*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!
-
*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.
-
*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 isn’t - can’t be - there.
-
*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 🙂
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.
-
@neil best book you read last year? Looking for recommendations
Book recommendations from anyone, or only from @neil?
Some of mine are here: @booktrail
-
@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?
-
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.
-
*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 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. -
@neil What I found really depressingly interesting is that I find it really fatiguing, and I already suffer from a huge amount of fatigue. All the dodging AI, my brain-fogged head working harder to filter things out, the heart sink as I get tricked and only later realise something was off.
Like recipes! Following along on my phone whilst already overwhelmed by what I'm doing, and then finding out mid-way through following a recipe that, hang on a sec, this is AI nonsense.
@FrazzledBrynn @neil
Yes! The constant gatekeeping is exhausting. In my profession, it's increasingly an issue where people (lay persons and professionals alike) have used AI to draft a document which looks legit but on closer inspection turns out to be a pile of shit. -
@neil I'm still trying to find the right words for why Ai stuff feels so unappealing. I think it's that they have no provenance? Theres nothing to contextualise it.
@diffractie I don't like the feeling that I might be the first person to look at/read/encounter something.
It just feels so inherently like it doesn't matter, it's like thinking you're on solid ground but when you check there's nothing holding you up, you've already gone over the edge of the cliff.
-
Book recommendations from anyone, or only from @neil?
Some of mine are here: @booktrail
@unchartedworlds @neil @booktrail welcome from anyone. Thank you for the heads up
-
*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 with you. I also don't think it's just a Masto echo chamber; there is some pushback against GenAI slop around, but whether it'll be enough to stop the tsunami remains to be seen.
Look at Buzzfeed, it was always slop, but they did annoyingly well. Then they switched to GenAI slop and found nobody wants that to the point they're bankrupt.
I see reports that teens are both aware and weary of GenAI slop in their SM feeds.
So, we must push back as much as we can. There's slight hope...
-
@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.
@rubyjones
Basically, yes to everything you've said Ruby. This is the issue going forward. People don't care. They will when it impacts them negatively but, of course, by then it's too late.
@neil -
@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.
@hedders @neil I’ve been pondering this recently, too. I’m as much against the generative/LLM material being used in lieu of that created by humans as anyone else, but the knee jerk reaction of many people towards “AI” as whole now is grating on me.
AI is bloody brilliant, it’s doing incredible things with computers, from running my home central heating more efficiently, to modelling crowd behaviour at football matches, and predicting heart attacks.
-
@FrazzledBrynn @neil
Yes! The constant gatekeeping is exhausting. In my profession, it's increasingly an issue where people (lay persons and professionals alike) have used AI to draft a document which looks legit but on closer inspection turns out to be a pile of shit.@Jaimieserotica @FrazzledBrynn Oh, so much this!
I often hear that "AI will mean the end of lawyers" but, for now at least, it just means more work for me :)
-
@hedders @neil I’ve been pondering this recently, too. I’m as much against the generative/LLM material being used in lieu of that created by humans as anyone else, but the knee jerk reaction of many people towards “AI” as whole now is grating on me.
AI is bloody brilliant, it’s doing incredible things with computers, from running my home central heating more efficiently, to modelling crowd behaviour at football matches, and predicting heart attacks.
@hedders @neil But Big Tech is selling us a dream of general AI that isn’t a reality just yet, and the consumers don’t know enough about the technology to understand that.
The negative sentiment towards AI in general is, imho, undeserved. And it’s all because the shite they’re selling at the moment is so dodgy. It’s a real shame.
-
@Jaimieserotica @FrazzledBrynn Oh, so much this!
I often hear that "AI will mean the end of lawyers" but, for now at least, it just means more work for me :)
@neil @FrazzledBrynn
Paralegals are already being let go in droves. Client facing/court-heavy roles like family and crime are probably safe for the time being but if I was a conveyancer I'd definitely be re-training without delay... -
@neil I find AI images a really strong flag that I'm not going to want to read an article.
I suspect at least part of the problem is that "experts" will tell you that a web page *has* to have an image to represent it (because that's what algorithms want), and people are panicked into finding *something* to fill that void.
-
@unchartedworlds @neil @booktrail welcome from anyone. Thank you for the heads up
"Against the Grain" by James C Scott was a paradigm shifter to me last year!
DEBT follows right after: https://mastodon.acm.org/@nobody/116232495598467927