LLMs 3
- People often keep using large tech platforms whose harms they object to because of the platforms' coercive power over their lives.
- The web is being flooded with coherent, generic, generated text that buries the writing worth reading.
Anil Dash
Technologist and writer, a blogger since 1999, formerly chief executive of Glitch and a board member of the Data & Society Research Institute. His 2012 essay "The Web We Lost" is one of the founding texts of the argument that the open web has been enclosed.
Anil Dash did not write this page.
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What Anil Dash says most about
Addiction 2
- Shaming people out of using a harmful technology does not work, because the companies selling it have already priced the stigma into their plans.
- Stigma changes what people admit to rather than what they do: they keep using the platform and simply get quieter about it.
AI alignment 2
- The harmful behaviors of major AI companies -- training without consent, opaque code, no user control -- are choices, not unavoidable features of the technology.
- AI works best when it solves a specific problem for a particular community rather than trying to be all things to all people.
design 2
- AI works best when it solves a specific problem for a particular community rather than trying to be all things to all people.
- Platforms wrongly believe that giving users flexibility and control makes a product too complex to grow, and that belief is the root of most of their mistakes.
government 2
- Authoritarian governments seek to destroy or falsify public records, including digital ones.
- Platforms run by technically capable, well-intentioned people can preserve content more reliably over decades than typical government or corporate web infrastructure.
open source 2
- The harmful behaviors of major AI companies -- training without consent, opaque code, no user control -- are choices, not unavoidable features of the technology.
- Large AI companies have used creators' permissively-licensed work without seeking their consent or offering compensation.
social media 2
- Whether the open web survives will be decided by what ordinary people collectively do, not by the companies that profit from it.
- Closing off interoperability is how a platform locks people in, and that lock-in is what lets the service be made worse without losing them.