Sunday, February 26, 2023

Why it is dangerous to use Artificial Intellegence as an editor.

While I'm not a fan of this Eurocentric colonial document, the so-called "Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms" (part of Canada Act 1982) lists as a fundamental freedom:

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;


I received an automated message from Blogger (Owned by Google) indicating an article titled "Evidence suggests broadcasters like the BBC don't want our money" written in January 2015 was unpublished.


From the email:

Why was your blog post unpublished?

Your content has violated our Spam policy. Please visit our Community Guidelines page linked in this email to learn more.

 

The Blogger Community Guidelines contains the following:


Spam
Do not spam. This may include unwanted promotional or commercial content, unwanted content that is created by an automated program, unwanted repetitive content, nonsensical content, or anything that appears to be a mass solicitation.



The first paragraph is a good summary of the article I wrote:


Some copyright holders and their lobbyists claim the reason people infringe Copyright is because they don't want to pay, and that copyright infringement is the largest single problem reducing their revenue potential. Evidence I've seen in my decades involved in the copyright revision process suggested neither are true, and that barriers put up by the copyright holders are the largest incentive to infringe and the largest barrier to revenue potential.


(Full article with original links available via the Wayback Engine).


There isn't anything in that article that could remotely be considered SPAM.  Sure, there were links to the BBC and their iPlayer (pages that no longer exist), but that wasn't as a promotion of their product or service but a critique of the corporation.

To get the article back up I have done some link checking (removing broken links), and removed any links to BBC.

I don't know if it was an employee at the BBC (or a devotee of the corporation) that flagged the content for review by a Google bot, but I have a hard time understanding the potential motivations of anyone else.

First rule of BBC club is that you can't talk about BBC club?

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