Curation is the last best hope of intelligent discourse

"The indiscriminate proliferation of AI-generated content will not empower the underrepresented or democratise knowledge creation... [but] dilute and fragment the authenticity and reliability of information ... the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against misinformation and mediocrity".

Why? Human curators :

• "bring nuanced understanding, contextual awareness, ethical judgment"
• "can distinguish between nuanced arguments, recognise cultural subtleties, and evaluate the credibility of sources"
• are "a filter for quality", signalling "meaningful and trustworthy content amidst the overwhelming [AI] noise"

Following the POSSE principle, combined with Fediverse social networks, "respected voices ... create islands of sanity amidst oceans of machine-generated content of questionable provenance". This content is then syndicated and combined by their follower networks "across the social web, providing an alternative to centralised, algorithmically boosted feeds. This distributed, decentralised model follows the architecture of the web itself... a rethinking of information democracy around engaged participation and critical thinking".

This is enabled by long-forgotten RSS, which provides people with "open standard feeds completely uncensored by any central platform ... [giving] agency to readers in determining their own information diet ... creators direct relationships with their audience". This is apparently Venkatesh Rao's "commonsism": to "let readers again own their own attention journey".

By publishing on their own sites, we get the needed "visibility into source provenance and credibility signals... We know exactly who authored the narratives and can evaluate them accordingly," with each piece of content having its own "origin story" - a lovely concept which fits right into my idea of Hubs and massivewikis as the public-facing edges of a content creation pipeline, where the author can invite their friends into the pipeline's middle to collaborate.

What role for AI? "Generative algorithms ... reinforce existing islands of curated insight instead of fully replacing them. Constructed carefully with hybrid human-machine curation in mind, these technologies can be a positive force" - cf How Artificial Intelligence will finance Collective Intelligence.

"Reclaiming even partial agency in navigating knowledge networks is an act of self-care."