An original journey through various thoughts and feels on the web that was and future so bright we have to prompt Wix AI.
Yesterday I had the privilege of attending an online presentation by Olia Lialina via Reclaim Hosting – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1cKASjX85w.
Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene – an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, “net.language” and vernacular web has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory. Lialina is credited with founding one of the earliest web galleries, Art Teleportacia. She is cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany, and a GIF model.
(from the presentation introduction)
While we participants were very nostalgic going through all the example websites Olia presented, the point was NOT to be nostaligic about the past web. The point was it’s not in the past, but just a path among many that large numbers of people have followed. The paths are still there, but some are disappearing (and Olia is attempting to archive as much as possible). The hope being that folks will still try to own their websites, and set a flag there for people to discover and engage in. There is quite a collection of websites with background/midi/mods in them. All of which still work and playback when you view them through archive. No doubt these are efforts of individuals seeking to express themselves and find like minded folks. It wasn’t about necessarily being an influencer or being monetized on a platform. But now that’s all changed. But to Olia’s credit, she’s archived a number of those sites of Geocities that popped up after 1995. https://blog.geocities.institute/about. And it’s good to see what the breadth and scale of that community was. So having attended the presentation and taken away some of Olia’s ideas of how to think of the web, I can help but stick on the Wix ADI (artificial design intelligence) section at 46:16 in the YT of the presentation: https://youtu.be/O1cKASjX85w?t=2776
Because today I see this article on Wix all about AI prompting your website into existence: https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/17/wixs-new-tool-can-create-entire-websites-from-prompts/
The headline is grabby, borderline click-baity. It breathlessly touts all the design and so forth and what Wix has done harnessing a ChatGPT-style front end where you “wish” into the prompts what you want and pass judgement on the results. Prompting as you go. No need to learn anything other than how be a prompt engineer for Wix AI. But I will give TechCrunch credit along with the author of the article (Kyle Wiggers). There is a “downside” near the end,…
As The Verge’s James Vincent wrote in a recent piece, generative AI models are changing the economy of the web — making it cheaper and easier to generate lower-quality content. Newsguard, a company that provides tools for vetting news sources, has exposed hundreds of ad-supported sites with generic-sounding names featuring misinformation created with generative AI.
From Kyle Wiggers article on TechCrunch, “Wix’s new tool can create entire websites from prompts”
So imagine if something as big, and variety filled as Geocities suddenly sprung up, whole, overnight?! And it was just one low quality, auto-generated, placeholder of site, purporting to be a community but just empty of individuals laboring away making the thing. Wouldn’t it just be a kind Internet Pollution, prompted into existence on a massive scale? Almost like the Pacific Ocean Guyre, swirling about where all the plastic floating debris gathering. How would you know? How could you tell? And worse yet, what if it’s got payments, transaction, eCommerce all built-in. The AI is a might lever, the attractiveness is there. But the potential for Internet Pollution is too. And I would say, thank goodness for folks like Olia, who are able to know/verify their sources and draw from teh web that was. Because it’s soon to be overwhelmed by the tsunami of prompted web that will be.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 