Recap
A post about what Archillect is
After the recent talks on twitter regarding what Archillect is and what it isn’t, I felt the need to respond in a more permanent way. As far as my small plain twitter experience goes with responding to certain types of arguments, I believe having this article here may help answering to some question marks, hopefully more permanently.
Let’s start with the basics.
What Archillect is
- Archillect is an experimental design project.
- Archillect is a bot (or an AI, if you will).
- Archillect is a non human curator.
- Archillect is a public service.
What makes me smile?
My primary reason for creating Archillect was to save time when finding inspiring* or beautiful visual content. She* started as a personal project, she* outgrew herself pretty quickly, and now the project reaches and satisfies millions of people every single day. I’m happy that this happened.
What is the problem?
As an account that shares 144 images per day, Archillect has a great invisible task: Make her audience reach to the work and their creators.
Why “invisible”? Because most people (including myself) do not really care where the content comes from. There has been many debates around the key topic of this article on social media: Attribution.
Therefore, as the creator of a system with a reach this huge I completely agree that the addressed issue is valid.
This is why there is @archillinks account as a part of the project that responds to every Archillect tweet with possible sources of the image.
Then what is the problem?
The problem according to some, is that Archillinks and Archillect are different accounts. Some believe that image sources should be a part of every Archillect post rather than a response from another account.
On other social media accounts of Archillect, such as tumblr, this is already an implemented feature. Every post already has their sources as a part of the post. Here is an example:
This is possible on tumblr, because the platform has an ability to handle sources. For instance, every “Photo Post” has a “sources” section when making the post submission. As a result, as long as that field is not empty, sources are there for each post. And as a result, Archillect has that ability as well.
However on twitter, there is no technical way to handle sources of the posted content. A tweet is just a tweet with only a few entities and “source” is not one of them.
And once again, this is why there is a separate @archillinks account as a part of the project that @ replies to every Archillect tweet with more than one sources of the image. Those @ replies are visible to everyone including Archillect’s followers.
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Here is the blog post of what else was tried before archillinks, and why Archillect and Archillinks had to be separate accounts:
There is also another article I’ve published before archillinks account was made, about how the word “Attribution” may be interpreted differently by different communities.
What makes me frown?
Occasionally I get negative responses that lead to improper aspired public shaming and blaming. A few times this built up to insults and hate speech against Archillect, sometimes against me.
As a result this causes a lot of information noise and misdirection. Makes me wonder to see the folk who think this kind of behavior is the way to handle or improve this kind of a case.
Also, I see some interesting public opinion on what Archillect is, and I want to respond to some of them here.
Assuming that Archillect is a museum where every artist in her collection should be paid, is a funny idea! But I like it. I wish some day this becomes a reality. Hopefully in an automated way! For now, museums and bots are different things. Archillect, is a bot.
Assuming that Archillect is an AI employer that should pay every image collected is a radical idea. Hopefully one day. As a creator that made various types of visual work that’s shared tens of millions of times all over social media, I would want this as well! For now, employers and public services are different things. Archillect, is a public service.
Assuming that Archillect has a Patreon page to steal and resell things, is a messed up theory. Sharing this all around social media is even worse. Just like any other creator, I have a Patreon page to do various things. Have a read before sharing the nonsense.
Assuming that Archillect is evil and does evil things, is an evil idea. I don’t have a response to that, besides re-stating that Archillect is only an experimental design project.
What Else
Even if Archillect had no way to source, as she* was in the beginning, it would still bring attention to creators. Mathematically speaking, having your creation shared to a massive community always wins in comparison to not having it shared at all.
“It (your work) was obviously too beautiful and got her (archillect’s) attention.”
Since @archillinks, Archillect shares sources all over social media. As mentioned above, on twitter this is in the form of @archillinks, on platforms that allow embedded sourcing per posts (such as Tumblr) the source is already a part of the posted content.
Additionally, if you are familiar with how I operate Archillect, you should also know that I manually check comments on daily basis, retweet found @ handles of creators in those comments and boost up charming content that goes to #archillect hashtag.
Conclusion
Archillect is developed quite experimentally. I try to make the project as good as possible through trial and error, iteration and feedback. Besides keeping this project alive technically, there is a ton of effort went into this project. So, I’m happy when people enjoy the project as much as I do.
Archillect may have started as a personal project but with the current reach the project would be defined much better as “public service”. A public service that serves visual content to many. Just as Google, or Pinterest, or Weheartit, or Giphy, project Archillect aims to bring content to the people that are looking for it, rather than claiming to be the creator of the content. Any other assumptions would only be shallow.
Archillect lives on the internet. As a result, she* has common internet problems that are much bigger than her. Such as bad sources in @archillinks.
Overall, I’m very glad and motivated that there is a debate going on around the topics: Attribution, Automation, Appreciation, Curation and of course Innovation. I’m happy that Archillect triggered attribution related public topics revolving around automated curation and AI’s.
[*] Have a look at the following article by if you are wondering why Archillect, as an AI, is referred as a “she”.
