Announcing Stop Gen AI Twitch Fest 1! The event is to raise money for our mutual aid, so we can help poor people survive. The event takes place between November 9th and November 23rd, 2025. We are looking for Twitch streamers to participate. We will promote your streams before and during the event. You may do your usual Twitch streaming and your usual monetization for the event, we simply ask for you to temporarily add our Ko-Fi widget and mention our fundraiser occasionally during your streams.
See stopgenai.com/Twitch for more information. Thank you!
Our members have been very busy working in the background, working on publicity and planning for our organization’s success. Last week, Kim, Mel, and Emmi spoke to a well known journalist. We have also been working with PR to hopefully do some higher profile media.
When media appearances become publicly available, you’d better believe we will hype the hell out of them. We recommend signing up for our newsletter in the side bar on the right. All we need is your email address.
Getting media attention is crucial because it’s necessary for our mission to raise mutual aid funds for human survival and to educate the public on why and how they should avoid Gen AI.
I (Kim Crawley) have made friendly contact with Dr. Olivia Guest, author of this new academic work on the harms of Gen AI that has deservedly been getting a lot of attention:
What Does ‘Human-Centred AI’ Mean? via Arxiv.org
Mirror of PDF, hosted on StopGenAI.com
Introduction:
While it seems sensible that human-centred artificial intelligence (AI) means centring “human behaviour and experience,” it cannot be any other way. AI, I argue, is usefully seen as a relationship between technology and humans where it appears that artifacts can perform, to a greater or lesser extent, human cognitive labour. This is evinced using examples that juxtapose technology with cognition, inter alia: abacus versus mental arithmetic; alarm clock versus knocker-upper; camera versus vision; and sweatshop versus tailor. Using novel definitions and analyses, sociotechnical relationships can be analysed into varying types of: displacement (harmful), enhancement (beneficial), and/or replacement (neutral) of human cognitive labour. Ultimately, all AI implicates human cognition; no matter what. Obfuscation of cognition in the AI context — from clocks to artificial neural networks — results in distortion, in slowing critical engagement, perverting cognitive science, and indeed in limiting our ability to truly centre humans and humanity in the engineering of AI systems. To even begin to de-fetishise AI, we must look the human-in-the-loop in the eyes.
William Lavelle’s Haven Kickstarter still has 12 days to go. Please, please, please donate or share!
Blurb from author:
Social media megacorporations have entirely enshittified themselves, and work to exploit, manipulate, and spy on their users. Creators on these sites are subject to the whims of a fickle, inscrutable algorithm, and have to spend hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology to avoid getting shadowbanned. Floods of AI bots steal any written work or art they can find in order to mass produce cheap imitations, and send any pictures of your face they can find to Big Brother-esque facial recognition mass surveillance dragnets.
We’re here to stop that.
We’re building a video-based social media, very similar to TikTok, but without the malice of today’s social media sites. Our platform will:
- Protect users from invasive surveillance firms like PimEyes and Clearview.AI, the company that famously scraped billions of pictures off of Facebook to use in a facial recognition surveillance dragnet. We do this by modifying all footage of users in a way that makes it indecipherable to facial recognition models.
- Protect artists from having their art stolen by generative AI art models without copyright. Every video and image uploaded to our platform is automatically “poisoned” against AI, with no effort required from you. If an AI ingests the art to use as training material, the AI cannot learn anything from it, or worse, learns wrong. This gives artists the power to enforce their creative rights! If AI companies respect the artist’s wish to not have their art used to train AI, or if they pay the artist for the unpoisoned version, they’ll be fine. But if they use the art without the artist’s permission, the AI model ingests poison. We’re essentially setting landmines for the AI. Artists are a majorly influential faction online, and we’ll be the best place for them to post.
Currently, in order to poison your art, you first have to own a expensive graphics card and have the technical know-how to set up the software. Haven will break down this barrier, making it easy and free for anyone to protect their art!
- Protect users from the severe censorship enforced by today’s platforms. I feel such dread for the future when I see words like “unalive”, “s3ggs”, “le dollar bean”, and “Ta!wan”. We’re creating a place where people don’t have to worry about being shadowbanned for talking about topics important to them.
- Promote healthy use of social media. Social media companies want you to doomscroll, and they want you to be angry! It makes them more money! But I believe this is dangerous and self-destructive for society. They’re making people constantly tense and scared and worsening everyone’s mental health to make cash. To prevent this, we’re building the best time limit functionality into Haven.
For the same reason, our algorithm will also promote quality content over engaging-by-any-means content. On other platforms, creators will intentionally post enraging, drama-stirring, exaggerated-strawman content because any interaction, even negative interaction, counts as engagement, and more engagement means more algorithmic boost. We prevent this by promoting videos based off the amount of positive engagement with the video, not total engagement. Don’t feed the trolls.
- Provide a honest, transparent recommendation algorithm. Do you want the beloved reverse chronological feed back? You’ll get it with us! Most platforms force their creators to be at the mercy of a fickle, inscrutable, manipulative algorithm. You may already know from experience how this adds a lot more stress and work! It’s frustrating to make good videos and have the algorithm basically shadowban them because you tripped an invisible tripwire! We make our algorithm’s inner workings very clear and well-explained, to help creators develop a trusting relationship with us.
- Compensate our creators better than anywhere else, by giving users money when they help us categorize posts or report rule-breaking posts, which they can give directly to their favorite creators. (in addition to normal creator compensation)
- Make it easy to protect all your videos and art at once. Moving lots of content from one site to another can be tedious, so we’ll move all your videos, art, and following list over for you!
Thank you, everyone!
Please share this post.