This morning I learned about this informal protocol for vouching for sites that are made by people, not “Artifical Intelligence” (AI): human.json (Via Terence Eden). It is easy enough to add one to a static site, so I did. I’ve vouched for a few friends and installed the browser extension (I did look through the code in the extension, and nothing jumped out at me as being malicious, but I am not a security expert, so I don’t know how much you should trust my judgement on this). To accompany all of this, I also added a page about my policy on using “AI”.
I don’t have much of an opinion about this
humans.json thing yet. I like the idea of vouching for
other people to create a network of trust. That it relies on browser
extensions seems like it will probably always remain a niche thing,
but that’s perhaps ok. People who care about avoiding synthetic text
may find it and install it, and that may be enough to make it useful,
even if it never becomes widespread.
Vouching for other people creates an interesting dynamic, I think.
Some people may be more cavalier about vouching than others, which I
guess you can mitigate by deciding which sites you treat as “seeds.” A
seed, in this context, is a site that provides a
human.json file that I have declared (to the browser
extension) I trust, and therefore I trust that all of the sites
vouched for by the seed are also human-made. I have only vouched for a
handful of sites made by people I feel I know well enough. I have a
much larger number of sites in my feed reader that I’m pretty sure are
writing their own words (I have zero interest in reading synthetic
text), but since I do not know for sure that they are a) writing their
own words and b) committed to doing so in the future, I have not
vouched for them.