I had a friend who was incredibly creative. He did standup and painted and made short films and did photography and wrote fiction and just generally was always busy creating. He prided himself on being weird and original, sometimes at the expense of accessibility, but he had a very distinct voice. A year ago he went all in on AI everything and his output has just turned to mush. It’s heartbreaking.

Yeah actually. It’s happened to me a few times in the last year.

Have you ever just googled something and it shoved an AI summary in your face that looked plausible enough to be accurate and you shared that information with the caveat of “according to chatgpt” since it might be wrong and then the other person just treated you like an asshole

luckily, I don’t interact frequently with chatbox users. i know they exist, but i can’t imagine interacting with one on purpose and asking it things. its bad enough i see my searches being turned into prompts that dump out stuff. i don’t mind when its some example of DAX code or a terminal command i can examine.

but these people who use it to do research and have it synthesize information, i cannot relate.

it takes shortcuts by cutting out details and making these broad generalizations to dump out heuristics that can be wildly inaccurate.

for more than a decade, my professional role has been the development of free, broadly applicable resources for lay audiences built on detailed, narrow reference materials and my own subject matter expertise from many years of formal education and a wide range of hands on experience.

i wasn’t really worried about AI replacing me because i have a weird cluster of complementary resource development skills, but occasionally i have stumbled across generative resources in my field and they are embarassing. like just explicitly inaccurate and unhelpful. and even more hilariously, the people who make them try to charge for them.

if anything, my knowledge has become more valuable because there’s so much misleading generative garbage online, people who want accurate information are more overwhelmed and frustrated than ever.

Yeah, you can tell when something is ai cause its soulless. People who aren’t creatives love this shit cause they never really engaged with art to begin with, it was always a commodity to hang on the wall or put on the bookshelf. Creatives cringe at ai “art” cause its not creative at all.

They don’t like learning because at some point in their past, learning got them in trouble, either with a bully in school or some authority figure. Anti-intellectualism is the dogma of American secular religion and it is strictly enforced by its adherents.

I gave up on their creative use pretty much after my first try. I saw people making rap lyrics, I was intrigued, then realized it was absolutely impossible to get it to write anything besides a flow like “we do it like this / then do it like that / all those other guys are just wickedy wack” sort of cheesy-ass style. This was GPT 3.5 I think, I tried later ones and it was no better at all.

I’m not too worried about it replacing real art, the commercial ‘creative’ jobs like advertising music or illustrators are probably already being replaced, but even that style of art done by ‘AI’ is just so irritating to me and usually has some indefinable thing about it that makes it feel bad to look at versus actual illustrating.

I can’t use any of them because the way they pretend to be people instead of apps/tools pisses me off.

It will describe anything it disagrees with as “the [x] trap.”

You can prompt it to stop doing these things if you notice it, and it will generally work. Quite useful if something pisses you off about its output.

My sole use for chatgpt is to generate lists to brainstorm.

I really like that parallel between formal academic English with its socioeconomic dimensions and algorithmically-generated English. To me there’s a certain point where speaking a language becomes singing it. When I actually give a shit about how I’m writing, I think in terms of rhythm with the structure and melody with the word choice. There’s a proper sense of consonance and dissonance in the way early 20th century composers used it. Even though I know French/Spanish/Romanian vocabulary and can functionally get around in countries that speak those languages, there’s no way I could speak or write musically in them. If I know the strictest Academie Francaise standards for French it teaches me nothing about how to write poetically and I would always stand out from a single incorrect word unless I spent decades learning the nuances of the language in France. ESL speech patterns also really stand out to me as an externally reinforced rather than internally generated style.

The “ChatGPT” accusation also gets leveled at autistic people fairly often.

I like this, I relate to this from the opposite side of the spectrum; when I’ve tried to relate e.g. a series of events as a story on here, it is very dry and precise because I want it to be as clear as possible. LLMs don’t really write that way because they are meant to mimic human writing I suppose, but I can sound very terse and robotic.

It doesn’t help they RLHF was largely done by educated people in the “former” colonies for a pittance.

Certainly, but prior to AI my neo-Luddite enemy was the business world. Corporate Memphis was the thing I attacked before image generators. It’s a malignant outgrowth of the same demonic trend that compounds the Hapsburg imagery by treating those Corporate Memphis simulacra as art.

Charlie Stress called corporations AI 8 years ago https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

This and some citations would’ve made this a really valuable article. Hopefully this idea will get refined a bit with better support.

Would have loved to see an exemplar text excerpt go through “refinement” to prove the author’s point

My first thought was to run this text through an AI for maximum irony

thanks i hate it

i think this process is exactly what makes me so mad about ai generated slop, it reads like fucking conservapedia (which itself reads like basically anything written by a fundie ever, in my personal experience).

Grok please summarize this too many word

So text generation ai works as a word prediction algorithm, finding whatever word is most likely to come next. When used to edit work , this along with the way models are tuned will naturally choose more likely and therefore more simple words over more complicated words that convey more nuance and meaning , simplifying and dumbing down our writing.

Instead of using more specific words and information it pares things down and simplifies them in ways that destroy nuanced meaning that was the point of using those specific words and information in the first place, this is bad because it’s dumbing down output that is already dumbing down the people reliant on using it

Semantic: Having to do with words, or word choice in a particular text. (EDIT: also, crucially, meaning within a text)

Ablation: The erosion or stripping awsy of the surface layer of a material under applied force, especially high-speed winds.

Algorithmic: Having to do with the use of an algorithm (an equation that specifies a particular output for a particular input).

High-entropy: A bit complicated to explain, but essentially means ‘complicated’ or ‘dense’ in this context. ‘High-entropy information’ is referring to information that communicates a lot of data with a small amount of communication. Consider a terse telegram vs a children’s book.

“Semantic ablation is the algorithmic erosion of high-entropy information” therefore refers to the automatic ‘stripping away’ of complex language in favor of simplified language by LLMs.

Gaussian distribution: A distribution of probabilities that peak in the middle of the range. A Gaussian distribution will favor ‘average’ results quite strongly. Yes, it’s more complicated than that, but that all you need for this article. The paragraph containing this discusses why LLMs are dumbing down language: they remove rare, precise terminology in favor of mundane words.

Romanesque, Baroque, ciccia: It’s describing a masterful art (carvings from Roman masters) being superficially copied by cheap knock-offs.

Entropy decay: Loss of information density/complexity.

Lexical: Relating to a vocabulary or set of words in a language or text.

That should be most of the unusual words. You should be able to get the gist of the article from that. Lemme know if there’s anything else you’re struggling with.

Ask ai to do it