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

[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.

[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