arrow Products
Glide CMS image Glide CMS image
Glide CMS arrow
The powerful intuitive headless CMS for busy content and editorial teams, bursting with features and sector insight. MACH architecture gives you business freedom.
Glide Go image Glide Go image
Glide Go arrow
Enterprise power at start-up speed. Glide Go is a pre-configured deployment of Glide CMS with hosting and front-end problems solved.
Glide Nexa image Glide Nexa image
Glide Nexa arrow
Audience authentication, entitlements, and preference management in one system designed for publishers and content businesses.
For your sector arrow arrow
Media & Entertainment
arrow arrow
Built for any content to thrive, whomever it's for. Get content out faster and do more with it.
Sports & Gaming
arrow arrow
Bring fans closer to their passions and deliver unrivalled audience experiences wherever they are.
Publishing
arrow arrow
Tailored to the unique needs of publishing so you can fully focus on audiences and content success.
For your role arrow arrow
Technology
arrow arrow
Unlock resources and budget with low-code & no-code solutions to do so much more.
Editorial & Content
arrow arrow
Make content of higher quality quicker, and target it with pinpoint accuracy at the right audiences.
Developers
arrow arrow
MACH architecture lets you kickstart development, leveraging vast native functionality and top-tier support.
Commercial & Marketing
arrow arrow
Speedrun ideas into products, accelerate ROI, convert interest, and own the conversation.
Technology Partners arrow arrow
Explore Glide's world-class technology partners and integrations.
Solution Partners arrow arrow
For workflow guidance, SEO, digital transformation, data & analytics, and design, tap into Glide's solution partners and sector experts.
Industry Insights arrow arrow
News
arrow arrow
News from inside our world, about Glide Publishing Platform, our customers, and other cool things.
Comment
arrow arrow
Insight and comment about the things which make content and publishing better - or sometimes worse.
Expert Guides
arrow arrow
Essential insights and helpful resources from industry veterans, and your gateway to CMS and Glide mastery.
Newsletter
arrow arrow
The Content Aware weekly newsletter, with news and comment every Thursday.
Knowledge arrow arrow
Customer Support
arrow arrow
Learn more about the unrivalled customer support from the team at Glide.
Documentation
arrow arrow
User Guides and Technical Documentation for Glide Publishing Platform headless CMS, Glide Go, and Glide Nexa.
Developer Experience
arrow arrow
Learn more about using Glide headless CMS, Glide Go, and Glide Nexa identity management.

What is the value of tech without content?

Thinking about the language used in the content landscape makes it clear that tech has the upper hand over creators. But without content, what is the tech for?

by Rob Corbidge
Published: 16:05, 14 December 2023
A haptic gloved hand resting on a book,

Is content more valuable than tech? We are currently in an epoch where the power to transmit has gained more importance than the transmission itself. It's not that content itself is entirely devalued, yet technology itself, in making content creation accessible to all and consumable by all, enjoys an upper hand that is largely supported by perception rather than reality.

There is no such thing as a TikTok video, or a Facebook one, and so on. They are just videos posted on the respective platform. They could be posted elsewhere. 

The art of tech is in keeping users on a particular platform, hence the recommendation alchemy of TikTok being a source of much intrigue. Yet the tech is nothing without the platform. You could have filmed your super-viral funny on an 8mm cine film camera, and it would still exist on that film even if it was never distributed.

Outside of the Machiavellian T&Cs associated with all content hosting platforms, and goodness knows they'd make Machiavelli himself blush, the actual content itself remains the property of the creator. Yet, as publishers know all too well, once you're neck deep with the platforms, they decide which way your head revolves.

Such thoughts about the value of content, the record of the activities of the planet's most exotic fauna - humans - not being valued properly were provoked by a post on X. (Note, X is just another platform, its value almost entirely in the user base.)

Twitter LLMs

Twitter LLMs

If we follow the logic of the misunderstanding around AI now so prevalent and accept the current generation of AI as a kind of sentience, then by reverse our mother's first words to us are just training data, right? Shouldn't all such sets of first words heard be coalesced into a training data set, and then all humans could be trained on a global standard dataset of first-heard words?

An absurd example of course, yet every piece of content of whatever format used in such training has the first moment of creation in it. And that first moment involved a human.

Training data is itself a misnomer, although once again the power of tech is in evidence because it is the technological process choosing the words to describe things with all the merciless brevity that a good engineer must use in the process of building a system.

Yet it is a diminution useful for those crawling all our content to their profit, as it reduces the collective endeavour of thousands, or more, into two words and the merciless brevity of engineering is then used as blink-of-an-eye cover for wholescale looting. 

This then is evidence of how tech strengthens its hand, even unwittingly, by dictating the language used to describe fundamental elements of any discussion. It's not necessarily wrong, or right, it's just how it is and that consideration must form a part of thinking about AI systems.

Even the modest modification to "training media" suggested above brings that "training data" a step closer to being something someone actually spent part of their limited lifespan creating.

LLM systems are amazing, and they have utility, yet ultimately they are the sum of their data, and still limited by the way they can use that data. In effect, the "training data" they consume has already been filtered by one of most complex systems in existence, one that assigns value at capacity in a way the Transformer at the heart of an LLM is not even in remote orbit with.

Happily, this pre-filtered content is also arranged in a hierarchy, a hierarchy somewhat in flux and constantly curated by humans, with a great deal of related content. It's called culture.

Latest articles

AI is now reviewing art while wearing the mask of a human - is it art or life?
Bots faking it as people is a fact of modern life - but is it art?
arrow button
AI legislation is coming - and some of it might even be good
The race to write the laws which will make or break AI
arrow button
a newsroom full of journalists. an evil robot burglar looking like a prisoner holding a sack full of money with money spilling out of it
Platforms vs Publishers: The Forever War
arrow button

Ready to get started?

No matter where you are on your CMS journey, we're here to help. Want more info or to see Glide Publishing Platform in action? We got you.

Book a demo