“Opt-in or opt-out” seems like a really important call. I believe you’re advocating for opt-in.
As an example, would inventing something like a search engine back in the early days be possible in that environment? Is the loss of such things worth the use of opt-in rather than opt-out control?
Similarly - if a world of clicking "I agree" failed to protect people, maybe there are ways in which "consent" as the frame (let alone a trump card) isn't going to cut it, and we need different frames too (which I think is consistent with your post). See also https://creativecommons.org/2025/04/02/reciprocity-in-the-age-of-ai/
yep. art relies on theft. but it's the theft on an individual from an individual, for the joy of creation and making something new with what you took. not a huge group of people taking stuff to sell to huge groups of people
...good point, haha, and silly of me to say as I love to collaborate. that said, i think the line between theft and inspiration and homage can get blurry and it's why there's so much tension with copyright; artists gotta get paid vs the reality of creation
I looked at a product on a website (I subscribed to their updates) the other day. No intent, just curious. Soon after, I got an addressed email saying their AI had “noticed I’d looked at the item without buying it and maybe this email encourage me to change my mind!”
You read my mind. The lack of consent IS bad, but I'd like to see some recognition that a lot of these business practices are sleazy bottom-feeding BS, consent or no consent.
I remember after GDPR (and I think some California law) when every website suddenly added popups forcing you to "accept" cookies, with tiny print that nobody bothered to read, the public saw it as an annoyance. The public perception was that these popups were a nuisance vs the frictionless tracking.
It reminds me of carbon taxes, where corporations just pass on the cost to the consumers and expose it, which causes public perception to see the tax as a nuisance. Those badly designed pop-ups seemed almost design to turn the public against the idea that they should have to consent to this stuff.
Really glad you're reminding us what consent actually means.
Have you seen this paper? Someone suggested it when I first started working on Germ - what would consensual social networking look like? - and it's become such a touchstone.
Also: when I was at a newspaper almost 30 years ago, I wrote an article about “cookies“ that warned about the surveillance elements – I remember it was kind of shrugged off by the experts I discussed it with.
When I started in federal IT in 1999 I was setting up a website to share public data and doing any kind of authentication was a problem because we had to get cabinet level approval just to set a session cookie because feds weren't supposed to track people and cookies could do that.
The folks that were gping to be creepy are still creepy but a bunch of other folks actually got better at being the kind of person you would want to work or hang out with.
Comments
As an example, would inventing something like a search engine back in the early days be possible in that environment? Is the loss of such things worth the use of opt-in rather than opt-out control?
But you could do it as a layer on top of email which is I think what https://hey.com kind of was?
Fuck no on every level. Creeps.
https://youtu.be/D1624DqhP40?si=Wye19WAwxNdqJ1zi
Consent would be great, but we really need to just ban all of the shyte stuff they do so we don't have to decline a million awful things.
Have you seen this paper? Someone suggested it when I first started working on Germ - what would consensual social networking look like? - and it's become such a touchstone.
https://imjane.net/papers/chi2021-affirmative-consent.pdf
Summarizes a lot of of the things I’ve been obsessing over
I think the cultural & political downward slide began when people started ripping music from CDs and calling it sharing
Gen AI is a beefed-up version of that