*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
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Someone was posting here about preferring "AI news" because they said that it was unbiased.
Someone posted an AI-generated "summary" of something.
More websites are using AI-generated images.
Do you not see this kind of thing?
@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.
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*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
Perhaps I am increasingly isolated in holding this position, but I have no interest in reading "AI"-generated slop.
I love reading.
I read people's blogs and toots and whatever *because people wrote them* and I want to read their own thoughts and opinions.
I buy books, and read numerous different authors. I like finding new authors, bringing new ideas, styles etc.
Same with "AI" images. I'd prefer no image at all.
@neil same goes for music, code, 3d printable designs and much more.
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@amin In which case, perhaps I am not as isolated as I thought.
It doesn't surprise me that *some* other people have this perspective, but I wonder how common it is.
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 (donβt share the ads, just say βcompany X used to be okay but their latest ad campaign is slop and it makes me hate themβ - 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 didnβt 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 βleakedβ from the ad agency to news sources who didnβt 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 βI hate thisβ, it wonβt necessarily have the right result. But if they share a single terrible frame, it might.
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@rubyjones @ahnlak @neil and Unsplash. And Wikipedia commons. And more besides I'm sure. There's just no need to use slop images, really.
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*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
Perhaps I am increasingly isolated in holding this position, but I have no interest in reading "AI"-generated slop.
I love reading.
I read people's blogs and toots and whatever *because people wrote them* and I want to read their own thoughts and opinions.
I buy books, and read numerous different authors. I like finding new authors, bringing new ideas, styles etc.
Same with "AI" images. I'd prefer no image at all.
@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.
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@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.)
@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
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*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
Perhaps I am increasingly isolated in holding this position, but I have no interest in reading "AI"-generated slop.
I love reading.
I read people's blogs and toots and whatever *because people wrote them* and I want to read their own thoughts and opinions.
I buy books, and read numerous different authors. I like finding new authors, bringing new ideas, styles etc.
Same with "AI" images. I'd prefer no image at all.
@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.
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@neil +1. The only place where AI generated text is a useful read is generated software documentation. It works pretty good for that.
@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 -
*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
Perhaps I am increasingly isolated in holding this position, but I have no interest in reading "AI"-generated slop.
I love reading.
I read people's blogs and toots and whatever *because people wrote them* and I want to read their own thoughts and opinions.
I buy books, and read numerous different authors. I like finding new authors, bringing new ideas, styles etc.
Same with "AI" images. I'd prefer no image at all.
@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.
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*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
Perhaps I am increasingly isolated in holding this position, but I have no interest in reading "AI"-generated slop.
I love reading.
I read people's blogs and toots and whatever *because people wrote them* and I want to read their own thoughts and opinions.
I buy books, and read numerous different authors. I like finding new authors, bringing new ideas, styles etc.
Same with "AI" images. I'd prefer no image at all.
@neil best book you read last year? Looking for recommendations
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*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
Perhaps I am increasingly isolated in holding this position, but I have no interest in reading "AI"-generated slop.
I love reading.
I read people's blogs and toots and whatever *because people wrote them* and I want to read their own thoughts and opinions.
I buy books, and read numerous different authors. I like finding new authors, bringing new ideas, styles etc.
Same with "AI" images. I'd prefer no image at all.
@neil I am definitely in the βif you couldnβt be bothered to write it, I canβt be bothered to read itβ category.
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@neil best book you read last year? Looking for recommendations
@sephster Let me reply when I have my eReader or calibre in front of me!
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*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
Perhaps I am increasingly isolated in holding this position, but I have no interest in reading "AI"-generated slop.
I love reading.
I read people's blogs and toots and whatever *because people wrote them* and I want to read their own thoughts and opinions.
I buy books, and read numerous different authors. I like finding new authors, bringing new ideas, styles etc.
Same with "AI" images. I'd prefer no image at all.
@neil definitely not isolated. It is a hill I will almost certainly be at least critically injured on.
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*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
Perhaps I am increasingly isolated in holding this position, but I have no interest in reading "AI"-generated slop.
I love reading.
I read people's blogs and toots and whatever *because people wrote them* and I want to read their own thoughts and opinions.
I buy books, and read numerous different authors. I like finding new authors, bringing new ideas, styles etc.
Same with "AI" images. I'd prefer no image at all.
@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 isnβt - canβt be - there.
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*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
Perhaps I am increasingly isolated in holding this position, but I have no interest in reading "AI"-generated slop.
I love reading.
I read people's blogs and toots and whatever *because people wrote them* and I want to read their own thoughts and opinions.
I buy books, and read numerous different authors. I like finding new authors, bringing new ideas, styles etc.
Same with "AI" images. I'd prefer no image at all.
@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... -
*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
Perhaps I am increasingly isolated in holding this position, but I have no interest in reading "AI"-generated slop.
I love reading.
I read people's blogs and toots and whatever *because people wrote them* and I want to read their own thoughts and opinions.
I buy books, and read numerous different authors. I like finding new authors, bringing new ideas, styles etc.
Same with "AI" images. I'd prefer no image at all.
@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 π
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.
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@neil best book you read last year? Looking for recommendations
Book recommendations from anyone, or only from @neil?
Some of mine are here: @booktrail
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@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...What's SOTA in this context, please?
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What's SOTA in this context, please?
@unchartedworlds
Oh, "state of the art". I mean we do have a very dynamic sense of what is novel, relevant, needed -
*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
Perhaps I am increasingly isolated in holding this position, but I have no interest in reading "AI"-generated slop.
I love reading.
I read people's blogs and toots and whatever *because people wrote them* and I want to read their own thoughts and opinions.
I buy books, and read numerous different authors. I like finding new authors, bringing new ideas, styles etc.
Same with "AI" images. I'd prefer no image at all.
@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.
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Disassembling Opcodes with a Font
Those who stay into the forbidden realm of font rendering quickly learn how convoluted and arcane it can be β LaTeX is a fully Turing-complete programming language, Unicode has over eighty invisible characters, and there are libraries that let you execute WebAssembly in a font. A great example of a fontβs hidden capabilities is Z80 Sans, a font that disassembles Z80 opcodes to assembly mnemonics.
If one pastes Z80 opcodes into a word processor and changes their font to Z80 Sans, the codes are rendered as their assembly mnemonics. The font manages this by abusing the Glyph Substitution Table and Glyph Positioning Table, two components of the OpenType standard. Fonts define relations between characters (internal representations used by the computer, such as ASCII and Unicode) and glyphs (the graphics actually displayed).
In some cases, though, the way a character is displayed depends on where it appears in a word, or what appears around it (Arabic characters are a common example, but an example from English is the ligature βΓ¦β). Z80 Sans defines all the possible glyphs for each nibble of the opcodes, then used a recursive descent parser to generate substitution rules which display the correct glyphs in context.
For a deeper dive into the pitfalls of text graphics, check out this font rendering engine written for a hobby OS. You can also use fonts to play games or talk to an LLM.
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