I use Grammarly to check for errors I make during writing more serious stuff (English is not my native language), but any suggestion it sends in my way changes the tone of the text so much that it sounds like it's written by a PR agency with a fake, forced attitude; sounding bland and colorless.
So no, thank you. Correct my textbook punctuation mistakes, and leave my wordy and "not positive enough" sentences to me.
I'm getting increasingly irritated by Grammarly's attempts to boringify my writing. I've even considered doing away with it entirely, even if it means I have to do my own spell-checking.
I wouldn't say the author's style is unique or individual in any way. Every single tumblr blog sounds like that. You could easily create a "make edgy" function that would feed your formal writings and turn them into that kind of prose. Is it better or worth than "polish"? There's no substantial difference. The "polish" version sure sounds less exhausting than the original.
It's personal. "Unique" and "individual" might not be the best words to describe it, but it's clearly a style they've intentionally adopted. They appear to have been quite successful for it to!
I'm working on a dystopia where the resistance is using text-in-text steganography to coordinate, so unpolished communication is flagged for extra scrutiny because all those stylistic choices might be hiding something.
I love The Freeze Frame Revolution, and yeah I was planning on doing something similar. I figure I'll publish an app that OCRs the text and displays the hidden message, and make the book read differently based on whether you can or can't see the messages.
Then readers can use the app for hiding their own messages to each other also.
(realizing this is veering off into tangents of tangents)...
An idea I discussed with someone tossing story ideas about was regarding the reliable / unreliable narrator for a mystery mixed in with being able to view (lock a display screen to a geographic location, got a knob to rewind / fast forward time (up to the present)) immutable past events who finds something amiss. Upon the "somethings not right..." the narrator reviews their own events of the previous day and finds that the events don't match their memory. Is the narrator reliable? Is the narrator that is questioning their own reliability the narrator or an external agent trying to cast doubt on the reliability of the actual narrator?
That does sound interesting--to give the reader a bit more tooling to decide whether they're being lied to and by whom. You might enjoy The Quantum Thief, which isn't published in a such a unique way, but which has fun a story that would fit right in.
There is no way in hell anyone who knows me would get that email and not think I’d been abducted
This person cares about not putting up a fake identity. That's pretty cool, but social media has exposed that a large number of people are perfectly fine presenting an illusion. People will have no shame passing off well written things as an output of their talent and hard work. Digital makeup has no bounds.
1. Born into plague
2. Never learns maths or writing
3. Nor spelling
4. Half the time your life ends before childhood does
5. Nothing happens in your life
Nevermind that "nothing happening" sounds positively amazing, especially if my surroundings were a bucolic river side European village.
Farm work done? Picked all my parasites out of my hair and clothes? Now to settle down for the very-zen "sit by the fire, sing some peasant songs and do nothing" -- sounds amazing
There are alternate explanations here. Men do not put as much effort into their presentation as women do. Men are putting out profiles that show themselves as anti-woman, and that's unattractive. Men absolutely should be pickier - they would honestly only date people compatible with them, but try to cast the widest net rather than finding people they could vibe with.
Men in the dating pool have become toxic, and women are doing their best to weed those out. Don't be toxic. Don't endorse people who are looking to make women's lives worse. Put effort into your presentation in your profile pictures - have a woman friend take them. Put effort into your profile to show that you are not someone who would endanger women - have other women in your life help you present your profile. (That probably means don't have a fishing photo, even if you enjoy fishing!)
Much of this is predicated on having women in your life that you trust and that trust you, and who want to see you happy. This means listening to them and trusting them.
And then, you might be a little pickier in your profile too.
No matter how much polishing a man does to his appearance / profile the biological reality is that women are sought after and men have to compete for their attention. There's some statistic along the lines of "the average female has about as much 'pull' as a male A list celebrity"
This means that women will receive far more attention from the opposite sex, and therefore have an "easier" time finding potential partners. This problem is just exacerbated by dating apps and social media making women more aware of their position and options - 100 years ago women could barely date outside their village. Nowadays they receive 100s of messages from men around the world competing for her attention. The opposite happens to men, they become more aware of how "undesired" they are so they start casting a wider net since no fish are caught in their smaller nets.
Blaming the men here just reeks of those toxic standards - since again it is on the men to improve. Not the women who should continue being hyper selective (most attractive, wealthy, etc.).
(Note I'm not blaming any side just showing the reality men face - really this is a problem both sexes need to tackle)
"easier" is in quotes because I appreciate women have to filter out abusers and creeps. But from the male perspective they'd kill to even have a chance with an abuser or creep.
Is it so hard to believe that going onto a digital marketplace with an order of magnitude more humans than you would ever physically deal with physically is probably what's leading to a type of thalassophobia (the fear of deep or vast bodies of water)?
Life is simple. He or she lived in the town, or your school, or was someone you pass by on the way to work daily. It's not some complicated digital dance where the universe presents to you all possible mates.
Date the person you wouldn't. Give it a chance, because you just don't know how this love stuff happens.
Completely agree - on top of the thalassophobia there’s also decision paralysis, and I’m not sure what you call it but: When you reject the good in hopes for something perfect down the line.
Safety is super important and I share your concern. I think online dating is similar to the internet. When the Internet started, there was a niche group that were really into it (early adopters). This was also true for dating apps in their infancy. It was safer simply because the pool was self selected (you had to be open minded to even try it).
Then the internet became for everyone and so did online dating. When there's that many people involved, things get more unsafe. It's not the same pool of early adopters on the same wavelength. It's everyone now, and everyone includes every wave length.
In my experience women are not statistically hyper selective. The less selective women are just out of the dating pool faster than the hyper selective ones. A lot of the women I know are happy to marry a man who grooms himself, respects basic boundaries, and has income. A lot of religious women in particular are socially pressured to drop the "respects boundaries" category also.
I think this is mainly a problem with dating apps - I have seen what you're talking about myself when the pair meets "naturally" or are set up by mutual friends.
People are far more forgiving in real life than they are online.
But part of the problem here is that the dating apps are like junk food: easy, satisfying, but ultimately unhealthy. And unfortunately because of this ease a lot of people reach for them instead of doing the more difficult leg work.
But I can also see it from the female perspective: If almost everyone I swipe right on matches with me - I'd start becoming WAY more selective about who I swipe right on. This leads to less matches but now the guys are also getting even less matches but they can't so easily fix it. The only remedy for the males is to start swiping right on anything that you're not put off by. And again, the men doing this exacerbates the problem - a copulatory ouroboros if you will.
Again you're coming at this with such intense anti-male rhetoric - take a step back and look at the problems beyond your own.
Yes I completely agree women DO need to be more careful as they are far more vulnerable and men far more likely to take advantage.
HOWEVER, playing off bad experiences for men as "a bad couple of hours" is just disingenuous. Women can absolutely ruin a mans life and reputation in those "couple of hours" - even worse if they get married and she decides to take him to the cleaners.
Look, I'm not coming at this as some anti-women basher - I see a societal issue that is hurting our men, women, and future. If we want to actually solve that problem the way forward is not increasing the hatred towards men and isolationism of women. We need to come together and not push each other further apart.
> A bad experience for you is a bad couple of hours and a few hundred hours. Ask a woman, what is a bad experience for them?
Playing the situation as though its 0% risk for men and 100% risk for women - making it seem as though only men can be harmful and they are by nature dangerous. Making it sound like no male has ever had a bad experience with women and the onus is completely on the males to fix this situation.
Meanwhile the only men who will listen to this advice are the ones who are already "safe" for women.
Probably the word "intense" shouldn't have been used by me and maybe I'm reading into it too deep.
The female perspective is slightly different here. Like I said, the less selective women have already been out of the dating pool a long time. Additionally, women on dating apps experience additional pressure to be selective because men who are dangerous/abusive/predators stay in the dating pool longer. This is explicitly unfair to normal men, but normal men are also out of the dating pool faster on a statistical level. This means that a dating pool selects for more and more picky women, and more and more dangerous men thereby validating the selectivity of the existing women.
[This is not to say that there are not dangerous/abusive/predatory women. There certainly are. But one of the greatest causes of death of pregnant women is the father of the child-to-be murdering her, and one of the greatest causes of death of recently single women is their now-ex murdering her. There is no similar reciprocation i.e. one of the leading causes of death of fathers-to-be is not the mother-to-be murdering him. Maybe financial ruin in child support, but explicitly not death.]
> men who are dangerous/abusive/predators stay in the dating pool longer
Not only this but they can use these apps to find their victims faster and easier than ever before.
> This is explicitly unfair to normal men
I think it's also unfair to women that they have to pick up the extra work that was done by the "community" before. And a loss for social cohesion too.
I am wondering though how someone who just ended a relationship could deal with this scenario? As a male you arguably look like one of the abusers because you're older and looking for a partner and as a female you're seen as less attractive. At the same time you're probably also more picky because of the break-up. Seems like they're the most shit-out-of-luck here regardless of what's between their legs.
I also wonder if this will push us towards being with our "high-school sweethearts" for longer than we would otherwise?
> Maybe financial ruin in child support, but explicitly not death.
Yeah absolutely, I'm personally not aware of the exact numbers for this but I wouldn't be shocked if you're right. Also I'd include things like false accusations, or getting her brothers/father to "take care of" the ex. Also we need to account for things like baby entrapment.
Also men tend to express their aggression physically whereas women tend to express it through reputation destruction. This also partially explains where we are today: women are afraid of male physical repercussions, men are afraid of female societal repercussions. Interestingly, it also mimics a lot of the rhetoric you see about "all males being bad" since it's a form of reputation destruction - whereas the male "comebacks" tend to focus on physical acts of violence that they "could do but won't".
> I think it's also unfair to women that they have to pick up the extra work that was done by the "community" before. And a loss for social cohesion too.
I would argue the community explicitly did not do the work of ousting predators. We are only in this generation or so no longer allowed to rape women if we're married to them. It is still legal for adults to marry children, not in an 18-to-17 way but a 38-to-15 way. Child marriages are overwhelmingly older-male-younger-female.
As for being with high-school sweethearts, that imo is also less and less likely, because more adults are forced to travel for employment (e.g. landing a job in a big city and moving).
I'd like to clarify when I said "community" I wasn't talking exclusively about friend groups (or your mother's friend groups) helping with recommendations and whatnot. I mean the community as a whole - men and women, the bailiffs and the blacksmiths: When you know everyone in your town and most of the people in your neighbouring towns it becomes much easier to know who is a bad person that'll abuse you (or to find out that information).
Yes, I'm pushing back on that because in the past it explicitly legal and normal to abuse women. Women were not allowed to be selective in the first place. So the community explicitly did not perform the protection you are saying. It was only recently illegal to rape your wife.
What I'm trying to say is that the people around us have always shaped who we pair up with - for better or worse - I think losing that is going to have consequences for social cohesion.
It's impossible to say who historically had it worse in general and I don't really believe such discussion is important except for historians. The only thing that dwelling on it will cause is resentment towards people who never perpetrated those crimes.
You pointed out a historical inaccuracy I wished to correct. You were the one that brought up the past and then incorrectly depicted it. You're reading a little too much on this.
> It's "do you make their life better than being alone?"
This is a really lovely sentiment and I wish more people approached it like this. I've never set up a dating profile and I don't plan to. But hiding stuff like fish pictures seems a bit over the top, surely if fishing is one of your passions you'd want to end up with someone who at least doesn't judge you for it.
Also keep in mind this approach of making sure your dating profile is "optimised" only works until a large enough %age of men's profiles are "optimised" - then its back to square 1 to figure out how to optimise it further to put yourself at the front of the queue again. We've seen what the SEO arms race has done to search engines, do we really want to do the same thing for dating?
The issue is that you rarely look your best in those pictures, and unless you are explicitly looking to date someone who loves to fish, you aren't showing them how they would integrate into your life.
This is assuming all women and all men are equal parties here in terms of candidate quality. I've used these apps and men are not socialized to present themselves in a visual medium the way women are. I'm not talking men should be putting on makeup, but a shocking number of men don't understand grooming their facial hair to fit their face shape, framing a photo of themselves, etc.
The whole AI discussion reminds me of David Graeber's "bullshit jobs" book. If the content doesn't matter, why not have an AI generate something polite and meaningless? Why not save effort managing your inbox full of meaningless emails by having the AI summarize them? It might lose some of the details, but they didn't matter. And so more and more of the white collar world gets replaced by AI .. until it actually disrupts away all the bullshit jobs entirely.
I was with you until you mentioned “brand”. You don’t need your identity to be a “brand”. Even more, it tends to be detrimental, because “story” implies inauthenticity.
Why such a hostile response to someone who cares about presenting themselves in a way they see fit? Your image is very important and it's logical that they want to control theirs.
> People will have no shame passing off well written things as an output of their talent and hard work.
Sometimes I don't want to waste my time crafting a professional e-mail to a bunch of jerks full of themselves. Maybe I want to write it as it comes off my brain, and let my digital scribe to reformulate it so that the people reading it feel respected/validated/flattered. Am I putting up a fake identity then? Am I presenting an illusion of professionalism? Maybe writing "Best regards" instead of "Bye" is the facade of professionalism in the first place.
I mean, I hear that. I was asked to be "nicer" in emails once, and when pressed for specific changes, was finally asked to occasionally say "Thanks!" as my sign-off instead of "Thanks,".
The "bunch of jerks full of themselves" likely aren't reading the emails now; we're burning immense amounts of energy for your politeness to be generated, and distilled out at the other end into a no-nonsense summary missing all the niceties another AI just added.
It's obviously a personal thing, but I even feel a little guilty clicking the autosuggested "thanks" when responding to a text. Everyone has the threshold they're comfortable with.
"Best Regards" vs "Bye" is one thing, but unless you're the owner of the company, sending a client "fuck you, pay me" just isn't professional and is probably going to get you fired.
If you care about putting up a fake identity this is still bad. Social media is all about being distinct and grabbing attention. Getting samified into a bland featureless identity isn't the same as as carefully crafting a persona to maximize clicks
At a high level I see convergence of styles, topics, behaviors to a generic form, both in "AI" and social media. Which to me suggest that the "AI" solutions are doing exactly what we would do ourselves, just faster.
With the normalization of default workflow to chuck all comms through an LLM filter settling in these days, I don't think it's even people trying to pass off illusions as their own persona. All it takes is a copy-paste and hitting the Make-Me-Some-Text button. I'm sure the responses will be frustratingly amusing if you were to press them and call them out on it (including trying to pass off the illusion).
Many people didn't think about what they are trying to convey (or self-analysed how they present themselves) when drafting correspondence in the past; now, many people think just as not-hard and often continue, like before, to neglect to meaningfully proofread whatever they had the LLMs generate for them before hitting Send.
Of course, I don't like it. But in some ways, it's just not a whole lot different from what it was before in that you can often still tell apart the people who care to be articulate from those who don't. Though, I feel bad for people disproportionately waylaid by the new paradigm like the bug/security responders on the curl project.
The obsessive need for AI developers to make everything into the most banal, inoffensive version of said thing will probably end up being the biggest roadblock for AI taking over human jobs.
"The obsessive need for AI developers (...)" - Of product product/business people trying to fit into the "AI era". Developers, if given a chance, wouldn't probably built this.
You phrase it well. It's not the AI themselves. You can as easily get an AI to take something fundamentally banal and write it into something exciting, dynamic, exotic, or strange.
If you analyze these systems as a work of art, using the postmodern toolset, the people and systems taking one of the most potent technologies humanity has ever created and using it to craft a banality machine is just... very revealing. Like the great-uncle who can't even finish protesting how non-racist he is without using a racial slur in the process.
"We're innovative! We're hip! We're on the cutting edge! We're setting trends! Now here, let me help you turn your text into the grayest corporate sludge imaginable."
It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.
It is, isn't it. It's the Sokal Hoax on a society-wide automated scale: rather than being concerned with what a "text" might "mean", generate millions upon millions of "text" sequences and mechanically separate those which pass as real enough. Baudrillard's simulacrum.
> It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.
People seem to be very insistent that the output of AI is not capital-A art, because that threatens their worldview, ignoring how artists had previously pushed to expand "art" away from any concerns of technique, intent, legibility etc.
I mean the system itself is art. The output is some kind of anti-art, but the system that uses the world's most amazing technology to extract the art out of everything that passes through it is an amazing piece of inadvertent outsider art on its own.
Honestly the only spot-on use case I can think of for an eternally calm, friendly, totally bland and generic customer service AI is for interacting with the Karens of the world and only because it would spare the nerves of human employees and because the logs would no doubt be hilarious to read.
I feel like nothing would turn me into a Karen more than interacting with AI customer service on a regular basis.
It’s already severely frustrating that at many companies, you have to talk to several people (separated by copious waiting) to get your problem solved after handling a severely outdated and underdeveloped phone system.
I see it as like- if you were the owner of a company, you could decide for yourself what the $/abuse trade off is, and for each individual customer decide if it's worth it.
As a disempowered employee, you can only decide in aggregate if the total $ vs total abuse is worth it. So in order to keep getting paid at all, you Must put up with every interaction. Which leads to no alternative to the person being abused and no real consequences for the person being abusive, which is a shame. And it seems a lot easier to take abuse if you know you have the upper hand and have an out if you ever want it.
I have noticed many news outlets presenting articles with an "AI summary" on top. Often the article is copied right off of a newswire service, with some elaborations woven in. I have a feeling the thing the LLM is summarising is increasingly something another LLM has previously expanded.
What if we just wrote articles well, such that (a) they were not filled with fluff, and (b) the summary would be to only read the first paragraph of the article?
Digital culture was fake and performative and insincere enough before Turboclippy: fuck that with something sharp.
It feels like the whole world is turning into an HR department premised on the ideological axiom that killing one man is a murder but killing a million is a statistic.
Since the standard thing for the marketing side of the industry is to promise blatant absurdities, I'm sure the next big thing will be "Let us maintain your authentic voice by learning from your messages!"
I think LLMs are transformative but it's incredible to me how unimaginative most product managers have been. It reminds me of the 90s when people discovered GIFs can be put on web pages so every page had to have a hundred of them. It was tacky, as is most embedded AI.
I've only recently started using AI, and have discovered my use or rejection of it is predicated on my feelings for the task. This argument of "authenticity" really resonates.
I'm a manager, so when I'm sending emails to a customer or talking with one of my reports, I care deeply - so you might get some overwrought florid prose, but it's my overwrought florid prose.
On the other hand, I have to lead a weekly meeting that exists solely to provide evidence for compliance reasons, something out of the CIA's sabotage field manual that David Graeber has probably written about. But is now a thirty second exercise in uploading a transcript to ChatGPT, prompting for three evidentiary bulletpoints, and pasting the output in a wiki no human will ever read.
That's also what I do. I hand-write every email because these words have my name under them. On the other hand, if I'm asking the tax office to issue a specific document, I let AI handle it.
I was thinking about the authenticity of my writing earlier this week and wondering why I have no problem accepting code from an AI and committing it, but I find the idea of passing off an AI's writing as my own feels not just wrong, but immoral on the level of purposeful plagiarism. I feel a distinct difference, but I'm not particular clear why. I'm okay with sharing AI writing, but only when I've clearly communicated it was written by AI.
Probably related to why I can copy a piece of code from elsewhere (with sufficient work to verify it does what I expect and only what I expect) but I don't copy a quote and use it as my own. My words are my words. My code doesn't have the same guarantee.
Code uses a simplified set of instructions to instruct a computer to do things. Hopefully these instructions can be understood and maintained by a human.
Writing uses the entire breadth of human language to convey information between human beings with unique and complex understandings of the universe. If those words come from a machine that is not you - that is not someone - you ought to disclose it.
It's probably because communication is a complex dance between humans, where you're constantly signaling that you're part of some group with the other person. Think of any profession or team, where members share common ways of speaking: jargon, inside jokes, terms of art, terms of endearment, etc. It's useful for cohesion, trust, and efficiency because you're assured that the person you're talking to is indeed "one of us."
If you use an AI to communicate, then you either fail to mimic those group membership signals and you look like an idiot. Or you succeed and show that a machine can fool humans at this game. Any grifter can come along and establish trust in a group by relying on this tech. This dance that humans have been doing since the dawn of time suddenly breaks down, and that doesn't feel good.
I wonder how people feel about "dumber" tools like hemingway.app that make mechanical suggestions for readability like suggesting simple synonyms and highlighting sentences that are too long. I've used it for writing documents that important and I knew a lot of people would read.
AI "polishing" tools are essentially a form of anti-compression. Lets take some information represented concisely and needlessly pad it with formalities and waffle so it appears more "professional" (whilst also throwing away useful "metadata" like message tone).
No doubt the recipient will also be using some form of AI summarization that strips away all that added "polish" - making the whole exercise entirely redundant!
> No doubt the recipient will also be using some form of AI summarization that strips away all that added "polish" - making the whole exercise entirely redundant!
Not entirely, there’s still the energy usage and stock price increases. All because everyone’s too anxious to just talk to each other directly.
My (evidently mentally disabled) previous manager was so proud of being able to use AI to generate the bullshit he sent out to clients. What the morons are really doing is proving they're useless, let them.
I get the frustration, but I think there’s a hidden assumption in this discussion: that everyone can write well in English.
Only about 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers, but more than twice that number use it daily. For many, AI rewriting isn’t about losing personal style—it’s about making sure they can communicate clearly in a language that isn’t their first.
It’s fair to dislike how AI flattens unique voices, but for a huge part of the world, it’s not erasing personality—it’s making participation possible.
AI translation is definitely a great enabler, both for written material and things like live subtitles, but people are already aware that translations are imperfect and can be disputed. Something that anime fans can get very heated about.
English is not my native language yet somehow I share this sentiment towards AI. I'm fine with a spell checker, I don't need whatever I write completely rewritten, thank you very much.
If you can't translate your email into a foreign language, how is the AI going to rewrite your incorrect prose into correct prose? it's working on something incorrect. And then after the ai rewrites it, how can you tell if it's saying what you want it to?
When I'm communicating with a non-native speaker, I intentionally use shorter / easier to translate words and sentences, and I give them more leeway with word usage / don't expect them to use the right words all the time. And that's fine! Communication still happens! We manage!
But if a non-native speaker starts running their text through an AI it makes communication harder, not easier. I can't tell if their word choice is intentional or if the AI did it. A tiny mistake I can understand gets expanded into multiple incorrect sentences.
>If you can't translate your email into a foreign language, how is the AI going to rewrite your incorrect prose into correct prose? it's working on something incorrect. And then after the ai rewrites it, how can you tell if it's saying what you want it to?
Absolutely this. "Accessibility" and "participation" are great goals on paper, but the tools at hand are likely to introduce confusion because the user fundamentally isn't in a position to judge the quality of the output.
How are you supposed to communicate clearly if you are relying on an AI to communicate for you? How could you even tell if it properly communicates your ideas if you couldnt communicate them properly in the first place?
Last year I worked with someone who used AI tools like this, to compensate for their lack of English. It was dreadful beyond belief and basically unworkable.
Lack of comprehension on what other people said was a big issue. But also having four incomprehensible paragraphs thrown at me for what could be six words (not infrequently based on a misunderstanding of a very basic simple sentence).
I'm not a native speaker either, but the only way to learn a language is to actually use it. For better or worse, English is the modern world's lingua franca.
The proper solution is to work with an editor that asks clarifying question not to rewrite the whole thing into something totally different.
For published work, if it's not worth editing then it's not worth reading (I would go further personally and say that most publish, edited and peer reviewed work, in your area of interest isn't worth reading anyways)
For unpublished work, like an email, ask the AI to translate the passage while maintaining style and tone. It will still flatten it, but not as much as the complete dogshit I read in the article.
Communication is a job requirement, faking it with AI is going to go about as well as someone faking programming skills. Not very!
I actually use LLMs to unpolish dictation results from MacWhisper[0] to match the way I write in chats. MacWhisper lets you set a prompt to automatically post-process your transcribed output. Here is my prompt:
'You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to rewrite this dictation with more casual capitalization and punctuation so it can be used in a chat setting.
- Always capitalize "I" and derived words like "I'm"
- Sentences should start with lower case letters unless they start with “I”
- Replace explicit punctuation callouts with the actual punctuation
- No period at the end of the message, but leave periods between sentences
- Do not remove commas
- Do not change sophisticated words to more common ones
Return only the result. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edit.'
As a tangent, the other day I read a post of a person who used to be close to Elon Musk and was giving their account of that relationship, and it was translated to Polish via DeepSeek.
It was not idiomatic Polish - very far from it really, so I guess depending on the model used here, the result could have been equally disappointing if it was really trying to Polish that email.
It's owners, however, definitely want you to fall into lockstep that cooking the Earth for their billion$ is perfectly fine and that waking up to a life of low-impact, serviceful compassion to the Earth and its peoples is just virtue-signalling when, in fact, it is simply virtuous in the face of demented psychosociopaths.
Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining. Just more burning the Earth for fakeass money so callous bastards can get richer.
They weren't using modern GPUs and muiltiprocessor machines to cook the Earth, which has been happening on a large scale since the turn of this century.
No, we were burning coal and cutting down trees. I'm not saying that what we're doing now is fine, if anything I'm agreeing with you but pointing out that profit-driven environmental destruction has been happening since way before the invention of cryptocurrency.
"profit-driven environmental destruction has been happening since way before the invention of cryptocurrency"
Yes. People forget that every tree on the east coast was cut down. Every forest you see today on the east coast was re-grown, new. It was all clear cut for progress during expansion. I think it was mostly for 'potash' by burning it.
Yes. The green house gas effect has been studied since 1856.
The 'right' is willfully ignorant. Not just ignorant because they just haven't been exposed. They willfully decide to be ignorant because knowledge goes against their religion.
"The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force of global warming."
Not for geopolitical stability, though. What did we learn about making the entirety of human civilization dependent on a constant supply of rare materials hostile countries dig out of the ground?
And what happens when they run out? Back to carbon fossil fuels?
> It’s like my whole computer is a toddler screaming “LET ME DO IT!” every time I try to create something.
Every autocorrect or auto suggestion ever has felt like this to me, but the volume has been turned up to 11. The otherwise drab Adobe Reader is covered with colorful sparkly buttons and popups suggesting I need not even read the document because it can give me “insights.” First, no you may not ready my proprietary document, nor do I suspect most people using this particular software - I only have it for digital signatures - have permission to share IP with a third party. But mostly, it can sometimes be a useful tool, and the fact everyone is shoving it in my face reeks of desperation.
> no you may not ready my proprietary document, nor do I suspect most people using this particular software - I only have it for digital signatures - have permission to share IP with a third party.
This is a massive liability that almost everybody seems to be ignoring. My employer has a ban on using AI on IP until this is properly resolved, because we actually care about it leaking.
Maybe an Information Commissioner will get round to issuing a directive some time in the mid-2030s about how none of this complies with GDPR.
I think in general, no major liability issue will come up:
- if everyone is doing it, you can't really fault anyone
- on some level we are, or will be, kinda dependent on that AI and opting out will probably be made unpleasant via dark patterns as usual
- no pushback to every piece of software, including at the operating system level, slurping all the keystrokes and data, let alone the data that's already in the cloud
- big tech knows everything about us but to my surprise no major public leak has happened, i.e. one where you really can see your neighbor's private data without buying leaked data from someone on the dark web or wherever
- things are moving too fast, and you don't know if you can afford to have your programmers not use tomorrow's AI, for example, so your "bans" will have to be soft etc., this limits the potential pushback and outrage
> My employer has a ban on using AI on IP until this is properly resolved, because we actually care about it leaking.
Yet I can almost guarantee you that someone has put something they shouldn't through ChatGPT, because they either feel like it's a dumb rule, that should not apply to them, or they where in a hurry and what are the odds of them getting caught.
Oh we can have something stronger than almost a guarantee, I have first hand anecdotes of documents from the financial services sector being fed to ChatGPT for polishing. They weren't trade secrets but their classifications were INTERNAL, _and higher_.
Open source has been looking better and better lately because it's not in a mad rush to bolt "AI" features onto it (an LLM will do something) and then shove a huge amount of interface in your face to try to get you to use it.
On some level it's enormously baffling that this was the thing they decided they needed to do...conversely Adobe Reader on my phone won't shutup about liquid mode either (which uploads to Adobe servers) and Microsoft and Google's solution to "people don't want to use our AI assistants" was to ensure they literally can't be disabled or removed.
I will simply point you to the iTerm2 AI kerfuffle (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40458135) as proof that some in open source _are_ in a mad rush to bolt on completely unnecessary "features".
It was a bad choice that never should have been implemented as "enabled but not configured", and I have moved away from iTerm2 as a result. I am sure that others have as well. (The grudging move to make it a separately downloadable plugin was good, but too late IMO.)
One of the rare times when the slow pace of open source innovation is actually a benefit, because all innovation that's occurring is making things worse.
After a recent Show HN, I got an email from someone saying that they'd set up a page for my 'product' on their product showcase startup site. I followed the link and saw my open-source project pitched as ChatGPT slop. It felt like a violation because it wasn't just an aggregated link, but a rewrite of my readme with an associated 'pitch'.
I recommend reporting this to dang at hn@ycombinator.com. I imagine that he'd be interested in someone crawling HN in order to send automated lead generation spam.
I don't think dang can do anything about it, I'm sure HN gets scraped all the time. I routinely get spam from cryptocurrency startups to (obfuscated) email addresses I have posted on HN years ago on "Who Wants to be Hired" threads, and from my commit messages on github.
Github is definitely quite the source of spam. I ended up realizing that when I was tired of having two .gitconfigs with two email addresses (work/personal) and switched to just putting my @users.noreply.github.com in there. No more spam.
(Plus I get to show off my 4 digit Github userid. I was the 2367th person to sign up! ;)
Neat. I was pretty late to the party and have a userid halfway into the 6 digits, but somehow I got extremely lucky and landed a two-character username (my initials).
I get a ton of emails from people on HN and I dunno, it's really my fault for putting my email in my profile. I don't blame HN for this; I don't think it's particularly supportive of this kind of "abuse".
Thing is, we've been here before in a much more limited way; people _hated_ it when Microsoft's demonic paperclip did this in Office. "It looks like you're writing a letter". _Hated_ it.
It is unclear what the industry thinks has changed, that people will now welcome "It looks like you're [whatever]".
It's a design that's in companies' best interests. You can have a computer that's a "friend." One that you trust but ultimately has a mind of its own. This contrasts with a computer that's merely a tool, that serves you exclusvely at your pleasure and has zero agency of its own.
Which approach gives companies more control over users? Which one allows companies to sell that access to the highest bidder?
Based on the experience of 20 years ago, though, users are _extremely_ turned off by it. There's little reason to think this has changed (if anything it is likely more pronounced because Clippy came in kinda without baggage, whereas LLMs have a lot of baggage and most of it ain't great).
> It's a design that's in companies' best interests.
I really don't think it is. Clippy was reputationaly damaging to Microsoft and they had to get rid of it. There's little reason to think this will be different.
Modern Big Tech doesn't particularly care what users think. They know they have network effects on their side and that switching costs are high. So what if it's "reputationally damaging?" What are users going to do? They're just resources to be exploited. Microsoft, Google, and their ilk can treat users with contempt if it means more control and more shareholder value.
Third option: the computer is your enemy, which will follow any sufficiently clever adversary’s orders.
Thinking of a computer as a tool seems reasonable, but thinking of your computer as your friend is clownish (which, I think you agree with based on your last comment).
Slightly offtopic, but I have a friend with synesthesia who sees inanimate objects like people, and they call their computer "macbook friend" (since it's a MacBook Air).
Thing is, Gmail's been doing this ~forever with quick replies to emails, now it's just doing longer replies instead of "that's great, thanks" level of replies.
This forum (HN) attracts certain population that wants to do things, to understand, to share relatively well based opinions and have a discussion.
But look around, look at the new hires in the other departments. And by new I mean young, in their 20. A lot of them welcome this kind of things, they evaluate by popularity and likes. The marketing begin the AI bubble knows this, and so it pushes for it. Make it popular is more important than make it useful, because there is a tipping point were is popular enough that we capitulate.
Did they, though? Polling fairly consistently shows that people don’t _like_ this stuff, and there’s some evidence that the more familiar with it they become the less they like it. I think Microsoft et al were betting on people liking it (that was certainly their thinking with Clippy, too) but that doesn’t seem to be working out for them.
Not only have the people changed but it is the belief of the elites at the top that humanity is entering a new era of hack-ability. They want to use these AI systems to rewrite humanity into their vision of the future.
Yuval Noah Harari talking about how the new "gods" are the data-centers and how free will is dead in the age of AI.
https://youtu.be/QuL3wlodJC8
Well, for the purpose of this conversation the people at the top of the food chain believe free will exists. They also believe that they can eliminate it with AI and Biomedical manipulation.
My sister is ripping her hair out dealing with the interns at he job being extremely tech illiterate with anything thats not app-ified. Many don't know what files are, and are needing run through computer basics because everything they have used has anything technical abstracted away. The post-iPhone generation just wants there hand held and anything technical scares them. Microsoft Bob was just too ahead of the curve.
The customer base for computing has expanded probably 3 or 4 fold or more from those windows xp days in the US. Maybe for the subset of the population that was word processing back then it was annoying. But now we are looking at a different pie entirely where that subset of annoyed power users is but a tiny sliver. There are people today who have no experience even with a desktop os.
This wasn’t the dark ages; in highly developed countries the ‘computer in every desk’ thing had just about come true. I doubt there are that many more regular word processor users now than in the late clippy era, at least in the developed world.
But clippy didn't write the letter for me = if I can be lazy and AI formats what I'm communicating in a way that is accessible to other people, then why should I care.
Clippy (and his predecessors, he wasn't one of the first avatars for the feature) might not have been so bad, but marketing got hold of it and decided it didn't pop up often enough for them to really make a big thing of, so it was tuned up to an irritating level.
> It is unclear what the industry thinks has changed
The demographics of computer (and other device) use have changed massively since the late 90s, and the suggestion engines are much more powerful.
I still want it all to take a long walk off a short peer, but a lot of people seem happy with it bothering them.
I remember when software would ask you on first start what your level of experience was. "Novice, Intermediate, Expert" and would tune the UI to respect that.
Sometimes different modes like that can be more hassle than they are worth, from the dev point of view. You can end up with many more paths to test in order to try make sure your product is bug free.
If the automation is much better at the task than I am, then I am happy to donate it the responsibility: It's a matter of accuracy. Clippy kind of sucked even when he was right about what I was trying to do. For many things, the LLMs are getting good enough to outperform me
The goal with most of these AI features is not to solve a real problem users are having, it's to add a feature that uses AI. This will not change because it's not wrong of the individuals making the decision. The project manager gets to say he shipped a cutting-edge AI project. The developers all get to put experience working with very hireable technologies at a serious company on their resume. There will be no adverse impact to the bottom line, because the cost to develop the shitty AI feature is a drop in the bucket, and the cost to create a competing product that accomplishes the core thing users are using that product for but without feature bloat would be very high, and probably unsuccessful since "less feature bloat" has never been sufficient to break the static friction threshold for users to switch.
So it won't change, because there is no lesson to learn. No individual involved acted irrationally.
My mother is a first-generation immigrant. Her writing isn’t ideal, but AI allows her to communicate articulately in a way, where before she might have been discriminated against
Obviously the AI version is bland and terrible, but arguably more importantly it has also completely changed the meaning of the message. The AI version:
- apologizes
- implies the recipient was "promised" this email as a "response" to something
- blames a hectic schedule
- invites questions
None of this was in or was even implied in the original. This is not a "polished" version, it's just a straight-up different email. I thought that style transfer while maintaining meaning was one of the few things LLMs can be good at, but this example fails even that low bar.
A lot of people who want to replace most human interactions with LLMs assume that there is some objective set of cultural values true in all contexts, and that it is good and easy to encode these as axioms into an AI.
Yes. As an Old now (GenX), I feel like moving all interactions to text and now having AI as a man in the middle is just reinventing ways to get in a situation where a decade down the line you reconnect with someone who used to be a friend and both discover "Hey, that wasn't what I meant at all!"
As ever, T.S. Eliot was right: "It is impossible to say just what I mean!"
And those objective set of cultural values are, apparently... a sort of parody of 90s corporate culture, a sort of polite version of Michael Scott. Like, no-one ever _actually_ wrote like LLMs tend to write; it reads as a parody of a now slightly obsolete corporate-speak.
And those ideas seem far more in line with millenial Silicon Valley culture. It's weird when they expect Germans to fake that sort of overly formal, overly cheery tone. People just don't talk like that.
Yeah, my father is German, and I'm Canadian, but of a .. grouchy ... variety. This kind of business culture has never really fit with me. But it's how the people with the $$ speak.
“OK Fine. But could you at least yell at me in corp speak?”
It's no surprise LLMs are using corp speak and vapid marketing prose as a template. There is so much of it out there.
This is from that Autodesk post last week where they admitted their mistake and… Nope it's corp speak:
“We are excited to share some important updates regarding Archiving and our Idea Boards and Forums that aim to enhance your experience and ensure valuable content remains accessible. Please read the details below to understand how these changes might impact you.”
Barf. But to an LLM this looks like a human communicating in a meaningful way.
> Look, we need to align on language here. If you’re not speaking in scalable, results-driven terminology, you’re slowing down the team. We don’t “talk about things”—we sync and strategize. We don’t “try something new”—we leverage data-driven insights to drive innovation.
A quick glance suggests that, because the site is pretty far afield of usual HN fare, folks here don't realize that Lawson is the author of several books.
I personally do not want you -- for any value of "you" -- to use an AI to "polish" any writing sent to ME. I want the author's actual thoughts, not their thoughts massaged by an LLM.
While not as longstanding as, say, Lileks, thebloggess is someone from the blog era of the Internet, and publishes an RSS feed. She's well known in other internet communities.
I simply do not understand the end game of these sorts of features.
Presumably, the idea is to make the other person think you've written the email yourself, and you're a "better"/more corporate/more professional writer than you actually are.
But once everyone starts using this kind of transformer, so nobody assumes that anyone else is actually writing the content they're sending out -- what's the point?! Who benefits?
The team that implemented the feature and hit their quarterly goal and got their full quarterly bonus. The execs who set the quarterly goals will be rewarded by wall street for shipping AI features. In 2 years, when reality has struck and the market has moved on from the AI fad, another team will receive their bonus for lowering COGS by removing this feature.
Users' needs are irrelevant to this cycle.
Big tech companies need to be broken up into teeny, tiny pieces.
The vendor's share price. This is nothing to do with the _users_; it is about cramming 'AI' into as many press releases as possible because it gives the markets the warm fuzzies. No-one wants to use this, and that's really beside the point; for the time being it makes stock price go up.
Presumably in a year or so there'll be a new fad, and most LLM-based 'features' will go the way of Clippy.
AI takes the personality out of written communication, and swaps it with a bland corporate persona. I want to know that I am working with actual human beings. It reassures me to know that if something goes wrong, I can appeal to those human beings, and not to soulless corporate automatons working off of a flowchart.
I feel like this is what corporate wants. A single way of speaking. A single way of thinking. Round off all the sharp edges and smooth out all the wrinkles. Humanity filtered through a sycophantic psychotic AI tuned to perfection by psychopaths who want to change humanity into their image.
"The idea of a Soul, Free Will -- these are Over!" - Technocracy explained by Prof Yuval Harari
https://youtu.be/NV0CtZga7qM
Good news is that AI is equally adept at turning long polite business speak emails into short, blunt, and sweary emails, so you can choose what you prefer.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV0CtZga7qM
So no, thank you. Correct my textbook punctuation mistakes, and leave my wordy and "not positive enough" sentences to me.
>You have an individual and unique way of speaking and writing? You're going to wish your e-mail finds people well, corporate-monkey.
Though, its stenography is a bit more obvious given the "you've got to be able to read it".
The kindle version of the book starts with https://imgur.com/uIBjwlQ
This would give you the opportunity to have another ending to the book.
Then readers can use the app for hiding their own messages to each other also.
An idea I discussed with someone tossing story ideas about was regarding the reliable / unreliable narrator for a mystery mixed in with being able to view (lock a display screen to a geographic location, got a knob to rewind / fast forward time (up to the present)) immutable past events who finds something amiss. Upon the "somethings not right..." the narrator reviews their own events of the previous day and finds that the events don't match their memory. Is the narrator reliable? Is the narrator that is questioning their own reliability the narrator or an external agent trying to cast doubt on the reliability of the actual narrator?
This person cares about not putting up a fake identity. That's pretty cool, but social media has exposed that a large number of people are perfectly fine presenting an illusion. People will have no shame passing off well written things as an output of their talent and hard work. Digital makeup has no bounds.
This is the current modern Human:
1. Born into the beast, enters social media by 5-7 years old
2. All math and writing is done for you (becoming illiterate)
3. You don't have to spell ever again (becoming illiterate)
4. You cultivate a virtual persona since childhood (becoming vain)
5. Did your life really happen if it wasn't posted online (the digital existentialist crisis -- do you even exist if you aren't part of the hive?)
Then add more shit to this like, I dunno, no jobs, swipe left and right to find your soul mate ...
Yeah and then you finally get ... you and me, the whole fuck it, I don't care anymore.
Feeding apathy with AI will not end well, we have to care. Look at our kids today, we screwed them.
1. Born into plague 2. Never learns maths or writing 3. Nor spelling 4. Half the time your life ends before childhood does 5. Nothing happens in your life
So what’s the takeaway, life a bitch and then you die?
Just because we don't know what daily life looked like doesn't mean "nothing happened".
Farm work done? Picked all my parasites out of my hair and clothes? Now to settle down for the very-zen "sit by the fire, sing some peasant songs and do nothing" -- sounds amazing
> Women only like 4% of the men they see on the app.
> Men like more than 60% of the women they see on the app.
this ends with 20 women with the same soul mate and 19 men without any. you need to add
> no kids, no grandkids
to your litany.
Men in the dating pool have become toxic, and women are doing their best to weed those out. Don't be toxic. Don't endorse people who are looking to make women's lives worse. Put effort into your presentation in your profile pictures - have a woman friend take them. Put effort into your profile to show that you are not someone who would endanger women - have other women in your life help you present your profile. (That probably means don't have a fishing photo, even if you enjoy fishing!)
Much of this is predicated on having women in your life that you trust and that trust you, and who want to see you happy. This means listening to them and trusting them.
And then, you might be a little pickier in your profile too.
This means that women will receive far more attention from the opposite sex, and therefore have an "easier" time finding potential partners. This problem is just exacerbated by dating apps and social media making women more aware of their position and options - 100 years ago women could barely date outside their village. Nowadays they receive 100s of messages from men around the world competing for her attention. The opposite happens to men, they become more aware of how "undesired" they are so they start casting a wider net since no fish are caught in their smaller nets.
Blaming the men here just reeks of those toxic standards - since again it is on the men to improve. Not the women who should continue being hyper selective (most attractive, wealthy, etc.).
(Note I'm not blaming any side just showing the reality men face - really this is a problem both sexes need to tackle)
"easier" is in quotes because I appreciate women have to filter out abusers and creeps. But from the male perspective they'd kill to even have a chance with an abuser or creep.
Life is simple. He or she lived in the town, or your school, or was someone you pass by on the way to work daily. It's not some complicated digital dance where the universe presents to you all possible mates.
Date the person you wouldn't. Give it a chance, because you just don't know how this love stuff happens.
Ask a woman who trusts you about their worst experiences sometime.
Then the internet became for everyone and so did online dating. When there's that many people involved, things get more unsafe. It's not the same pool of early adopters on the same wavelength. It's everyone now, and everyone includes every wave length.
Stay safe!
People are far more forgiving in real life than they are online.
But part of the problem here is that the dating apps are like junk food: easy, satisfying, but ultimately unhealthy. And unfortunately because of this ease a lot of people reach for them instead of doing the more difficult leg work.
But I can also see it from the female perspective: If almost everyone I swipe right on matches with me - I'd start becoming WAY more selective about who I swipe right on. This leads to less matches but now the guys are also getting even less matches but they can't so easily fix it. The only remedy for the males is to start swiping right on anything that you're not put off by. And again, the men doing this exacerbates the problem - a copulatory ouroboros if you will.
A bad experience for you is a bad couple of hours and a few hundred hours. Ask a woman, what is a bad experience for them?
Yes I completely agree women DO need to be more careful as they are far more vulnerable and men far more likely to take advantage.
HOWEVER, playing off bad experiences for men as "a bad couple of hours" is just disingenuous. Women can absolutely ruin a mans life and reputation in those "couple of hours" - even worse if they get married and she decides to take him to the cleaners.
Look, I'm not coming at this as some anti-women basher - I see a societal issue that is hurting our men, women, and future. If we want to actually solve that problem the way forward is not increasing the hatred towards men and isolationism of women. We need to come together and not push each other further apart.
Playing the situation as though its 0% risk for men and 100% risk for women - making it seem as though only men can be harmful and they are by nature dangerous. Making it sound like no male has ever had a bad experience with women and the onus is completely on the males to fix this situation.
Meanwhile the only men who will listen to this advice are the ones who are already "safe" for women.
Probably the word "intense" shouldn't have been used by me and maybe I'm reading into it too deep.
[This is not to say that there are not dangerous/abusive/predatory women. There certainly are. But one of the greatest causes of death of pregnant women is the father of the child-to-be murdering her, and one of the greatest causes of death of recently single women is their now-ex murdering her. There is no similar reciprocation i.e. one of the leading causes of death of fathers-to-be is not the mother-to-be murdering him. Maybe financial ruin in child support, but explicitly not death.]
Not only this but they can use these apps to find their victims faster and easier than ever before.
> This is explicitly unfair to normal men
I think it's also unfair to women that they have to pick up the extra work that was done by the "community" before. And a loss for social cohesion too.
I am wondering though how someone who just ended a relationship could deal with this scenario? As a male you arguably look like one of the abusers because you're older and looking for a partner and as a female you're seen as less attractive. At the same time you're probably also more picky because of the break-up. Seems like they're the most shit-out-of-luck here regardless of what's between their legs.
I also wonder if this will push us towards being with our "high-school sweethearts" for longer than we would otherwise?
> Maybe financial ruin in child support, but explicitly not death.
Yeah absolutely, I'm personally not aware of the exact numbers for this but I wouldn't be shocked if you're right. Also I'd include things like false accusations, or getting her brothers/father to "take care of" the ex. Also we need to account for things like baby entrapment.
Also men tend to express their aggression physically whereas women tend to express it through reputation destruction. This also partially explains where we are today: women are afraid of male physical repercussions, men are afraid of female societal repercussions. Interestingly, it also mimics a lot of the rhetoric you see about "all males being bad" since it's a form of reputation destruction - whereas the male "comebacks" tend to focus on physical acts of violence that they "could do but won't".
I would argue the community explicitly did not do the work of ousting predators. We are only in this generation or so no longer allowed to rape women if we're married to them. It is still legal for adults to marry children, not in an 18-to-17 way but a 38-to-15 way. Child marriages are overwhelmingly older-male-younger-female.
As for being with high-school sweethearts, that imo is also less and less likely, because more adults are forced to travel for employment (e.g. landing a job in a big city and moving).
It's impossible to say who historically had it worse in general and I don't really believe such discussion is important except for historians. The only thing that dwelling on it will cause is resentment towards people who never perpetrated those crimes.
Your biggest competition is not the other men on the app. It's "do you make their life better than being alone?"
This is a really lovely sentiment and I wish more people approached it like this. I've never set up a dating profile and I don't plan to. But hiding stuff like fish pictures seems a bit over the top, surely if fishing is one of your passions you'd want to end up with someone who at least doesn't judge you for it.
Also keep in mind this approach of making sure your dating profile is "optimised" only works until a large enough %age of men's profiles are "optimised" - then its back to square 1 to figure out how to optimise it further to put yourself at the front of the queue again. We've seen what the SEO arms race has done to search engines, do we really want to do the same thing for dating?
The issue is that you rarely look your best in those pictures, and unless you are explicitly looking to date someone who loves to fish, you aren't showing them how they would integrate into your life.
not a good start to a relationship :)
http://hyper-reality.co/
Edit: comments describing exactly this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42865225
If I don’t bring my identity, I don’t make sales. My business is an extension of who I am (and my decades of experience).
My identity helps customers understand that. It’s part of a brand story.
Sometimes I don't want to waste my time crafting a professional e-mail to a bunch of jerks full of themselves. Maybe I want to write it as it comes off my brain, and let my digital scribe to reformulate it so that the people reading it feel respected/validated/flattered. Am I putting up a fake identity then? Am I presenting an illusion of professionalism? Maybe writing "Best regards" instead of "Bye" is the facade of professionalism in the first place.
The "bunch of jerks full of themselves" likely aren't reading the emails now; we're burning immense amounts of energy for your politeness to be generated, and distilled out at the other end into a no-nonsense summary missing all the niceties another AI just added.
When you did it manually you were putting up a fake identify. ofc using an AI to fake you being fake for work would be fake.
The idea that our work personas aren't at least a little fake is toxic. Depending on where you work it might be a lot fake.
Wear your character as lightly as a cap, don't get tricked into method acting.
At a high level I see convergence of styles, topics, behaviors to a generic form, both in "AI" and social media. Which to me suggest that the "AI" solutions are doing exactly what we would do ourselves, just faster.
Many people didn't think about what they are trying to convey (or self-analysed how they present themselves) when drafting correspondence in the past; now, many people think just as not-hard and often continue, like before, to neglect to meaningfully proofread whatever they had the LLMs generate for them before hitting Send.
Of course, I don't like it. But in some ways, it's just not a whole lot different from what it was before in that you can often still tell apart the people who care to be articulate from those who don't. Though, I feel bad for people disproportionately waylaid by the new paradigm like the bug/security responders on the curl project.
If you analyze these systems as a work of art, using the postmodern toolset, the people and systems taking one of the most potent technologies humanity has ever created and using it to craft a banality machine is just... very revealing. Like the great-uncle who can't even finish protesting how non-racist he is without using a racial slur in the process.
"We're innovative! We're hip! We're on the cutting edge! We're setting trends! Now here, let me help you turn your text into the grayest corporate sludge imaginable."
It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.
It is, isn't it. It's the Sokal Hoax on a society-wide automated scale: rather than being concerned with what a "text" might "mean", generate millions upon millions of "text" sequences and mechanically separate those which pass as real enough. Baudrillard's simulacrum.
> It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.
People seem to be very insistent that the output of AI is not capital-A art, because that threatens their worldview, ignoring how artists had previously pushed to expand "art" away from any concerns of technique, intent, legibility etc.
It’s already severely frustrating that at many companies, you have to talk to several people (separated by copious waiting) to get your problem solved after handling a severely outdated and underdeveloped phone system.
Its an offense to justice that its so easy to get away with being mean to service workers.
I see it as like- if you were the owner of a company, you could decide for yourself what the $/abuse trade off is, and for each individual customer decide if it's worth it.
As a disempowered employee, you can only decide in aggregate if the total $ vs total abuse is worth it. So in order to keep getting paid at all, you Must put up with every interaction. Which leads to no alternative to the person being abused and no real consequences for the person being abusive, which is a shame. And it seems a lot easier to take abuse if you know you have the upper hand and have an out if you ever want it.
What if we just wrote articles well, such that (a) they were not filled with fluff, and (b) the summary would be to only read the first paragraph of the article?
It feels like the whole world is turning into an HR department premised on the ideological axiom that killing one man is a murder but killing a million is a statistic.
Oops, probably too late.
So is a landmine.
I'm a manager, so when I'm sending emails to a customer or talking with one of my reports, I care deeply - so you might get some overwrought florid prose, but it's my overwrought florid prose.
On the other hand, I have to lead a weekly meeting that exists solely to provide evidence for compliance reasons, something out of the CIA's sabotage field manual that David Graeber has probably written about. But is now a thirty second exercise in uploading a transcript to ChatGPT, prompting for three evidentiary bulletpoints, and pasting the output in a wiki no human will ever read.
Probably related to why I can copy a piece of code from elsewhere (with sufficient work to verify it does what I expect and only what I expect) but I don't copy a quote and use it as my own. My words are my words. My code doesn't have the same guarantee.
Writing uses the entire breadth of human language to convey information between human beings with unique and complex understandings of the universe. If those words come from a machine that is not you - that is not someone - you ought to disclose it.
If you use an AI to communicate, then you either fail to mimic those group membership signals and you look like an idiot. Or you succeed and show that a machine can fool humans at this game. Any grifter can come along and establish trust in a group by relying on this tech. This dance that humans have been doing since the dawn of time suddenly breaks down, and that doesn't feel good.
No doubt the recipient will also be using some form of AI summarization that strips away all that added "polish" - making the whole exercise entirely redundant!
It just feels absurd.
Not entirely, there’s still the energy usage and stock price increases. All because everyone’s too anxious to just talk to each other directly.
The more the first pads, the more the second is needed.
If AI really were Intelligent, I'd fear it's an organism making sure it's needed in the ecosystem.
Only about 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers, but more than twice that number use it daily. For many, AI rewriting isn’t about losing personal style—it’s about making sure they can communicate clearly in a language that isn’t their first.
It’s fair to dislike how AI flattens unique voices, but for a huge part of the world, it’s not erasing personality—it’s making participation possible.
It's how well you know english that's correlated to being able to write well in english instead.
When I'm communicating with a non-native speaker, I intentionally use shorter / easier to translate words and sentences, and I give them more leeway with word usage / don't expect them to use the right words all the time. And that's fine! Communication still happens! We manage!
But if a non-native speaker starts running their text through an AI it makes communication harder, not easier. I can't tell if their word choice is intentional or if the AI did it. A tiny mistake I can understand gets expanded into multiple incorrect sentences.
Absolutely this. "Accessibility" and "participation" are great goals on paper, but the tools at hand are likely to introduce confusion because the user fundamentally isn't in a position to judge the quality of the output.
Lack of comprehension on what other people said was a big issue. But also having four incomprehensible paragraphs thrown at me for what could be six words (not infrequently based on a misunderstanding of a very basic simple sentence).
I'm not a native speaker either, but the only way to learn a language is to actually use it. For better or worse, English is the modern world's lingua franca.
it just makes them better at copy and pasting
For published work, if it's not worth editing then it's not worth reading (I would go further personally and say that most publish, edited and peer reviewed work, in your area of interest isn't worth reading anyways)
For unpublished work, like an email, ask the AI to translate the passage while maintaining style and tone. It will still flatten it, but not as much as the complete dogshit I read in the article.
Communication is a job requirement, faking it with AI is going to go about as well as someone faking programming skills. Not very!
'You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to rewrite this dictation with more casual capitalization and punctuation so it can be used in a chat setting.
- Always capitalize "I" and derived words like "I'm"
- Sentences should start with lower case letters unless they start with “I”
- Replace explicit punctuation callouts with the actual punctuation
- No period at the end of the message, but leave periods between sentences
- Do not remove commas
- Do not change sophisticated words to more common ones
Return only the result. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edit.'
[0]: https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper
It was not idiomatic Polish - very far from it really, so I guess depending on the model used here, the result could have been equally disappointing if it was really trying to Polish that email.
It's owners, however, definitely want you to fall into lockstep that cooking the Earth for their billion$ is perfectly fine and that waking up to a life of low-impact, serviceful compassion to the Earth and its peoples is just virtue-signalling when, in fact, it is simply virtuous in the face of demented psychosociopaths.
Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining. Just more burning the Earth for fakeass money so callous bastards can get richer.
Always strikes me as interesting that "Nvidia" sounds like the syllables in the middle of "invidious"
No. No, it's not. It doesn't matter how many fools do something, they're still fools. The root word of ignorance is "to ignore".
"Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining"
But it didn't. That's what I'm saying.
That's what I was and still am saying.
Yes. People forget that every tree on the east coast was cut down. Every forest you see today on the east coast was re-grown, new. It was all clear cut for progress during expansion. I think it was mostly for 'potash' by burning it.
There, fixed it for you.
The 'right' is willfully ignorant. Not just ignorant because they just haven't been exposed. They willfully decide to be ignorant because knowledge goes against their religion.
"The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force of global warming."
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/07/scientists-physics-c...
https://history.aip.org/climate/co2.htm
And what happens when they run out? Back to carbon fossil fuels?
Every autocorrect or auto suggestion ever has felt like this to me, but the volume has been turned up to 11. The otherwise drab Adobe Reader is covered with colorful sparkly buttons and popups suggesting I need not even read the document because it can give me “insights.” First, no you may not ready my proprietary document, nor do I suspect most people using this particular software - I only have it for digital signatures - have permission to share IP with a third party. But mostly, it can sometimes be a useful tool, and the fact everyone is shoving it in my face reeks of desperation.
The tech industry is in real trouble.
This is a massive liability that almost everybody seems to be ignoring. My employer has a ban on using AI on IP until this is properly resolved, because we actually care about it leaking.
Maybe an Information Commissioner will get round to issuing a directive some time in the mid-2030s about how none of this complies with GDPR.
- if everyone is doing it, you can't really fault anyone
- on some level we are, or will be, kinda dependent on that AI and opting out will probably be made unpleasant via dark patterns as usual
- no pushback to every piece of software, including at the operating system level, slurping all the keystrokes and data, let alone the data that's already in the cloud - big tech knows everything about us but to my surprise no major public leak has happened, i.e. one where you really can see your neighbor's private data without buying leaked data from someone on the dark web or wherever
- things are moving too fast, and you don't know if you can afford to have your programmers not use tomorrow's AI, for example, so your "bans" will have to be soft etc., this limits the potential pushback and outrage
Yet I can almost guarantee you that someone has put something they shouldn't through ChatGPT, because they either feel like it's a dumb rule, that should not apply to them, or they where in a hurry and what are the odds of them getting caught.
Maybe it isn’t the tech industry, and just consumer-facing apps.
On some level it's enormously baffling that this was the thing they decided they needed to do...conversely Adobe Reader on my phone won't shutup about liquid mode either (which uploads to Adobe servers) and Microsoft and Google's solution to "people don't want to use our AI assistants" was to ensure they literally can't be disabled or removed.
It was a bad choice that never should have been implemented as "enabled but not configured", and I have moved away from iTerm2 as a result. I am sure that others have as well. (The grudging move to make it a separately downloadable plugin was good, but too late IMO.)
(Plus I get to show off my 4 digit Github userid. I was the 2367th person to sign up! ;)
It is unclear what the industry thinks has changed, that people will now welcome "It looks like you're [whatever]".
Which approach gives companies more control over users? Which one allows companies to sell that access to the highest bidder?
> It's a design that's in companies' best interests.
I really don't think it is. Clippy was reputationaly damaging to Microsoft and they had to get rid of it. There's little reason to think this will be different.
Thinking of a computer as a tool seems reasonable, but thinking of your computer as your friend is clownish (which, I think you agree with based on your last comment).
Kind of. Ask a Chinese AI about Tianament Square historical military events.
Slightly offtopic, but I have a friend with synesthesia who sees inanimate objects like people, and they call their computer "macbook friend" (since it's a MacBook Air).
This forum (HN) attracts certain population that wants to do things, to understand, to share relatively well based opinions and have a discussion.
But look around, look at the new hires in the other departments. And by new I mean young, in their 20. A lot of them welcome this kind of things, they evaluate by popularity and likes. The marketing begin the AI bubble knows this, and so it pushes for it. Make it popular is more important than make it useful, because there is a tipping point were is popular enough that we capitulate.
Turns out that Idiocracy is not that far behind (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)
Yuval Noah Harari talking about how the new "gods" are the data-centers and how free will is dead in the age of AI. https://youtu.be/QuL3wlodJC8
https://www.statista.com/statistics/209117/us-internet-penet...
> It is unclear what the industry thinks has changed
The demographics of computer (and other device) use have changed massively since the late 90s, and the suggestion engines are much more powerful.
I still want it all to take a long walk off a short peer, but a lot of people seem happy with it bothering them.
So it won't change, because there is no lesson to learn. No individual involved acted irrationally.
Our society is very openly discriminatory against people who aren't able to produce written communication that fits a huge number of unwritten rules.
LLMs know those rules. Helping people with ESL better interact with a world that requires them is a huge win in my book.
- apologizes
- implies the recipient was "promised" this email as a "response" to something
- blames a hectic schedule
- invites questions
None of this was in or was even implied in the original. This is not a "polished" version, it's just a straight-up different email. I thought that style transfer while maintaining meaning was one of the few things LLMs can be good at, but this example fails even that low bar.
(tyrna be funny not patronizing. but the machinery of subjectivity production is ofc very real)
As ever, T.S. Eliot was right: "It is impossible to say just what I mean!"
AI exists in a Matrix where toxic positivity is enforced with electric shocks.
When I was at Google this tone was so pervasive that we had "CongratBot" to make fun of this stuff, and Memegen to somewhat counteract it.
But Silly Valley is the poster-child for "hey don't be a downer" communications vibes.
As the child of a super-critical German father, it always seems insincere to me.
It's no surprise LLMs are using corp speak and vapid marketing prose as a template. There is so much of it out there.
This is from that Autodesk post last week where they admitted their mistake and… Nope it's corp speak:
“We are excited to share some important updates regarding Archiving and our Idea Boards and Forums that aim to enhance your experience and ensure valuable content remains accessible. Please read the details below to understand how these changes might impact you.”
Barf. But to an LLM this looks like a human communicating in a meaningful way.
I personally do not want you -- for any value of "you" -- to use an AI to "polish" any writing sent to ME. I want the author's actual thoughts, not their thoughts massaged by an LLM.
But I think it's a safe assumption that she can write well when she wants to.
Presumably, the idea is to make the other person think you've written the email yourself, and you're a "better"/more corporate/more professional writer than you actually are.
But once everyone starts using this kind of transformer, so nobody assumes that anyone else is actually writing the content they're sending out -- what's the point?! Who benefits?
The team that implemented the feature and hit their quarterly goal and got their full quarterly bonus. The execs who set the quarterly goals will be rewarded by wall street for shipping AI features. In 2 years, when reality has struck and the market has moved on from the AI fad, another team will receive their bonus for lowering COGS by removing this feature.
Users' needs are irrelevant to this cycle.
Big tech companies need to be broken up into teeny, tiny pieces.
Phishers.
The vendor's share price. This is nothing to do with the _users_; it is about cramming 'AI' into as many press releases as possible because it gives the markets the warm fuzzies. No-one wants to use this, and that's really beside the point; for the time being it makes stock price go up.
Presumably in a year or so there'll be a new fad, and most LLM-based 'features' will go the way of Clippy.
"The idea of a Soul, Free Will -- these are Over!" - Technocracy explained by Prof Yuval Harari https://youtu.be/NV0CtZga7qM
(People tend to forget it, and it's only seen in passing, but the Ministry of Truth has machines for writing terrible books in the novel!)
Everything is a product.
Every choice is a product purchasing choice.
We ourselves are products.
And endless sea of products selecting from other products.
After I posted I immediately regretted it. It sounded too structured and should have been more whine-y. Weird, but it would have been more like-able.