Things I'll Never Do - Ethics on Hive

The topic of ethical online behaviour is fascinating and convoluted.

I believe Hive actually simplifies a lot of it, with some clearly identfied activities that are always considered unacceptable. Plagiarism, using unsourced images or ones where you don't have permission to use them for what is effectively commercial gain.

For Hive users, these are all no-brainers. I'll never do any of those things, full stop.

Image by Janos Perian from Pixabay

But there are a couple of other things where there are effectively unspoken or unwritten rules. Let me tell you about two of them.

Upvoting Yourself

It is generally considered bad form to upvote your own posts, and (quite rightly) doing so tends to attreact matching downvotes from those who look out for such things.

There's a more insidious form of it which is a little harder to spot unless you're really looking. Many Hivers have several accounts. It's totally legitimate, and there are often good reasons for it. You could have a main account, one where you stick savings, a community account or two, and maybe another account where you post about specific different topics (possibly even controversial ones). I'm thinking of creating an account for my business in the near future, although even that won't get me near the profusion of accounts some people seem to have.

But I'll promise you one thing.

I will never use one of my accounts to upvote any of my other accounts.

Nor, for that matter, will I cross-comment from one account to another. Each is it's own separate entity. It's fair to say however that I may upvote people I follow from multiple accounts. The reality is that right now only one of my accounts has a serious vote value, but curating with the smaller ones is a good way to gradually build their value.

AI-Generated Text

The "rules" on AI generated text seem to currently vary from community to community. But most ban it, and it seems to be generally frowned upon.

I'll be honest and say that I'm a profligate user of AI-generated images to illustrate my posts. I'm a rubbish artist, and I find that creating images with AI art generators (however imperfect they are) can help create the right "tone" for a post. But I will always, always put a credit on them making clear they are AI created and which tool I used.

AI text is another matter entirely. I hate it with a passion. I will never use it, nor will I use AI-created text to create an outline for my posts.

It can be hard to detect, particularly on Hive where for a lot of Hivers English isn't their first language. I'm okay with relying on translation tools, even if they include an AI component.

To me, the most important thing of all is keeping the spark of human creativity alive. It's something AI can't replicate (at least not yet !).

Particularly in creative writing, I find AI generated stories to be drab, overly linear, structured formulaically and lacking truly imaginative plot twists. I've never been surprised by an AI written story, while a good human-written post can include true emotion and have plot twists that come out of left-field and really make me think.

What do yo uthink of AI-generated content ? Does it have a place on Hive for more news and statistics-type posts, or should we stick with humans ?

Posted using The BBH Project