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

[alter_unicorn@masto.bike]

@neil same goes for music, code, 3d printable designs and much more.

[david_chisnall@infosec.exchange]

@neil @amin

Before Christmas a couple of big companies cancelled AI-generated ad campaigns because the negative feedback was causing harm to their brand at the start of their peak selling season. The more people complain about these things (don’t share the ads, just say ‘company X used to be okay but their latest ad campaign is slop and it makes me hate them’ - ad agencies consider people sharing the ads to be positive for raising brand awareness even if people hate them), the more that feedback will go from ad companies to their customers.

For an example of the parenthetical: about 15 years ago, Tango did an ad campaign that had people rolling fruit down Constitution Hill in Swansea, where it smashed at the bottom. There were a bunch of news articles about how they didn’t bother to clean up and left the mess for residents. There was only one problem: all of the fruit was CGI, there was no mess. The negative press made a load of people watch the ad. The claim that they made a mess was ‘leaked’ from the ad agency to news sources who didn’t do any basic fact checking (I lived just around the corner, it was easy for someone to pop down and see there was no mess). The campaign was considered a big success. So if people share an ad and say ‘I hate this’, it won’t necessarily have the right result. But if they share a single terrible frame, it might.

[noodlemaz@mstdn.games]

@rubyjones @ahnlak @neil and Unsplash. And Wikipedia commons. And more besides I'm sure. There's just no need to use slop images, really.

[sarahw@mastodon.green]

@neil
I quite agree. It's just not necessary.
AI has its uses in certain fields but generally I despise it
People need to remember that if AI doesn't know something, it makes it up, so we can't ever rely on it.

It's all part of a bigger picture of needing to be constantly entertained.
Yesterday I heard about kids' AI soft toys that talk to them. Some of the results are extremely disturbing .
AI is not a baby-sitter.

I honestly don't understand why people use AI instead of actual people.

[noodlemaz@mstdn.games]

@neil @rubyjones libraries are also great! I get loads of ebooks from mine.
And authors support them too. Reading is very accessible thanks to them :)

Sorry for flurry of replies

[petitcoeur@hachyderm.io]

@neil You're not isolated. I also have zero interest in reading / watching / hearing AI generated stuff. Totally pointless.

Humanity grew by exchanging ideas. Between people.

[iwein@mas.to]

@stroobl
AI can write good docs is an unpopular opinion among people that know the value of documentation. Rightfully so because:

1. "AI" doesn't exist, and LLM's can't "know" meaning. They hide it well.
2. Writing documentation proves the author cares about the thing they document.
3. Documenting something surfaces it's subtlest bugs.

If devs use llm for documentation, the software is shit. If you use llm to describe others' software, you're taking a great risk of misunderstanding it.
@neil

[derickr@phpc.social]

@neil I made that exact point in my closing keynote at #dpc last Friday. There was a lot of LLM generated images in many presentations, even when actual photos existed. My line was something akin to: I'd rather see badly drawn stick figures illustrating my points than fake generic "art", and I also made the point about the different ideas and writing styles of authors.

I'll turn it into a blog post soon.

[sephster@fosstodon.org]

@neil best book you read last year? Looking for recommendations

[alex@social.alexhyett.com]

@neil I am definitely in the “if you couldn’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it” category.

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@sephster Let me reply when I have my eReader or calibre in front of me!

[solderandchaos@mastodon.me.uk]

@neil definitely not isolated. It is a hill I will almost certainly be at least critically injured on.

[slothrop@chaos.social]

@neil most of my early professional training was as a text person. Literature, journalism, history. Professions where you obsess about individual words, sentence structure, context, and layers of meaning.

For this reason, I find LLM-generated text supremely exhausting to read. I keep looking for meaning and intention, and it just isn’t - can’t be - there.

[nobody@mastodon.acm.org]

@neil
I very much relate and, at least for myself, I'd say it's not even anthropocentrism, not "human supremacy". It's largely about SOTA, it's about information hygiene. SOTA in thought, SOTA in language and expression, which are achieved through struggle and experience that today happen to mean specifically human experience. As for hygiene, there's the matter of attention being a very scarce resource, and the matter of contamination: exposure to information affects the thought...

[rpbook@gts.phillipsuk.org]

@neil I have no interest in AI generated crap either. Even though the fediverse is my only social media, I do sometimes feel very isolated in that stance. It's good to see so many replies to your post agreeing with us 🙂

I've commissioned an artist to create the cover of my next book. He periodically sends me work-in-progress images. It's fascinating watching the evolution, and I love being asked about specifics and being able to offer feedback. I can't imagine it would be the same if I was talking to a machine.

[unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyz]

@sephster

Book recommendations from anyone, or only from @neil?

Some of mine are here: @booktrail

#books

[unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyz]

@nobody

What's SOTA in this context, please?

[nobody@mastodon.acm.org]

@unchartedworlds
Oh, "state of the art". I mean we do have a very dynamic sense of what is novel, relevant, needed

[feff@comicscamp.club]

@neil How anyone can read unedited AI-generated stuff is beyond me. It is so empty, so soulless; somehow using so many words to say nothing at all. It is boring to read.

The false tone of helpfulness is grating. The puffery reminds me of long pre-ambles on recipe sites.

AI-art also lacks that something. It is so smooth and so normalised and boring. The mass average of everyone's work is boring, for it can say nothing new.

[jaimieserotica@kinkycats.org]

@neil I take the same view but I think we are increasingly in the minority. I hate what I see of AI. We keep being told of the benefits but all I see is slop, people losing their jobs and tech-bros getting richer.
I worry about what it means for creatives (and I include myself in that although it's not how I make a living) but moreso, what it means for us as a species. Enfeeblement and disempowerment most probably.