AI has been a bothersome subject for me for a long time, dating back to when my wife and I had an actual brick-and-mortar art gallery here in our town, and we were increasingly dealing not only with the impact of digital art, but — towards the end — AI assisted digital art.

Early Art AI — like the "Night Café" web site — was pushing the envelope on "creativity" that was basically machine learning. Is that art? And if not, what IS it?

Stopped having to deal directly with it because the gallery became a permanent victim of Covid lockdowns.

At the risk of writing my own dissertation in response to yours... some of this brings use face-to-face with something everybody seemed to really want to avoid in the early days, namely "What IS Steemit?"

It's not so much a question asked to put the community into some kind of box... as it is the question of this being "social media" or an "income opportunity." Those two are very different beasts and require substantially different approached, not least in the context of who you are trying to onboard as the "ideal user."

I was reading @soulsdetour's post yesterday, which also touched on what kind of world it is we are building... hereunder the implications of AI. To which I want to add "AI in the context of Web 3.0."

The irony there — which often makes me just want to beat myself over the head with my keyboard in frustration — is that we have all these Web 3.0 fanboys/fangirls touting this new frontier while waving their (figurative) banners to abandon the matrix while being proponents of AI which precisely is likely to put us right back INTO that matrix.

WTF, over?

Anyway, to bring the bunny back around... I'm only interested in AI as "information service," not as anything more. And that's where we have issues with AI on Steemit.

As I allude to in my most recent post, I don't mind AI telling me something like "I noticed you've posted about nature three times in a row; have you considered joining Steemit's Nature Photography community?" Totally appropriate use of AI: helps with content discovery and potentially with keeping people interested and engaged in things they enjoy.

Which is very different from what is being discussed here. For me, AI is only useful if it is providing a service, not if it is emulating a human being. If AI can stimulate social engagement, that's great, if it is being that social engagement, it's just rubbish.

But I'd rather be having the discussion, than just have it show up out of nowhere like this "experiment" originally did.