STFN

Human JSON - community against AI generated content

Yesterday, Michał Sapka, Poland's favourite blogger according to a certain Australian posted on the Fediverse a toot about human.json.

human.json is intended to be a way of presenting that this specific website is written by humans, not AI. It also allows to vouch for other websites, that the author of this one knows that those other websites are also written by humans.

I would call it a reputation based system of proving a website's human origins (how creepy does it sound, doesn't it?). In contrast to something like GitHub stars, it is more personal and works based on people you already know. I am quite sure that Michał is a human that writes his blog with his human fingers touching his fancy retrocomputing keyboard. With human.json I can see that he vouches for some other website, so I can relatively safely assume that this other website is also written by a person of flesh and bone (this is getting even creepier).

In technical terms, all an owner of a website needs to do is add a human.json file on the server, and link to it using a <meta> tag in the site's header. That JSON file consists of the canonical URL to their own website, and a list of websites they vouch for. Simple.

The second part is to install a browser extension that will show, when visiting the websites, that their author declares itself human, and also how many other people vouched for them not being a murderous bot able to withstand an exploding fuel tanker truck.

The AI generated slop flooding the internets is a problem that is only growing. I don't know of any simple and sure way to tackle it, probably such a solution does not exist. But we can and should oppose it, and human.json sounds in my opinion like a good tool to have. With it we can build a public network of mutual connections and use it as a shield against the dying of the human web.

I've been listening recently to the Late Night Linux podcast and one of the main reasons I listen to it is because those guys don't sugarcoat the world, they are angry as I am about the current state of things. In the last episode, I think it was Féilim who said we had 20 good years of using the Internet, and now it's ending because of the AI slop and attacks on people's privacy. I started using the internet somewhere around 1999, and for me always its strengths and features was it being anarchic, egalitarian, free (both as in beer and speech), and everyone could be anonymous as much as they wanted. And this is ending with bullshit like AI crawlers DDOSing websites, and destroyers of anonymity like age verification being implemented by lawmakers.

We are not in a great situation, and I'm glad even such small things like human.json are being implemented to fight it.

I implemented it on my blog and added a few people from the top of my head. If you would like to be added or removed from that list, send me an email or contact me through the Fediverse, links in the footer.

Thanks for reading!

Other bloggers that I found implementing human.json: Terence Eden, Neil Brown

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