Neocities, AI, and my personal take
Heads up
This blog post contains outdated information! For up to date information, please visit the site that I made for this.
https://ai-petition.neocities.orgTimeline
On June 2nd 2023, Kyle Drake posted a blog post about his thoughts on AI.
You can view this blog here(archive).
On April 1st 2024, a coding assistant (AI) called "Daria" was introduced to the editor.
On April 21st, I noticed that in the editor there was another coding assistant called Penelope.
Penelope was no longer visible sometime between me sending a message about it and when Jodie finally responded. I have heard nobody else talk about this initial sighting of Penelope so I felt it was important to dig up this chat log.
On July 7th 2024, it was discovered that the code is still in place for Penelope.
Link to Reddit Post(archive)
In the post, Kyle responded to a comment. This account is a moderator for the neocities subreddit so I am pretty sure it's not someone pretending to be him.
What I can't yet add to this timeline is the reason why people are currently talking about it. I have no clue and have found no definitive source yet.
Update
Penelope is for sure still in the source code of the editor, I have taken a screenshot of it myself because I got a email asking about it.
If you change none to block on the line below, penelope's chatbox window appears
<div class="col right-col chat-container" style="display: none">
Attempting to talk with penelope results in a error
If you have firefox and want to check it out yourself, open the source code within the editor, press ctrl + f, then type "penelope". It should be the second one.
My personal thoughts
I have a hard time justifying the majority of what Kyle said in his blog. Getting caught up on the idea that people compare AI's danger to that of nuclear threat is... interesting albeit missing the point. AI poses lots of danger but getting caught up on just one thing feels wrong. He does mention that AI contributes to climate change but said it in a way that feels like he's trying to discredit safe.ai.
If it's found out that our data is being used for training purposes or they try to add the coding assistants back, jumping ship is perfectly justified. If that does happen then there are alternatives to neocities like nekoweb. Sometime soon after writing this, I'm going to make a easy guide for making your own website on a virtual private server.
In the reddit comment that Kyle made, he states that he wants to impliment AI in a way that does not alienate people that don't want to use it so it's on hold for now. I don't think this is possible with any form of social media including neocities without alienating the group that does not want it and/or an outright worse experience for everyone. This also ignores the fact that Kyle stated in his blog post that there are climate change concerns with AI. The fact that it's "on hold" implies he still plans on implementing it at some point.
Within the midst of my neocities feed blowing up about this, I found out that if you want to avoid ai webcrawlers you can setup a file called robots.txt. Copy and paste the contents of https://owly.fans/robots.txt into your robots.txt file and you should be good to go.
If you feel like protesting, you can join me in mirroring your site over to nekoweb.org and/or sign the petition below and call for the removal of AI/ML/Coding Assistants from neocities and it's future plans. The petition is here The petition will stay open until January 18th 2025. I will send the results directly to Kyle Drake.