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    When robots write blogs...


    Post #: 110
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2012-02-23 13:32:20.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Internet



    Many years ago, my website (the one you’re reading now!) did not live on jeremyreimer.com, but a domain I registered called pegasus3d.com. (The Wayback machine has records dating back to May 1, 2001, but I think it was around earlier: http://web.archive.org/web/20010501232114/http://www.pegasus3d.com

    Why Pegasus3D? Well, I had recently taken a 3D animation course, and I had silly dreams about starting a one-person company to do animation. Pegasus was the name I used when I was a small child building Lego Space Ships to refer to my giant, world-sized flagship. (I had not seen the 1970’s Battlestar Galactica episode that introduced said ship, or maybe I had, it doesn’t really matter)

    None of this matters. This isn’t the point of this post.

    Years later I let the pegasus3d.com domain lapse, as I wanted to brand all my web stuff under my own name. I figured nobody would grab it, because why would you want such a silly domain name?

    Well, I was wrong. Last month, somebody got it. Or, to be more accurate, some thing got it. Check it out: http://www.pegasus3d.com

    It looks like a standard WordPress blog, right? Only look at the articles. They SEEM like standard, boring blog posts about--wait, what are they about again?

    If you read them closely, they aren’t about anything! It’s just random text made to look like a blog post. Some computer is churning out articles filled with spam links. I suppose I should be glad that said robot isn’t posting on my blog with their random spam links, as many robots do. But it’s still somewhat disturbing. I may not blog a lot, and I may not use that domain any more, but it used to be full of content created by a human. Now it’s full of content created by a robot, hoping to be read by humans.

    One wonders if they couldn’t cut us out of the loop altogether, and have robots read the robot blog posts. Hmm.

    This sort of thing isn’t an isolated incident, either. Big name sites like Forbes.com are using far more sophisticated robots to write articles for them that they used to have to pay humans for: http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/forbes-among-30-clients-using-computer-generated-stories-instead-of-writers_b47243

    My friend Terry and I have talked before on our Knotty Geeks podcast about the book The Lights In The Tunnel, about how the future of our economy is a bunch of people with all the money and nobody having any jobs because they have first been outsourced, then replaced by computers. This is happening and there is little that any of us can do to stop it.

    I’m not a Luddite: I don’t advocate smashing the computers in protest. The solution involves creating new types of jobs, ones that (for the moment at least) robots can’t handle. Beyond that, I have no idea what to do about this.

    EDIT: Followup in 2013:

    The robo-page is gone, but the site is now just a "parked" domain with the standard ugly Godaddy default crap inside it. I'm not sure if this is better or worse.


    Jeremy Reimer on 2012-02-23 14:00:45.000

    Love, LOVE the WayBack archive. It’s saved a whole bunch of images as well. It even saved the horrible Flash animation that (for a single day) was on the front page of my site before overwhelming negative feedback forced me to banish it to a page that would never be visited:
    http://web.archive.org/web/20060318053714/http://www.pegasus3d.com/jer_main.html

    (click the "Pegasus" icon in the top left once the page loads)

    AllYorBaseRBelong2Us on 2012-02-28 01:13:09.000



    Shiney!

    :)

    AllYorBaseRBelong2Us on 2012-02-28 01:13:38.000

    er, the web archive isn't werkin

    :?

    Jeremy Reimer on 2012-02-28 13:42:05.000

    It works here, but it takes a while to load. You have to be patient.

    Magus on 2012-04-10 10:34:01.000

    It's funny to see this thread. I've been sorting out some ancient personal archives and found some #osy logs from 2005.

    After reading a bit, I thought I'd check if OSY still lived and ran into that robopage. While looking for the OSY link, I wondered if the Amiga had finally lost a few of JR's marbles. :D

    Good thing I read it a bit more closely afterwards.

    View this post in the forums

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