Weeping Muses: Moving Away From Google  – Spare a Talent

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Weeping Muses: Moving Away From Google

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Yvette Hunt

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Summary<br>An explanation regarding my decision to shift from Blogger to WordPress for my blog.

When I started my blog, Spare a Talent, back in 2013 on Blogger, I never imagined the AI “revolution” would push me away from that platform.

I am actually sad to see it go. Not just because I have been getting what seems to me to be a surprising number of visitors for extraordinarily niche content. Nor is it that I know how to use the Blogger platform, and learning a new one is difficult. Both of these facts are very real.

I am also sad to change because deep down I feel a little like I am abandoning an old friend.

I have to remind myself that Google appears to have abandoned any sense of decency with their ridiculous data-centres and ongoing forcing of AI down our throats.

I wrote back in April about the dangers of AI to research, but that blog did not touch on the environmental and social damage of AI. By not allowing us to opt out of AI rubbish, Google has at least run me away from using Google search (I will miss what my brother called my “special relationship” Google) and by extension Blogger.

The way “tech-bros” talk about the inevitability of AI is utter rubbish. Most people don’t want it. Some overly wealthy and influential arseholes (and I think that is praising them), have convinced governments that their AI systems will give greater control, be it over us hoi poloi or unseen “enemies” with their military uses; as a result, the tech-bros receive huge government contracts, and them and our various governance leaders try to convince us that the AI revolution is inevitable. That the destruction of land and the use of precious water for these data-centres are good things.

They aren’t good things, and the AI revolution is a choice, not an inevitability.

And I choose to limit my engagement with these as much as I can.

For an ancient history slant to this bordering-on-Luddite rant, consider the image I feature as the header (assuming I have set this up correctly) for this blog – an image of the Muses. I will add it again here just in case.

The Muses

The Muses gave inspiration for the various areas of sciences and the arts. They were meant to nudge us mortals to greater artistic and scientific endeavours. It feels to me that this idea of “divine” inspiration that they embodied has been both inverted and perverted. Instead of Muses nudging us, we now “prompt” soulless machines to create artistic and scientific outcomes of lesser and lesser merit.

If the Muses did in fact exist, I think generative AI would make them weep.

All of my old posts will remain on the Blogspot platform.

ancient history Blogger generative AI Google Muses

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Weeping Muses: Moving Away From Google

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Yvette Hunt is a frustrated archaeologist who became an ancient historian owing to disability, and keeps translating stuff because either the material she is interested in either has not been translated, or been translated poorly. For a less facetious biography, see the "Who am I?" page.

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