Proof of my existence is the real reason why I started blogging out here again.
Why? Whelp, you see, I’m not on social media anymore. I have come to understand the extreme negative emotional impact that social media has on people, including me. I’m also no longer interested in being Zuckerberg’s product to sell. Or Musk’s. Or any of them. So I kicked that habit four years ago and I never looked back (except a YouTube habit where I try really hard not to comment).
This has made me effectively invisible to the world beyond the very small circle of people who know me personally. Which is exactly the way it used to be prior to, say, 2001-ish when the blogosphere was a thing.
And that’s okay except I might have reason to someday want to prove that I’m a real human man who walks and talks and eats and breaths and whose nose does not grow when I lie. The reason is because I’m working on yet another novel (personal history suggests I won’t finish it). And the concern is Artificial Intelligence.
In a world where all the people you interact with are virtual, how do you tell the different between a real person and a manufactured one running in a data center somewhere?
How do you tell if art is authentically created by a human being, as opposed to created by fancy algorithms somewhere in the world?
Right now, as I write this, we are in the era of ChatGPT 4.0, and similar, which are good but not perfect. So at the moment people can generally tell if an AI is faking it (mostly because what AI does is usually too perfect, too over-produced). But soon there will be ChatGPT 5.0 and who knows what that will bring? Even if that doesn’t quite perfectly imitate a human being’s art, Elon Musk says we’re increasing the power of AI by a factor of 10 every six months. At that rate, it’s going to get real hard to tell Is It Real, Or Is It Memorex?
The answer lays in the realization that compute costs money. So what you do is leave so many virtual tracks across the face of the internet that it would cost more than its worth to fake it. Most people are (accidentally) accomplishing this by posting endlessly on Facebook or X or Instagram or some such. But I refuse to use those sites. Hence, this blog.
Make sense?
Of course, if you can’t imagine why it matters whether something was created by a real human being or by a machine, I suppose this whole thing is going to be a mystery to you.
I’m not right now telling anyone about this site, although it’s been around for long enough in one evolution or another that someone out there might stumble upon it. What I’m really doing is laying down tracks just in case someday it might matter.
Future proofing Proof of Life.
And, yes, I’m real and my nose doesn’t grow when I lie. Just sayin’.