Why Gate-Keeping Technology is Wack 

A few years ago, before I started developing Violet Verse and when I was new to Miami and the tech scene in general, I began attending tech meetups to share ideologies and concepts with fellow technologists, including those building communications-based AI products.

I will never forget the conversation I had with a technologist who was building a product using AI. I was curious to know how they went about building their AI product because I deeply wanted to create my own. To my surprise, I was told that "special permission was required" to access GPT-3 models from a "special community in Silicon Valley."

Wow, I thought. There are so many hidden barriers to accessing the inner workings of technology. I wondered what else I didn't know existed because I had never been to the mythical place called Silicon Valley.

Anyway, his response left me deeply concerned, and I thought about it for months. Even the universe caught on to my curiosity and started pinging me with AI inspirations and little tests to see just how much I was smitten by the long-lost world of AI.

A part of me believed I wasn't good enough to access AI, let alone be one of the few people training the very same models millions of people are using today. But here we are, healing and building our worth - barometer. The underlying problem is that I had been a fool in gatekeeping. It wasn't the technologist's fault for delivering me the news; I blame it on whoever was in charge of distributing the GPT-3s. It wasn't that my ideas—a Clueless-style smart closet or a shopping widget that could change the face of personal style for girls, gays, and theys—were a total flop. It was that my ideas were in the wrong hands and blocked by a gate.

Looking back at the situation, maybe we were in the midst of a technological boom that was being held back by the gatekeeping powers that be. Society shifts in tech, money, and culture come in cycles. They take decades to become something - just look at the internet from the 90s. Now, technology shifts are happening more rapidly, leaving humans to figure out how all of this makes sense.  In a world where the speed at which technology gets mass adoption is getting closer together, their early-stage AI app quickly became irrelevant a few months later when Artificial intelligence became open-source, thanks to OpenAI and the work they are doing to make it more available. 

Read more: OpenAI Shakes Up AI Industry with Launch of GPT-4 Turbo at a Fraction of the Price

Gatekeeping is when you know something is good, but you keep it the person, place, or thing for a specific group of people. Gatekeeping is a result of a lack of communication and a difference in shared information. In the age of social media, gatekeeping has reared its ugly head when the private sphere gets exposed by the public, and in technology, this disruption is happening at every stage of culture. The Violet Verse community exists because a group of people got together and started contributing and adding to how open-source media can become something.

If you met me in my fashion magazine era, you'll be familiar with my Fashion Week coverage and how much of an allure it was to those outside looking in on what exactly I was doing at a designer runway show on a Tuesday morning. It wasn't exactly office work and the stuff my mother and aunts grew up doing. Yet, it was my dream, and that dream was hard to realize when the entire industry operated on a system of nepotism. Fashion Week and getting a covetable invitation was the epitome of gatekeeping and had its run in the early 2000s, but social media has quickly decentralized this global gathering of the most fashionable. It's not for the elite; Fashion Week is for the community, and now that we have YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat, anyone can sit front row. You don't have to be best friends with Anna Wintour.

In many ways, this is the vibe of technology. Back then, web2's private servers and dial-up ruled the internet and determined who could post and be SEO kings of their niches. Now, with blockchain, public servers, and community digital asset portals, there are new ways of doing everything and cross-continental collaborations are more readily accessible. Hello, remote work! As we move to abolish gatekeeping, we must beware of decisions that invoke the old-guard way of doing business and sharing resources when it comes to innovation. It's about reality; it will only open up creative ways to improve the human condition and make us better off.

To be continued...