Final Blog

 My digital footprint is partially an invisible one, if only because I spent more time "lurking" than "interacting". However, what you consider an interaction is based on perspective.

An interaction is usually measured by how you affected the person who originally posted. For example, leaving a comment or adding onto the post. However, when it comes to your footprint, it can be measured as whether you were there at all. People can easily trace what websites you visit, what accounts are linked to you, and where your device is at any time. Your footprint is a lot more than what you add to the wide discussions of the internet; it's mainly a trail for anyone interested to follow.

It feels that no one could predict the profound impact of the internet on our world at large. After all, this sort of technology is entirely unprecedented. There is little to no time separating communication, making it impossible to avoid information being checked, denied, and twisted at every moment. Our technology wants to know everything about us and the world we live in, whether we want it to or not.

 

The "wonders of technology" may be all well and good, but it drives a break between our sense of self and sense of belonging. It is now impossible to avoid the fear of missing out, now weighing what you want to miss out on. Are you missing out on hanging out with your friends by spending time with them without technology, or are you missing out on a conversation about something they watched the night before on their phones? Are you missing out on current events, or the newest video game? People are now missing out on everything all the time because it's happening all at once, so now they must pick and choose. No matter their choice, they will still feel poorly by the end of the day because they missed something, regardless of what it is. Our reliance on the constant stream of information makes it impossible to live without it, or to even put it on pause.

Technology will only get worse before it gets better, since we are incredibly slow at legislating it and the funds for government intervention can often come from technological coffers. I may have been taught from an early age to be careful what I say online and have been schooled accordingly, but that does not change that I am being tracked. I have been tracked my whole life, through my parents and my siblings and any friend I've ever had. This will not stop until the ability to sell information stops. This is so profitable a market that our privacy will not be returned unless the market is blacklisted altogether, and it will not be blacklisted because it's used to the government's advantage. When it comes to our safety, a drastic measure must be issued to ensure it.

Sources:

Picture of AI

The Age of AI

When I watched a video on the affects of AI, it gave me a strange amount of dread. I had previously watched the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which was dedicated to how our current social medias routinely harvest our information and sell it to the highest bidder. When watching it though, I felt that there was no real conclusion. It stated that this was a problem we needed to solve, but not how to solve it. This documentary did a significantly better job of outlining the issue and just how solvable it is: by not feeding it.

However, it is nearly impossible to avoid feeding AI. They have recently begun to be plugged into the internet at large, so anything you have posted on there is now susceptible. Some websites are currently trying to add code and file lawsuits over what can and cannot be harvested from them, but this will take a very long time.

This turn of events has brought a particular horror to me as a creator. I have been honing my craft as a writer for almost a decade, working on my personal narrative theories and creative skills whenever I possibly could. In January of this year, I decided to take the final step needed to be sure I was up to snuff: I started publishing my work. I chose a nonprofit website that uses all of its funds on upkeep and allows anyone to access what you write, free of charge or hassling emails over your account. Publishing publicly makes it where I can get feedback in real time on what I did well and what I can improve.

However, a week ago an article was published on how Elon Musk's company devoted to AI is now "crawling" through the internet for information. Basically, it takes everything it can find, mostly through the archival website Common Crawl, which has access to any host of websites (Communications Today). It then scans through everything written and takes it without the author's permission to algorithmically come up with its own addition (Communications Today). Without the original creator's consent, their work is being stolen to be given to an AI who claims it as their own. This entirely affects smaller creators who cannot defend their work in court with the expenses, and have no way to prove it as theirs when they are only a drop in the ocean of plagiarism.

The only way to stop this from happening is to restrict who can access your work, which means less feedback and less experience gained. Either your words must be stolen, or invisible to the passerby. This is a lose-lose situation that is ignored in the name of "advancing technologies", forgetting to ask if it is ethical to steal from others when that stealing is by a robot, not an individual person. Unleashing an AI upon something as vast as the internet without warning or forethought can only lead to danger. Without rules in place, this will hurt real people. If it possible, legislation must be made to ensure the creative ownership of the individual is maintained.

Sources:

Picture of The Social Dilemma 

Communications Today