Brainmade but not Not by AI
As I was building out this blog in its current form I had the "written by a human/not by ai" badge living in my footer for a while. This seems to be pretty ubiquitous in the indie web community at this point and I completely understand why. In the era of LLMs and big tech shoving it down our throats at every corner it feels like we can never catch our breath or our morals. Frankly though using this badge, (I was going to put an em dash here as a joke and realized I don't even know how to write one) even though it's true I do write all these posts myself, felt disingenuous. I do write my own stuff, and a lot of times I write my own code, but I don't NEVER use AI (LLMs I hate calling it AI but I guess that's where we've landed). I use it sparingly to be sure. Thoughtfully, as much as I can. But not NEVER. I don't subscribe to the moralistic undertone that it's useless because it's simply not true. But like with any new tech we have to find our way as a society and as individuals. There's ethical, societal, and environmental harms to be navigated for sure. In my experience having grown up in hyper moralized religion fighting fundamentalism with fundamentalism only breeds more fire. It divorces both sides from reality.
So when I stumbled on NoBoilerPlate's Brainmade.org project it resonated with something I've been feeling myself. A push towards the positivity and beauty of human made things. The entire idea of 90% human made lands perfectly on the heart of it. I've been making things using tech since the day I got my first laptop and my first digital camcorder. I plundered code from my favorite websites to learn how it worked and make my dumb teenage website projects look cooler. Every artistic and creative endeavor is an act of theft (a lot of y'all haven't read steal like an artist and it's showing), and a repackaging. It's all of the YOU that you put into it that makes it special. That makes it beautiful.
Yes it's gross when people are out there vomit prompting and calling themselves "AI Artists". Yeah the current tech oligarchy is morally bankrupt and shoving lies and just outright useless things down our throats at all times. But we don't win by negging the everyman for using chatgpt to look up a fact or proofread a blog post. We win by making things with our brains.