Good morning to everyone except those who uncritically reproduce digital extractivism practices at the expense of other people’s work. Especially those who create algorithms to optimise these extractivist practices.

I’ve spoken before of my utter dislike for the thread reader bot and the issues surrounding consent in regards to taking people’s content and republishing it elsewhere without their consent. Here’s a short post on the topic https://artificeofintelligence.org/non-consensual-bots-and-personal-space/

and every day I log on this app and I see people gleefully RTing the decontextualised hell that is archillect and nah, do your basic research before you continue reproducing these extractivist practices. Their entire algorithm is *designed* to not give credit to creators.

From their About page: Archillect [archive + intellect] is a synthetic intelligence (or artificial intelligence, depending on the point of view) made to find and share inspiring visuals over social media channels. She is a living inspiration archive. She is a digital muse.

AND: Attribution is too hard so we made a decision to capitalise on creatives’ output without having to actually credit them for their hard work. I cannot make this up: “Please remember that Archillect is not human-operated.”

I view these extractivist practices via algorithm as part of a continuum of non consensuality that forces us into compliance to accept the predatory nature of capitalism. Every boundary is pushed so that we “accept”, be it extractivism of creative work, surveillance, violence etc

I've written a few threads about a continuum of non consensuality before. Here's one of the threads https://twitter.com/redlightvoices/status/1048871826489843712

But aside from non consensuality, there is also who gets to capitalise on creative work: who makes a name for themselves at the expense of others' labor. Because these algorithm or bot creators manage to sell their own “brand” and get invited to conferences, talks, symposiums etc

and I am not even touching on issues of creative control: these bots/ algorithms/ AI remove the works from the context in which they were created, aggregating them in a third party platform that the creator cannot control/ access. Here’s another thread https://twitter.com/redlightvoices/status/1029679167342825472

At the core of my issues with these extractivist practices is also an issue of epistemic justice. Marginalized creators have always had to contend with the knowledges they produced being either erased or appropriated. Now this practice is optimised through the algorithm.

The unroll thread bot is popular because people want to read in a familiar medium. Some of us actually choose this app as a medium. The archillect bot is popular because people love decontextualized "inspiration". Both are parasites in their own way.

TL;DR: stop enabling extractivism and epistemic injustice by uncritically reproducing these parasitic practices. Ultimately any algorithm *designed* to either non consensually erase creators or remove control from creators is part of a continuum of capitalist appropriation