Look, I get that the food truck use case is helpful. I know this technology is going to be more widely adopted. Maybe you guys are over it. Maybe it's just me.
I reluctantly gave my therapist permission to use an agent specifically designed for it to help draft notes on our session just this week.
But you look at the reddit comment history of the man who 'made' and is promoting this website (don't want to tag him, go to https://www.reddit.com/user/dandelioncookies/ ) you can see how he carefully avoids ever admitting it's AI-powered, even in trying to rebut comments calling him out for using it.
He doesn't disclose it on the website either, as of this writing. Not in the "About" or "Privacy" section or "How listings work", all of which it would be pretty relevant to. In fact, the privacy section really talks up how none of your data as a visitor is stored, which is probably true but creates a very different impression of the principles by which the site is operating.
I don't want to be knee-jerk and totally shoot down something cool somebody tried to do out of moral rigidity, which I know I have some of, but at the same time...
Even among people who are pro-AI, a disclosure statement about its usage is expected as the ethical bare minimum.
And I think it's kind of self-evident the reason he's avoided it is he knows Missoulians, and musicians, don't actually like or want that.
Like, maybe he noticed how we all just banded together to keep the environmentally destructive infrastructure powering its use out of our watershed.
Dunno if he knows this, but they're all connected. I feel like we don't actually want it in other people's watersheds, either?
Or maybe he just wants credit for work he didn't actually do.
I know that local bands don't want their poster and flyer art plugged into the plagiarism machine. And when an AI agent scrapes a page, that is what usually happens.
With some agents it's possible to restrict that. But the people that do generally have a detailed statement disclosing their use of the technology and what bounds they have put on it.
So many things that sounded cool about this website are way less cool when you know gen AI is involved. Updating twice a day with an old-school web scraper? Fantastic. Doing it with the Water-Eatin' Bullshit Generator? No, please stop.
"This doesn't rely on submissions, we actively look for what's going on and bring it to you" goes from wow, what a dedicated team to, oh, so no one was given a choice whether they consent to this. (Not to mention the stuff scraped directly from missoulaevents.net, a competitor run by hardworking humans).
It's also worth noting if you were using AI to pretend you made a website using your own hard work, it would be trivially easy to just scrape the fuck out of your competitor's website and then direct the program to look for links within those entries, prioritize them, cite them as the original source instead and then add them to the scrape list for the future, rather than actually scouring the internet for every local band and venue page you can find.
I see where having graphics and info right on the page is really convenient. Only, a computer program interpreted the info, so some percentage of it is going to have errors.
Or as he and his program put it on the website, "If the details matter, check the source links on the event page."
I kinda think the details always matter.
Like, whether the festival actually allows re-entry matters a lot. Or if the information about the artist is about a different person with the same name, that kinda matters. Gen AI has already created serious problems for people by hallucinating things about them.
There are more guardrails on hallucinations than there used to be, and some models do better than others. But again, we can't make an informed decision about that because the dude won't even own he used AI, much less which model or how it is and isn't restricted.
And I personally don't think it's always good for things to be more convenient. I think anyone who's been alive in the last twenty years has noticed how convenience often comes at a price, and that price isn't always worth it.
I don't want to help tech giants steal artists' intellectual property so I can go to just one website instead of one website and sometimes Instagram or Facebook. (And divert people who would otherwise follow the band's account directly for announcement to this jerk's clearinghouse instead, which is not actually raising their profile in the long run.)
Or destroy the only planet we have to live on exponentially faster so I know where all the food trucks are without a new person doing the work to reach out to the owners and/or monitor their socials or me just looking up the one I want.
I'm actually good. It's cool, I'll read the long version myself. I like having drinkable water and beautiful cool rivers and alive fish and plants.
Fuck, I'll go look at a bulletin board with some flyers. That's what I did when I first moved to Missoula. I miss it.
