An updated update
[Heavily edited as an update posted on 3/9/26]
Yes, it has been a very long time since the last post…not that any of them ever came quickly to begin with…
So what’s been happening?
What I continue to see every day are articles and posts that continue to throw around the words ‘photography/photographic’ —and especially, ‘photo’ —with both ignorant and deliberate misapplication.
What “AI” and many of its most fervent users and abusers are doing is perpetrating fraud. Fraud is a word with legal defintions and consequences. Fraud is a word I have been using—very deliberately— in comments to posts I see that practice this deception. I intend to ensure that photography becomes fully understood by the public so that they can recognize fraudulent imagery, but more importantly, fraudulent narratives, nomenclature, and semantic blurring when they see and read it. When photography finally has a standardized legal definition, all fraudulent activities, linguistic associations, and catachrestic (please learn and use this word) use of terminology will have legal consequences..
So the question is, when will 2.4 post?
I now have over 4,000 hours of research under my belt. The vast majority is source review. Lots of it. I don’t know how many primary sources I have found. I have looked at thousands of secondary/tertiary or worse books, papers, and articles. This has resulted in finding a surprising number of miscitations in the existing literature, including academic papers, and, needless to say (but I must), endless posts that recycle the same …stuff…over and over again. There is an endless supply of content produced about complex subjects that have been condensed to a few lines as “research” to produce their endless streams of online posts to hold their audience. All of this has resulted in hundreds of hours of unplanned side excursions to find, catalogue, and correct, if possible.
And then there is the other class of miscitations. I don’t just mean misplaced or mistranscribed footnotes or endnotes. I mean citations that don’t match the source content. I’m talking about cites that have been passed along as references, obviously never actually consulted. This is the …stuff… beyond-disturbing, being created or assimilated into the corpus of material that is ending up in AI-assisted search (what has quickly become the prime subject on sister publication ThisOldGoat), and that will become part of next year’s training corpus. I have increasingly had to deal with wasted time catching, correcting, and “feedbacking” about truncated search, search summaries, and hallucinations. It’s bad enough when these issues are in English “sources,” but much of my research is in foreign language materials, made maddeningly difficult when the AIs hallucinate by creating non-existent sources in other languages that end up being found in assisted search and summaries that I then have to transcribe, translate, verify, and vet. I don’t trust them to assist in my work.
So yes, 2.4 and a related series of sideposts are coming. One sidepost will be a deep-dive diatribe against the continuing assault on language and the implications of that on this and other historically-based projects, and so many other aspects of civic living, commerce, law, and government. If you have been paying attention, you will have noticed many references I have made regarding issues of historical anachronism and how the problem is deeply rooted in language. The point will be made much more frequently in 2.4 (why it is time for the sidepost). Given the nature of defintions, legal and common, this is a parallel core subject of equal weight to all others.
2.4 will be an eye-opener, and eyebrow-raiser, and I hope, make some lightbulbs come on over our collective heads as we examine things “everybody knows.” Other posts and sideposts are also in parallel development, which is slowing me down now, but will help bring the next posts along more quickly.