I don't really like the "Human-made" badging trend | acdw.netI just came across the Done by Humans “movement,” which appears<br>to similar to not by AI: both offer badges to display proudly<br>on your human-made website after some kind of vetting process.<br>I don’t understand the appeal of sites like these or what they offer, and I think it’s possible they represent a new way to mislead people about AI use on the web.
There are three main reasons I am wary of these efforts.
1. They’re unnecessary
I don’t use AI on my website: I’ve coded it all by hand and I write<br>all the words.<br>I have a little hand-made badge
on my front page that says as much, and it’s really easy to find other<br>badges—or make your own—online.<br>So the badges provided by Done by Humans and not by AI aren’t needed.
Also, because of the way the Internet works, if you want to use one of<br>those sites’ badges—regardless of your AI use—you just download<br>and re-host them.
Tangent about finding the badges<br>... OK, so I was going to add the badges here, but at least DBH have<br>made it a little more complicated to get a badge.<br>Or they don't actually provide badges?<br>I don't know, but now that I'm digging just a little deeper it's<br>pretty clear the whole project is bunk.<br>Some certificates<br>point to websites that don't, and can't exist,<br>while others<br>point to archive.org pages, presumably written by the author listed in the site?<br>Regardless, it seems as though none of the submissions are properly<br>vetted, so the value of having one of these badges seems pretty thin.<br>… OH! yes they do. I finally found this one on like, the eighth site<br>I clicked on:
As for the not by AI badges, they want your email and possibly<br>payment for the privilege of using their badges.<br>And while the example badge at the bottom of their page isn’t<br>right-clickable (and it’s just in English), it’s not hard to yoink it<br>too using the advanced hacking technique of view-source:
2. They don’t mitigate the cause that AI overuse is a symptom of
While I don’t like it when people say “AI is a tool,” it is a tool in the<br>sense that when it causes problems, it’s not the AI per se but the<br>people using it.<br>AI (over)use is a symptom of late-stage runaway capitalism with its<br>perverse incentives to maximize profit at the expense of every other<br>metric, including human dignity, a healthy environment, etc.<br>Putting a little badge on your site doesn’t mitigate those facts at<br>all, and that’s true for my hand-made one as well.
“So why bother at all?” you might say.<br>“While these sites don’t help anything, they don’t hurt either,” you<br>might also say.<br>“You admit a badge does nothing and yet you still have one; curious,”<br>you might further intone.
I agree with each of these points.<br>The point I’m trying to make here is subtle.<br>Yes, no-AI buttons are equivalent to doing your own recycling (the<br>overwhelming majority of waste is caused by industrial processes and<br>individual recycling solves a vanishingly small proportion of the<br>problem).<br>Yes, something isn’t nothing (doing a little bit, like showing you<br>personally care about not using AI, is better than doing nothing at<br>all).
However, I think that having a third party verify (or not,<br>apparently) whether you’re using AI in your personal site is endemic<br>of the commodification of everything under late-stage capitalism.<br>If you don’t use AI on your site, just say so .<br>Make a dumb button yourself, or use the one on my site (don’t hotlink<br>it, please!).<br>It doesn’t have to be this big production.
3. They don’t actually mean what they say
Finally, the most baffling thing about these sites for me is that they<br>aren’t actually against AI use.
not by AI clearly states that you can generate up to 10% of your<br>content with AI, and that
You can freely use AI for inspiration purposes, supporting legal<br>documents, non-user facing content, or looking for grammatical<br>errors and typos.
Done by Humans takes a little more digging, but both of its<br>founders are in the AI business (emphasis mine):
In 2020, [co-founder Pedro Favuzzi] founded KineticLab, a technology<br>company developing accessible AI-powered biomechanics and kinematics<br>tools to help bike fitters and movement specialists access<br>high-quality analysis technology at affordable prices.
[Co-founder George Kovalev] is the founder of Barcelona Code School,<br>where since 2015 he has helped hundreds of students transition into<br>careers in software development, UX/UI design, game development, and<br>AI engineering through intensive bootcamps and mentorship.
I’m not quoting these to “debunk” anyone, and I’m not making a value<br>judgment outside of (A) I don’t personally like AI use at all and (B)<br>I think it’s strange that a company claiming to champion things made<br>by humans was founded by people who...