussion is really for. In his bewilderment, Pablo wrote:

Do you not enjoy the pride that comes with attaching your name to something you made on your own? It's great!

No, don't use it [an LLM] to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!

But talk is cheap, you might say. What happens when you’re struggling and your creativity is leading you nowhere? You might be desperate enough to hit the chatbot! As Ava argues, you might receive “some reassurance through its sycophancy, a chance to sort my thoughts a bit, and a level of feedback I can’t get from people” for one reason or another. But do you, as the person aspiring to create, want real feedback or just the simulation of one? Exequiel walks us through what is tempting many to pick the former:

The artifact is increasingly treated as an interlocutor rather than a tool. In a certain way, the Cartesian cogito seems to be subverted: to speak supplants to think as the proof of being.

… What produces effects is a linguistic performance that simulates dialogue. … What's striking is not so much what AI is, but what it appears to be, and what that appearance triggers in its users.

While the two that prompted me to write this post may choose simulating self-reflection over experiencing it, as expressed in their promoting and using AI infused software, many bloggers on Bear are frequently expressing their frustration with AI’s encroachment in various corners of their lives. While Ava weighs the dangers of AI in hiring processes, Mo is frustrated by inexperienced programmers using AI to sabotage established code submission processes. In addition to the push of AI in areas where the cited authors (minus the first two) agree that they are are overstepping some lines, Exequiel laments the loss of self-expression by letting AI filter our language to become “good”; whether we choose to run ChatGPT over our writings to fix syntactic errors or a platform performs that action by default as in LinkedIn’s case. In their own words, they call the product of AI sanitization a “post-human corporate theatre”.

To conclude, it’s apparent that these authors whose cited posts that have topped the Trending page (an interpreted expression of popular agreement) that AI-uncritical posts are not so welcome on Bear Blog. What is even more evident is that AI won’t replace us bloggers any time soon, for our reason for sharing and receiving does not lie in valuing the act itself. Quoting Herman: “We like to see into the experience of others, understand how they think, and develop (sometimes para-social) relationships with these writers.” What we do brings us joy because of the human aspect of communicating our interior and making it part of our exterior.

We do not need voices among us that propagate ideas that endanger or devalue our reason for creating. Least of all do we need to be turning Bear Blog into another social media site plagued by knee-jerking and hype cycles. It is gatekeeping to reject these people from our communities. However, not all gatekeeping is equal. When you escape the digital equivalent of terrorists, you don’t just welcome them in your spaces as they flee the aforementioned “elsewhere” for their own reasons. You need to reject them to keep the “safe space” safe. Importantly, this is not a call to action for the central authority of moderation to “shadow-ban” the two I linked to among others. This is more so for us to become aware of these types and reject them as a community before they co-opt our spaces and dilute our sense of self.

Thus, what I would like to ask of you as the reader is to speak your piece. If you are discontented with these tech bros overrunning us, make yourself heard. Reject them. If not, well, that’s your choice.

Community Echoes

#bear #suliman