1/x On Friday, I ran a personal poll asking whether you are open to seeing AI content from me in your feeds. The results pleasantly surprised me, and a couple of commenters also gave me a path forward here.
Firstly, re the results. Not a large sample size, but good enough: 57% said Yes (even if some of those were anti-AI in general). Even better, only 20% of poll responses were a resolute No. Honestly, I expected that to be much higher given most of the AI discourse here.
2/x So what’s the path forward. I have to thank @misty and @[email protected] in particular for a couple of enlightening comments. Misty suggested “tagging the posts consistently in a way that people can use Mastodon's word mute to filter out if they'd prefer not to see it.”
Excellent idea, and I will do that using the hashtag #AI.
3/x Clara wrote that although she isn’t personally interested in AI content, “I think its valid for you to post your interests and thoughts and I'll leave my filters on.” She added in a separate comment: “I filter to hide it behind a content warning with or w/o a hashtag.”
Thanks to both Misty and Clara for reminding me that the fediverse gives you power to control what you see. So if you don’t want to see AI content from me, set a personal filter (& optionally use Content Warning aka CW).
4/x Again, I will make it easy for you by putting the #AI hashtag on all of my AI-related posts.
I’ll also add that if you have followed me for a bit, I hope you know by now that I’m not an ‘AI bro’ and that I always engage in web tech conversations with honesty and integrity. I’m not looking to be an “influencer” or anything like that. I’m always curious about, and tinkering with, new web tech; and in this case, I’m also trying to eke out a living by specializing in the #AgenticWeb.
5/x I’ll leave the last word to @[email protected], who beautifully summed it up here:
“We're all a bit overwhelmed and overstimulated but you should still be able to explore things intellectually in good faith. The tools exist to quietly disengage if necessary and everyone has a different threshold.”
Amen to that. #VivaLaFediverse
Richard MacManus