*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!

[wurzelmann@mastodon.wurzelmann.at]

@neil I'm with you on that hill. ✊

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@rubyjones On the consumption side, I am absolutely in a fortunate position that I can afford to pay, and see value in paying, for books, to support authors, and so on (although I suppose that I see blogs as free-to-read). Perhaps there's a circle there.

Slop has no value to me, so I would not knowingly pay for it.

But perhaps someone who doesn't value creativity or human expression would not willingly pay for it anyway, so slop is attractive enough?

(Sorry, pondering aloud here.)

[odd@mstdn.social]

@neil I haven't seen such posts here at all. Tbh it sounds like a troll because AI generated content is anything but unbiased. And in my experience, people around here are well aware of this.

That said, at work and around the internet at large I see more and more people using AI. Some because they believe in the technology, others because they feel its the normal thing to do now.

[futureisfoss@fosstodon.org]

@neil That is not an unpopular opinion, not at all.

[rubyjones@wandering.shop]

@ahnlak @neil The thing is... Pixabay exists! I used it all the time when I worked in Marketing. I think you can spend a lot more time messing around trying to get your 'prompt' to give you what you want than you would just going to Pixabay and finding a public domain image.

[lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me]

@ahnlak @neil Which is kind of funny because even before AI I found it so tailored towards some sort of ranking that it can end up looking a bit shady like sites that look borderline SEO-farming.

[anderelampe@chaos.social]

@neil yes, you are not alone. 100%.

[rubyjones@wandering.shop]

@neil The thing is, there is more free fiction and art online than a person could ever need. I've actually found it hard to pull myself away from the safe, comforting arms of fanfiction, which gives me exactly what I want, for free, but I get frustrated that I can't pay the authors for their often spectacular works.

I agree with you - writing and art are communication - there's no point if there's no one on the other side communicating anything. And the fact that it's all stolen>

[mjj@mstdn.dk]

@neil In principle I mostly agree, in practice entirely.
I would say with the top 92% I would read, I share the sentiment. *In principle*, I would be okay with looking up LLM-gens for the last 8% which would be checklists or how-to on changing a setting on something or listing a number of events. But it is mostly, or at least unpredictably, bullshit. If these models are built holding everything that is smart and good, why is there so much bullshit?
It does not reassure me for humanity that the machine that extracts the average of everything generally comes up with visually well-ordered feces.
So I arrive at your conclusion mostly, but not entirely, following the same route.

[rubyjones@wandering.shop]

@neil >and relies on technology that is doing absolutely horrendous things to the environment, makes it absolutely unthinkable for me to partake.

And yet I have very old, very dear friends who seem to simply not care. Even after I have explained to them how bad it is for the world, and how hurtful to me.

I don't get it.

[coldclimate@hachyderm.io]

@neil strong agree

[stroobl@mastodon-belgium.be]

@neil the humans who made the software left and didn’t bother to write any. ;(

[helixnevel@mastodon.nl]

@neil
I agree!

[hedders@mas.to]

@neil Quite.

I'm not opposed to machine learning; it's genuinely useful. I'm more ambivalent about LLMs, but that's more to do with the environmental impact, the way they were trained and the people involved in doing it than it is to do with the technology per se.

What profoundly offends me is the pretence that these things are capable of thought or creativity, of "generating" something that is actually going to be of interest to or provoke an emotional response in a human.

[stroobl@mastodon-belgium.be]

@kimcrawley thanks for sharing you kind opinion.

[tschenkel@mathstodon.xyz]

@neil @amin

Add me to your list.

But I'd add: there is a space for texts that are read purely for information. Which would be something that could be machine generated. Unfortunately those texts require (a) correctness, and (b) transparency about sources. Both things a transformer cannot give, due to it's architecture.

So genAI fails completely for me.

[matzeller@mastodon.social]

@neil You're not isolated, just normal.

[pixl_xip@pleroma.envs.net]

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk Yes! I read to hear other people's ideas, not for cobbled together fragments of ideas from an AI's training data!

[justincrozer@mastodon.green]

@neil I’ll never post AI generated content on my blog because why would you expect/want someone to take the time to read something you didn’t even create?

[noodlemaz@mstdn.games]

@neil @signaleleven lol then they don't understand how those 'tools' were made. You can't have a company run by (mostly) tech bros and feed it content from humans then expect no bias to come out. Sigh.