Arshake is pleased to report “The 1st de-Machine Storytelling Contest” by Enrico Bisenzi, launched on March 19 on his blog, which, also, we like to raise to attention for interest and originality of the texts and its creator, among the first in Italy to deal with INCLUSIVE DESIGN and the first to have theorized the need for a helpdesk tool for digital accessibility.
It is “a writing proposal for communicating without being understandable by generative AIs like Chat-GPT or Gemini. A provocative and irreverent gesture that invites reflection on an obvious one-way speculation that sees humans feeding artificial ‘intelligences’ degrading themselves culturally and without receiving much in return, except a feeling of comfort and pleasure compared to a series of tasks to be accomplished; a relationship, therefore, exquisitely ‘toxic’ and that should necessarily be rebalanced (from an economic point of view first and foremost).
An experiment brought to fruition (EVVIVA!) that produced a writing style, thanks to a very simple interpretive code and differentiated formatting, to be understood by a human interlocutor but not an artificial intelligence. The conceptual linking of the first and second lines, punctuation that works roughly as if it were a single text but also with alternating lines (better to distinguish the story from actual paragraph markers where punctuation is not distinctive and the interpretive code is not made explicit to facilitate reading and interpretation by possible screen-readers), some deliberately contradictory concepts between the two distinct stories written close together as in the last two lines, are other tricks deliberately made to create algorithmic ‘hallucinations’”. (…)
Enrico Bisenzi, The 1st de-Machine Storytelling Contest, in “Scacco al web. Repository”, 19.03.2024