It absolutely is.
I was gonna block but now I’m curious because the comments and posts it’s made don’t make the goal clear yet.
So time to make a shot drinking game: Troll, PsyOp, Good intentioned but weird social experiment from the good comrades, bad intentioned but weird social experiment from the bad comrades, or Corpo Intrusion?
I love the Fediverse.
Functional and hypothetical only example usage of a curated digital footprint, for story purposes:
You keep, use, maintain, and preferably daily drive technology interfacing gizmos in a manner that results in a footprint where the conclusions drawn from it resolve to a “curated” set of… whatever the beholder is looking to ID from the footprint.
Functional example:
You keep and use devices in a manner that is at most “normie+”.
You own a Pixel Phone but keep stock android on it and add just enough to it not make you hate your life. You use a couple of normal sub services.
You still show some of your silly, like use an account on a porn website that federates with the world you care to socialize with. You still post how The Man better watch out.
Same as everyone else. The fingerprint looks like what you want it to look like.
So that it remains separate from what could happen/be happening elsewhere inside a Faraday cage with other devices there. How they are configured like, or who they talk to, the networks you utilize and the level of silly you display in your other accounts that have never so much as shared a trace route in passing together.
That’s hypothetically separate from the curated digital identity, depending on how careful and good at it your set up was.
So when the friendly folks with the mass surveillance pull up your file, it’s composed of what you wanted there to begin with.
It’s just another implementation layer of minimizing and compartmentalization, really.
Hypothetically. For a friend.
That’s just for Google’s AI summaries, but it’s the only one with actual methodology disclosed I could find on a quick (non-AI) search.
Plenty of SEO mills with their own “studies” too, and the trend is similar. People don’t interact with the source sites or if they do it’s extremely seldom.
They (SEO mills) are currently trying to flip the gaslight towards “Worry not dear Webmaster, now you just have to make sure your content is now formed so it’s engaging for AI search and engage able right from the AI!” type shit.
I’m tired boss, and I’m not even generally (as in, in all aspects) anti-AI. Yet, I guess.
I do not at all disagree.
From a technical reason standpoint:
AI/LLMs/ML/Expert System Output, they all require proficiency and understanding by the operating user to actually live up to any potential, debatable or objective.
From a data rights/licensing/sovereignty/FuckTheCorporations Standpoint:
Fuck 'em. Anything that Claude Code/Codex or any other corporate backed proprietary model/inference pipeline produce is sin tainted, and feeds the beast. Ban on principle.
From a social perspective:
The linked article says it all better than I could.
This is all said, as someone who does use open source and privately developed both versions of LLM, ML, and Expert System backed/using/supporting systems.
I’ve scraped zero places I had no right to, and asked permission in several I had licensing rights to, but morality compelled me to not be a shit head human who doesn’t understand the idea of consent regardless.
I’ve provided zero AI driven PRs to anyone, and even though my ass was fired not even a month ago and thrown into the blender of the current US labor environment, my repos are still private, I haven’t tried to sell anyone any bullshit SaaS ideas, and I haven’t tried to have a soulless automaton go roam the Internet for me and insert itself anywhere for the clout that may help get me hired.
It is not that hard to not be a shithead with the technologies, even if that’s what the techbros are marketing it under, and anyone who can’t not be one with them, doesn’t deserve to be welcomed into projects they would need to put some heart into understanding before the idea of automating any portion of them should even be considered.
This is only true of the sort of caliber of mind who thinks clicking ‘pay subscription’ on a tool that parrots the stolen knowledge they wish they had with a fraction of its functional spirit because the mind attempting it cannot direct nor supervise what it cannot understand, equates to having said knowledge at all.
This is admittedly the grand majority of those causing the problems described in the article, but is by no means everyone.
That is not a humble brag of any kind, I really wish more people understood the danger of bad actors being the only ones proficient in the use of “AI tools”.
They are gleefully camouflaged right now, right under the idiots and the hate.
Many of those PRs aren’t clout seeking, they’re sabotage, and some of them are sneaking right by without said AI identifiers in a multitude of critical FOSS projects, because of how easy it is to tell bad AI from human authorship and how hard actual enhanced human authorship is to detect.
Cory’s reverse centaurs don’t all ride for the same side, and this battlefield will need more focus than just stopping Chad from using his credit card to make his LinkedIn and GitHub look good.