It’s funny, I’d genuinely say that Gravatar improved for quite some time. In the old days it was fine, then for quite some time under Automattic when they started fiddling with it it was ridiculously bad and for a while even literally unusable due to broken tie-in to WordPress.com accounts or something (I forget), then they finally got it together again so that it was arguably better than before they took it over, with the caveat that they had expanded its scope a little so there was foolish distraction, but at least the core flow was actually better… but then they’ve continued fiddling with it.
At a cursory glance, this “AI Context” thing is just frivolous AI-washing of the profiles feature they put in some years ago for humans to be able to read. I’m tired of that sort of thing, and products advertising features as being AI Ready™ for an Agentic Future™, when those features are just as meaningful for poor humans.
You have to read the image to figure out what they're talking about.
Subtitled "Add more info to your profile to help AI know you better"
Presumably llm scraping bots scrape gravatar, so they're adding a set of profile fields so bots will scrape and know more about you.
You could just call this a public profile and people wouldn't freak out, do it or don't, it's not like you're particularly paranoid if you're using gravatar.
But this one mentions AI instead of just calling it a profile and this person reacted ... like this.
Myeah, the first thing I saw when opening it on mobile is that the top logo is not centered and the menu is not displaying properly ("About" item single on a line with some random left margin).
Not that I care but then I was confused by the two comments here praising the design.
However I am a bit confused by the author's remarks
> I do NOT EVER consent to ANYTHING being done in regard to AI in my name.
> With newer sites like Bio Link and FediProfile I don't see the usefulness of Gravatar. If anything, I think it now has ANTI-features.
It's conflicting to mention Bio Link with the author's ideology since it quite prominently has:
- AI assistant to answer visitor questions based off of your "links, descriptions, posts, and a short knowledge base"
- AI site builder
At a cursory glance, this “AI Context” thing is just frivolous AI-washing of the profiles feature they put in some years ago for humans to be able to read. I’m tired of that sort of thing, and products advertising features as being AI Ready™ for an Agentic Future™, when those features are just as meaningful for poor humans.
Subtitled "Add more info to your profile to help AI know you better"
Presumably llm scraping bots scrape gravatar, so they're adding a set of profile fields so bots will scrape and know more about you.
You could just call this a public profile and people wouldn't freak out, do it or don't, it's not like you're particularly paranoid if you're using gravatar.
But this one mentions AI instead of just calling it a profile and this person reacted ... like this.
I'm on my phone in bed so I can't inspect the page, but by all appearances it 16pt Arial...
Is the web in such a poor state that this is a revelation?
Not that I care but then I was confused by the two comments here praising the design.