in principle i like the idea of marking that your stuff is your own work instead of being by ai; sure you can lie but at it at least demonstrates that you want people to think you care, and that's gotta be worth something. people are doing this. for one example there's somebody on cohost, I can't remember who I just remember seeing this, who has an 88x31 badge in their bio which says "made with my own two paws", and honestly they have my admiration for that. typing with paws is hard.

There's more than one way of doing this. I found this "produced by human not by AI" badge in with the 88x31 badges on an artist's website (from far back enough in my 5000+ browser tabs that the website is currently only available through the wayback machine). It links out to notbyai.fyi - and this website is weird right? why does it look a little too professional? Why does their logo look a little too similar to that of Creative Commons? Something seems wrong.

First of all, this isn't an artist-led thing. They say "content creators" without any irony, that much is clear. I think it's a business, primarily. Sure, they're soliciting donations, but they're also selling, for US$13 a month, a license to use the icons as a business; or for $5 a month (*per "project"), you get access to a "creator page" that lets you prove your work is human-made... somehow. I can't find any evidence of these creator pages existing, please link me to one if you know of it, I'm not paying $5 to find out if it's a scam.

The proposition is that it's not just websites: you're meant to put this badge on literally anything. Their gallery is interesting. It'd odd to imagine that you'd want to put this icon on your artwork to show that it wasn't made by AI instead of like... your signature. Also the idea that a physical, handcrafted "wooden pedestal" would be, somehow, AI-generated?? At least for now I think a lot of these uses have a sort of asbestos-free cereal sense to them - if you're picking up a book in a physical store, you're expecting it to not be AI-generated, and it seems a bit odd if it's too forward with the proclamation that it's AI-free. Or, well. 90% AI free.

Understanding that there is a blurred line between what is considered AI-generated vs human-generated, if you are a content creator, such as a writer, researcher, artist, music producer, sound designer, or filmmaker, or a business that provides creative content, and you estimate that at least 90% of your content is created by humans, you are eligible to add the badge into your website, blog, art, film, essay, publications, resume, or whatever your project is. The 90% can include using AI for inspiration purposes, supporting legal documents such as privacy policies (assuming that legal is not the main focus of your content or service), non-user facing content such as SEO meta tags or code, to look for grammatical errors and typos, and to translate content.

Ah. You know how "98% fat free" means 2% fat? A "10% or maybe less AI" badge doesn't seem to have the same value to it... like, as a person looking at art with the watermark you can't trust that any particular part of it isn't actually AI generated, and as an artist who never uses AI, why would you want a faux certification that leaves people guessing where the 10% is? It seems misleading, almost on purpose, to say something is "not by AI" and mean mostly not by AI, and I don't buy this "blurred line" justification - either something came out of a generative AI or it didn't, picking an arbitrary percentage threshold only makes things more confusing. And allowing unlimited use of AI for translation is... certainly a choice (considering all the stories about fully AI-translated games and how shonky the translation work is).

so, this particular badge is probably not a good choice if you're ideologically opposed to generative AI and want to advertise that your stuff is handmade. Actually, I'm going to go a bit out of my depth here to look at the ideology of this project, because it's interesting.

The Not By AI badges are created to encourage more humans to produce original content and help users identify human-generated content. The Ultimate goal is to make sure humanity continues to advance.

It is worth mentioning that AI technologies mark a major milestone in the history of technology and the Not By AI badge is not designed to discourage the use of AI. Instead, it is to make sure that, while we celebrate the achievement, we work with AI instead of being replaced by AI.

As I see it there are a few main points:

1. AI is really good and useful actually!
2. But we risk having it replace all human creativity, and then we'd stop making new stuff content.
3. That would be bad because then the AI would have no new content to train on and just repeat the old stuff forever, and this would cause us to stop advancing as a species.
4. So we shouldn't stop using AI, we should just make sure that we're still making (enough) new content ourselves.

And I have questions. Why did they capitalise "Ultimate" like that? What do they mean by "human advancement"? Do they seriously think we're just going to stop making stuff entirely? What do they think is so good about AI that it's worth keeping it around even in the face of such risk? Would William Shakespeare have written Hamlet if he had access to ChatGPT? Why do they pick those four specific things, from literally all of human art history, to be the four examples of things that couldn't have been made after this theoretical AI content apocalypse? Where are those 247 thousand pages that they allege feature their badge? I'm not one to put much stock in social media numbers but they only have 65 twitter followers.

...

How mainstream is this ideology, actually? Equating making new "content" with the nebulously defined "advancement of humanity" is definitely weird (bad vibes, even), or maybe just worded unusually. I think the idea that generative AI is at least somehow useful isn't too uncommon, though these people seem more positive on it than most. What about that AI apocalypse, though? I've heard the "AI will replace us" stuff from both AI boosters and those who would very much rather it didn't. I don't know how big of an impact the average person expects AI to have.

Personally, I can see AI making human artistry a lot less profitable, but people make art without being motivated by profit all the time. We'd still be making art and "advancing humanity" or whatever, it's just that everything would suck more. In my case, the fear of AI getting big has actually encouraged me to get better at making art - when everything is being made by machine, I want to be a small part of the resistance and keep making things with my own two claws. But I think I'm weird. Cohost is weird, right? We seem to all hate AI here, there are a lot of artists, those two things are surely connected. Most people probably haven't really thought about this stuff too hard.

I think that Not By AI's ideology is, at least in part, put on - if I assume that it's primarily a money-making venture, they must be advertising to some demographic and catering their messaging to them. That demographic is not me, and I don't know if I should be worried that it might be most people.