Category: AI

“ai” is coming to android

whbeebe2 Comments
Android Studio Jellyfish with AI announcement

I will always put “AI” in quotes because every “AI” vendor is gaslighting us so hard about their machine learning software being “AI” when in reality it’s not. Google is no different, having recently announced both Gemini “AI” as well as Gemini coming to their Pixel line of smartphones. In order to invoke Gemini “AI”/machine learning you need to write Android applications that can invoke Gemini, and in order to invoke it you need support from your development tools such as Android Studio Jellyfish, which it proudly announced when first started up after Android Studio’s installation.

I have nothing that can remotely run Gemini because, according to news articles, the only Pixel phones that can handle it will be any Pixel 8 and soon-to-be-released Pixel 9 smartphone with at least 8GB of internal memory. I’m sure that it will also require reasonably up-to-date processors running on the phone as well. But if you want to get involved with Google Gemini running on a Pixel 8 or later that can support it, Android Studio Jellyfish is your on-ramp to this exciting future.

how to block ai from scraping your wordpress blog (maybe)

whbeebe1 Comment
WordPress AI Block checkbox in Settings

I thought I’d make it out of February without a final post, but here we are on Leap Day and here I am blithering on about how to (maybe) block AI from scraping your WordPress blog.

To “prevent third-party sharing” with anyone, including and especially with “partners” that “train AI models,” open your WordPress dashboard, select Settings, then under Privacy, Public, make sure to check the Prevent… checkbox (see screenshot at the start of this post). Make sure to click the Save settings button at the top.

Over the last few days many articles have cropped up about how Automattic, the owner of WordPress and Tumblr, have struck deals with one or more AI companies to sell content on both sites as training data to help train said AIs. Reading about this indirectly in the news as apposed to hearing about it directly from Automattic is not “good optics” with regards to Automattic. But I shouldn’t be surprised by this, as the biggest story so far is how Reddit basically screwed everybody over on the Reddit site by charging money for use of their API, which in turn led directly to Reddit selling training data content to big AI for what are probably pennies on the dollar. All of this selling is well after it became plain how AI models were strip-mining the web of every big of content they could lay their digital hands on, copyright be damned.

Making sharing an opt-out instead of an opt-in is so typical of the web these days, as is burying it within menus and then not telling anyone about it until all hell breaks loose.

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