hackernews — Unattributed

AI and Cognitive Dissonance

July 26, 2026

The old Postville Courthouse in Lincoln, Illinois, via The Library of Congress. Abraham Lincoln practiced law there from 1847 to 1859.

Well, as a surprise to me, my silly little Gravatar article was posted to Hacker News. This has called a lot of attention to the post, and made for some interesting comments. The most interesting of this is the claim that I have “cognitive dissonance”:

We live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don't you'd go insane.

This article is perhaps a good example of that. On the one hand live in public (post blogs, use the same avatar on multiple sites) but at the same time try and control how that publicness is consumed (humans only, no AI).

Right now, whatever you make public is in AI. Whether that is on HN, or your blog, or wherever. You may not like that, but public is ultimately public.

Ironically a blog post about leaving some service because they used the marketing phrase “AI”, is immediately added to the AI training corpus.

So, of course, I feel the need to respond to this.

First off, I don't have cognitive dissonance on this topic. Instead, I would say I have a rather refined set of principles when it comes to AI. But, I'm sure you aren't here to read all my thoughts on AI. So, I will summarize them as: AI is a technology that holds promise, but at this time it's not ready for public consumption. Despite what Alphabet, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other companies have you believing, there is still a lot of work and research that needs to be done. And, it seems that a substantial portion of the AI research community agrees with this stance, according to a report published by the AAAI.

Now, on to the idea that “whatever you make public is in AI.”

The questions surrounding this are matters for legal discourse. There are, in fact, many ongoing lawsuits with respect to AI companies (OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, et al.) vacuuming up large quantities of copyrighted material into their system. There are currently 163 cases according to this tracker. Not just in the United States, but globally. Anthropic settled one case already, to the tune of $1.5 Billion, which shows that there is reason to believe these companies are aware of the harms they are doing in violating the ownership of the works they are ingesting.

This is not a matter of public versus private. This is a matter of ownership. In the U.S. and quite a few countries works are owned by their creators automatically on creation. Sharing a work publicly does not remove that ownership. Works are not transferred into the public domain for lengthy periods of time, unless the creator explicitly assigns their works to the public domain. (And, even then it's difficult to do. See the reasoning behind the Creative Commons 0 license.)

My ownership of a work means I have the right to control how that work is reproduced. I could, for example, assign the rights to reproduce the work to a publisher. Or I could transfer those rights to a foundation or another organization. I can even reproduce the work publicly, while still maintaining ownership of the work.

Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. are potentially a different matter. Originally they stated that their reproduction of your posts did not transfer ownership to them. However, over time, they have slid more and more towards a position that they have the right to reproduce your work in ways they feel is appropriate (this was mostly for advertising originally, but that's becoming increasingly blurry these days).

Alphabet has a contract with Reddit to slurp up users postings, and they are certainly using Gmail, YouTube and as many other sources as they can to train their AI. Meta is almost certainly using Facebook, Instagram, and What's App to train their AI's. And Elon's companies are doing whatever they can to feed Grok. But I don't have to capitulate to this loss of ownership. I've left all of those platforms behind for a reason. They might have whatever relics are left over from my time there, but I never agreed to their usage to feed AI systems, and I won't willingly provide them with more fodder.

Hopefully this clears up the misunderstanding that I might have “cognitive dissonance” where AI is concerned.

As a final side note: I was amused by the side discussion regarding the aesthetics of my site. As noted, the font is indeed Work Sans. And, I have done some very minor tweaks in terms of the spacing to make it nicely readable. The overall structure of the site is designed to be minimal. And, through its minimal design I'm aiming for each page to be small and fast loading (there is an issue here, which is based on how the underlying platform works). There are no images in the footer, the buttons are all HTML. The images I use are hand edited to reduce their size (I aim for under 250K per image). As for the color: I just wanted an earthy tone, but yeah, tan isn't really my favorite color either. As for the person that said they didn't like the logo, well what can I say? :) The logo is meant to be mildly humorous—the “A” being a triangle is intended to be a slight visual cue to the name “Unattributed” being a joke about the Attribution clause of the Creative Commons license. (IE, “Attribution: Unattributed”) Yeah—I know it's a joke that passes over most people heads.

Categories: #Features Tags: #AI, #HackerNews, #repsonse, #cognitivedissonance, #public, #ownership, #copyright License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.