This post is part of a series I'll be writing on Artificial Intelligence. I'll come back and link to the other articles in the series as they are published.
There has always been some amount of machine-generated material on the Internet but it has become exceptionally more common over the last year or so. This is a problem (I'll save diving-into why this is a problem for another post) and I'm desperate for a solution.
When I can't find a solution within the industry I'm working in I often look for analogies from other industries and one that came to mind is food labeling. Most people have some awareness of what's in the food they consume, and this demand led to requirements for food to be labeled to make it easier for people to know what they are putting into their bodies. I feel the same way about what I put into my mind, so I thought "what if we had labels like this for websites?".
I posted something along these lines into the fediverse and my friend Preston came up with an even more elegant variation of it: the Real Seal:
What I love about this is the simplicity. We can start doing this today, just pick a seal and start adding it to the things you create and publish to the internet. If we use the same seal, it should be fairly straightforward to filter-out stuff that doesn't have the seal. If we want to get fancy we could create a registration process akin to how the actual Real Seal works, but in the spirit of Good Enough Software I don't want to put-off doing this just because we can do it better later.
As I am famously bad at most forms of visual design, I'm hoping that someone with such skills will volunteer to create such a seal and donate it to the cause. If this sounds like you, get in touch.
Until then (and in traditional punk-rock fashion) I'm just going to use the Real Seal to stamp everything that I, a human, create and share with the rest of you and once someone creates a new seal we can go back and update things, make ambitious plans for registration and indexing and all that great stuff that will eventually make it possible for people like you and me to search the internet for healthy, human-created brain foods. 