Can we find a corner that has not been polluted?

admin@example.com — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 12:33:24 +0000

I am truly blessed to be able to travel quite a bit but something really hit home earlier in May during our trip to Punta Seca, Sucre 🇨🇴

Despite staying at a 2km stretch of beach that was only accessible via a 8 minute motorboat ride we found plastic pollution on the beach. Not much but still very much present.

Bear in mind we're staying at a private stretch of beach which only has 20 homes of which probably 2 more max were occupied during our stay.

But how remote? Well our uber to the airport was booked for 3:30am for 5am flight followed by more than 2 hrs drive + the last boat trip which means we arrived at 13:00 or 9.5 hours after leaving home. So it's fair to say that it's fairly remote.

And if you stay at a large beach resort the story is pretty much the same. Despite having dozens of workers cleaning the beach every morning about the same amount of rubbish slips their net and you only have to stray off the manicured resort beaches 10 mins to find remote but truly polluted beaches.

And today we learn that AWS estimates that 57% of all Internet content is now AI-generated. Mix that with the fact that AI models will collapse when using AI generated content as training data and we're facing our very microbeads pollution moment. And as much as plastic bottle manufacturers are being forced to keep their caps attached to their bottles we can imagine how this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I see several issues in had right now:

Labelling content produced by humans and otherwise
Making sure we continue to produce high quality content
The ethics surrounding both otherwise our techbro overloads will rape us before we realise it with their own intrinsic biases

It's time to recognise that we're going to have to think about cleaning our beaches and doing our active piece to solve this puzzle as part of our holidaying. We simply can't consume without contributing back.

In once sense I miss the days of Web 2.0 and even the innovation behind BitTorrent which encouraged participating by default as intrinsic to taking.

ps: I recommend reading the Open Access paper on https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493. it's just a shame it's a little to early days for www.alphaxiv.org as the authors have not claimed it no are there any comments on it yet https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v3

Ideas that come to mind as I'm inspired but what happens around us.

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Can we find a corner that has not been polluted?