There’s a little “web tool” from Kagi (the independent search engine) called Small Web and it’s a great way to discover active bloggers that you might not have otherwise stumbled upon.
The concept is simple and very similar to StumbleUpon in it’s heyday:
Imagine the internet like a huge neighborhood. There’s a lot of folks around, but we rarely bump into each other, right?
Kagi’s all about humanizing the web and we want to help surface the people behind the posts and stories that zip by. This less known corner of the web is also known as the “small web”.
Hit ‘Next Post’ to read something new. We only show posts from the last seven days to keep it fresh. And yep, this whole thing is open-source. Oh, and no JavaScript on our end.
About — Kagi Small Web
So, bookmark the site, add it to your favourites, pin it to your speed dial – whatever the term is nowadays for remembering to visit a website regularly. And don’t forget to leave a comment on any interesting blogs you’ve read!
Many moons ago, I used to spend a lot of my free time running a videogame website named Gamestyle. The site focused on reviewing, previewing and publishing feature-length articles about video games.
Over time, it achieved a reputation for its rigorous reviewing policy and efforts to establish itself as an unbiased and reliable source of gaming opinion pieces. It got quite popular.
Nintendo used Gamestyle’s favourable review of Metroid Prime to promote the game in it’s launch campaign and writers and contributors to Gamestyle have subsequently pursued careers in video game journalism, going on to work for like likes of IGN, gamesTM, Retro Gamer, News Corp, The Guardian, Forbes.
I was very proud of what we achieved and then it all came to an end.
Come 2023, the site was long gone but the domain kept renewing. Every year that bill had to be paid, I felt a little sad that the site no longer existed, until one day I found myself sketching out a new logo for Gamestyle on the back of an envelope.
I jumped into Adobe Illustrator and turned that sketch into some digital art (pictured above) and that set the spark for reviving the site.
The initial goal is simple, but time consuming. When I find myself with a moment of free time, I’ll take an old article from any available archive I can find, tidy up the formatting, and publish it online.
Maybe one day in the distant future, the goal will change. But for now, all I am looking to do is restore the many hours of writing to the Gamestyle domain and make the content available once more.
2024 will be the 25th Anniversary of the site and it might be nice to have something to look back on.
I don’t actually use LinkedIn that often and when I sign in to my account, I’m always surprised about how often people are active there; posting content to their timeline, liking content, and probably (hopefully!) messaging potential new hiring managers about possible new job openings.
Over the past week, I have logged into LinkedIn to see trending posts from existing and past colleagues which read like the typically enthusiastic posts that you’d see on your LinkedIn timeline. They’re celebrations of work anniversaries; look how much I have accomplished and how happy I am to work for X company.
Two of these posts in particular stood out as being popular and I took the time to drop them a reaction (a good thumbs up, heart, or clapping emoji) and then leave a comment, congratulating them.
And then the story unfolds.
Disclaimer
This post is about LinkedIn and the ethics of using the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, specifically talking about ChatGPT from OpenAI. Both of these companies are companies that Microsoft (my employer) own or have heavily invested in.
I’m probably obliged to say that this is not any statement on how these companies are using the technology, but rather an observation about how people are using the technology that these companies create.
If you’re reading this, Satya Nadella, please don’t send your security team to leave a box of my belongings on my desk. Cool. Thanks.
Fool me once…
Below you’ll see a screenshot of the first post I encountered. I read it and nearly passed it by because I had no intent to interact with anything on LinkedIn other than to message one specific person. But, as if often the case, I got distracted.
I liked the post and clicked through to see what people were commenting.
On second glance, the post seemed a little peculiar. When crafting my reply, I considered; “Are those really words that author would say?”. I wasn’t so sure.
Their native language is not English, yet they used what I would consider quite uncommon phrases for native speakers, never mind for someone writing in a second language; “a leap of faith”, “loop-de-loop”, and “real eye-opener”.
I didn’t put too much thought into it, wrote a reply and moved on. But I did make sure that my reply included one of those uncommon phrases for a non-native speaker:
And shortly after crafting the reply, my phone pinged and I had a message from the original author of the LinkedIn post:
Did you realised (sic) it was a computer talking?
OpenAI is so great it can even write your LinkedIn posts.
Now, honestly, I didn’t fully realise it was a computer talking. Despite being a little uncertain about the use of language, I accepted the post on face value as being genuine and moved on with my life. I didn’t take the time to analyse it; I simply consumed.
But, I had reacted and responded to that post. Despite a whiff of sarcasm – my reply was sincere and genuine. It was crafted using my brain and emotions. But now I know the original post wasn’t.
“Fool me once, shame on you”
I’d fallen for the AI-generated post and misconstrued it for being a real, genuine, heartfelt message.
(Yet, I’m still not sure anything that anyone posts on LinkedIn is 100% genuine. It’s often done for some sort of corporate-social networking clout.)
The author of the LinkedIn post admitted to me that they were experimenting with ChatGPT – the latest AI technology from OpenAI, which has been trained to generate human-sounding text. And, they had thought that by quoting their original post, that their research had been rumbled!
Fool me twice…
And so, the following day my phone beeps again. It’s another message from the person that ‘wrote’ the LinkedIn post above. They had sent me a screenshot from LinkedIn of a second post authored by a different person and that I had commented on.
This is ChatGTP (sic)
Ahhh people who use it can recognise this so easy
And so, I revisited the post and I genuinely couldn’t tell that it was written by AI. That’s mostly because this is an ex-colleague that I haven’t spoken to in years. I recall their English being good, but to what standard? I don’t recall.
On a reassessment of the post, there could be a few signs as to it being authored by a machine – strange capitalisation of a word and the over-enthusiastic tone. But of course, the real test would be to ask them. So I did.
Me: Did you use AI to write this
Them: Yes
Me: Weird question I know, but one of my friends has been posting LinkedIn messages generated by AI. This came up in their feed and they were like “This is AI written!!”
Them: Wow.
Me: Great that you were honest about it.
Them: Nothing to hide, writing is not one of my skills. But use of tech is.
Me: Can I blur out the name, photo (all the personal details) and use a screenshot of your post in a blog post I’m writing about ChatGPT?
Them: No.
And so that is why the second example you see above is a dummy LinkedIn post, with blurred out cat images. It’s for illustrative purposes.
But, the conversation? 100% real. And the flip from “Nothing to hide” to the rejection of sharing was particularly surprising.
“Fool me twice, shame on me”
All of this really brings me to a question of ethics and trust. You fool me once and maybe I learn not to trust that one source. You fool me twice, and maybe I only have myself to blame and become a little less trusting of everyone and everything. And is that healthy?
I think it’s safe to say at this point, after encountering and uncovering two examples of AI on LinkedIn “in the wild” that are posing as genuinely authored posts, I can say that I am personally not comfortable with using the technology in this manner and I will likely approach posts of this nature on LinkedIn with a large dose of scepticism and has degraded my trust in the platform as a whole.
Whilst AI-assisted text generation can be a great tool for good, it’s also – as these examples show – erode trust in people and products.
The posts in question currently total over 500 ‘reactions’ and over 50 comments from individual people. I am very curious to know what percentage of these 500 people knew it was AI they were reacting to, or even responding to. Neither of the posts explicitly credit this as AI-generated text.
Even if someone consumed the post and swiftly moved on with their life, as I initially did, that post then leaves an impression that you tie to the author. The character you build around that person in your head is going to be different when you find out that those words you presumed were from their brain, were in fact written by a machine.
I want to be making genuine, human-to-human interactions in real life and online. And, if I have to talk to a robot, I want it to be very clear that I am talking to a robot.
I’ve been reading and watching a lot about OpenAI technology over the past few weeks, but in real life scenarios it’s not at the front of my mind to actively search for AI patterns in text that is attributed to a human contribution.
From the interactions above, ChatGPT clearly is detectable by those who are aware of it, are familiar with it, and have used it to generate posts of their own.
You can come to your own conclusions. I’m not sure I’m quite ready, educated, or qualified enough to summarise this post in an eloquent way.
It’s just here, it exists and – like all the content on my blog – it was written by a human.
✌️
The header image for this post contains a render of two plastic figures using digital devices, which I stole from Brett Jordan on Unsplash.
The title says a lot. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, bought the social networking website Twitter at the end of October 2022(BBC News). As a result of that purchase, a lot of users were unhappy and fled.
The alternative? Mastodon. It’s not run by one single user, but anyone can install the software on their own server. Or, if you’re not that technical, you can just join one of the many servers that already exist.
Because there are many servers, this means the Mastodon network can’t ever be bought up by one individual. This also makes it really tough to tell exactly how many people have given up Twitter for Mastodon – but the answer is seemingly a lot as some of the larger Mastodon sites struggled with the new influx of users, and others reporting massive percentage increases(The Guardian).
The logo for the Mastodon instance oslo.town
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you will know that I run a version of Mastodon called oslo.town. During October, the site added 100 new people. During the first five days of November, the site grew by an additional 170 people, bringing the total number of people to 680.
A journalist, writing for the Norwegian technology website kode24.no reached out and asked some questions about the growth in traffic and subsequently featured me in an article on their website(This article is in Norwegian).
If you live in the Greater Oslo area, or are interested in Oslo for another reason, feel free to sign up to oslo.town and create your first Mastodon account! If you already have a Mastodon account, you can follow me: @matt@oslo.town
And that’s pretty much the update for this blog post. However, people have a lot of questions about Mastodon, so I’m going to continue below with a Frequently Asked Questions. If you are interested, keep reading…
Frequently Asked Questions (about Mastodon)
If you wish to share this article, but to jump directly to this section, please use the following link: https://coxy.co/3750/#faq
Is Mastodon the same as Twitter?
Mastodon is similar to Twitter, but they are not quite the same. Many of the basic features are the same; you have a Home timeline which shows posts from people you follow, you can follow people and they can follow you back, you can write new posts and share others’ posts to your followers, you can create polls, etc.
However, Mastodon and Twitter work slightly differently and so it can be confusing to new people who sign up to Mastodon.
Where should I sign up for a Mastodon account?
If you are unsure of where you should first sign up for your Mastodon account, you can go to this big list of Mastodon sites and choose a website that you think sounds funny, or similar to your interests.
This works similar to email. If you sign up on Outlook, your email address is probably username@outlook.com but if you signed up at Yahoo! it would be username@yahoo.com.
Do I need to sign up to other servers to read messages on them?
No. You only need one account on one server. From there, you can follow anyone you want – regardless of which server they use – if you know their username.
Simply type their username into the search box on your Mastodon app or website and they should show up. OR, you could visit their page and hit the big ‘Follow’ button and follow the instructions.
How do I find people to follow on Mastodon?
You can find people to follow on Mastodon in a few different ways.
Using and searching for #hashtags. This will allow you to see posts around particular topics or live events. As a starting point, you can try searching for #introduction and will see posts by new people to Mastodon introducing themselves.
Do you know their username? If you know a person’s username, you can put it into the search box and it will show up. If the Mastodon server you use has never ‘met’ this person before, it could take a few seconds before they show up.
‘Explore’ special interest Mastodon servers. Every one of the many Mastodon servers has an Explore page. This is usually at server.name/explore. For example, visiting oslo.town/explore will show you people on oslo.town and each profile will have a ‘Follow’ button.
Thank you for reading this far. If you made it here and still don’t have a Mastodon account, you probably should just sign up now as you clearly like to waste time on the internet.
Is this big news? No. Probably not. There aren’t that many new features that are going to blow your socks off – but too many people use Google Chrome and this is a great opportunity to give Firefox a try!
Firefox are working to make their app faster, better, and offer more privacy protecting features. And, whilst they don’t get everything right, they’re a better company to support than Google.
