Braincrafted or Heartmade?
There is a village in Cyprus, an island nation in the Mediterranean Sea, called Lefkara. It is a beautiful place in the heart of the island, filled with lots of small shops and tavernas. Historically famous for its lace (known as 'λευκαρίτικα' in Greek) and silver handicrafts, the pride in these crafts is still palpable there. However, it's also painfully obvious that the highly skilled masters of the past have lost their battle with industrialisation and mass production. Their small shops feel like the last stronghold of the human-made art with their 'handmade' posters all over the place.
I had the same feeling while visiting Side, an ancient city located on the southern coast of Turkey. In 334 BC, they stamped coins for Alexander the Great. Now, they're selling counterfeit “Abibas” goods to European tourists.
That war is long lost, and the heartless advance of globalisation is not the point I want to make now. Instead, I'd like to focus on those 'handmade' posters and what they represent in the digital age.
In an analog world, it's us, humans, who started producing and making stuff first. Then, we invented the technology to do it more effectively and make the stuff more accessible to everyone. Eventually, we gave the means of production away to big corporations and automatic systems.
The same is happening in the digital world with content and AI, but here's the difference — we're trying to highlight the content made with AI using special tags and labels (rightfully so). It's the right thing to do. However, I'm afraid we will lose this battle too, as AI companies don't like to follow any guidelines or respect any guardrails — such as robots.txt.
What if we follow the same path and start labeling content produced by humans and human brains, similar to the craftsmen in Lefkara? If laces and silver can be handmade, what would you call such content? Human-generated? Braincrafted? Soul-sourced?
Just a small idea, and it's fun. In a sense, we're already labeling human-generated content, and it's called a paywall.