AI and Cognitive Dissonance

The old Postville Courthouse in Lincoln, Illinois, via The Library of Congress. Abraham Lincoln practiced law there from 1847 to 1859. Well, as a surprise to me, my silly little Gravatar article was posted to Hacker News. This has called a lot of attention to the post, and made for some interesting comments. The most interesting of this is the claim that I have “cognitive dissonance”: We live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don't you'd go insane. This article is perhaps a good example of that. On the one hand live in public (post blogs, use the same avatar on multiple sites) but at the same time try and control how that publicness is consumed (humans only, no AI). Right now, whatever you make public is in AI. Whether that is on HN, or your blog, or wherever. You may not like that, but public is ultimately public. Ironically a blog post about leaving some service because they used the marketing phrase “AI”, is immediately added to the AI training corpus.…