At least a dick can be useful to create life… an LLM can never become life
Pretty sure my boss did this to me today.
I mean on one hand, it’s a shower thought. On the other, this is a really dumb shower thought.
But I have my phone’s texting set permanently to respond with AI so I never have to talk to anyone.
I read recently in an article something that struck me as the heart of it and fits.
“Generative AI sabotages the proof-of-work function by introducing a category of texts that take more effort to read than they did to write. This dynamic creates an imbalance that’s common to bad etiquette: It asks other people to work harder so one person can work—or think, or care—less. My friend who tutors high-school students sends weekly progress updates to their parents; one parent replied with a 3,000-word email that included section headings, bolded his son’s name each time it appeared, and otherwise bore the hallmarks of ChatGPT. It almost certainly took seconds to generate but minutes to read.” - Dan Brooks
That’s something I’ve attempted to say more than once but never formulated this well.
Every time I search for something tech-related, I have to spend a considerable amount of energy just trying to figure out whether I’m looking at a well written technical document or a crap resembling it. It’s especially hard when I’m very new to the topic.
Paradoxically, AI slop made me actually read the official documentation much more, as it’s now easier than to do this AI-checking. And also personal blogs, where it’s usually clearly visible they are someone’s beloved little digital garden.
That’s something I’ve attempted to say more than once but never formulated this well.
Did you try ChatGPT?
Funny how people who’s job it is to write can sometimes write gooder than us common folk.
I had this “shower” thought when chatting with a friend and getting an obviously LLM-generated answer to a grammar question I had (needless to say the LLM answer misunderstood the nuance of my question just as much as the friend did before). Thank you for linking the article, I will share that with my friend to explain my strong reaction (“please never ever do that again”)
AI and someone who uses AI missed nuance? This is my surprised face. (- _ -)
Damn. Nailed it.
The most annoying part - the recipients email client probably offered to summarise with an LLM. My bot makes slop for your bot to interpret.
Its the most inefficient form of communication ever devised. Please decompress my prompt 1000x so the recipient can compress it back to my prompt.
I will say though, even a chatgpt email tells you a lot about the sender.
Question: why does the linked lemmy.today “theatlantic@ibbit.at” show up here on lemmy.world (https://lemmy.world/c/theatlantic@ibbit.at), but there are zero posts visible in the community? I mean - since you commented from lemmy.today, we are clearly federated? I am confused - I wanted to comment on the article you linked with a question, but I can’t find it via lemmy.world :(
Edit: Mhh… it seems I could send a federation request specifically for that community. I have done that, I hope someone will respond to it.
Let me go ask AI and copy the response for you.
Federation sometimes has a few quirks. Seems like you figures it out though
Yeah, it’s working now :) This was the first time I experienced having to subscribe to be able to see posts from a community. Still weird, but if I assume correctly that this works like the Usenet, if I unsubscribe again, now that the community is federated properly, the posts should remain visible to everyone @lemmy.world?
That’s my understanding but I’ve not played with it too much
To me, it is exactly the same as people who linked lmgtfy.com or responded RTFM. If you send me an LLM summary, I’m assuming you’re claiming that I’m the asshole for bothering you. If I am being lazy, I’ll take the hint. If I’m struggling to find a way to do the research myself, either because I’m not sure how to properly research it myself, or because LLMs have made the internet nigh-unusable, I’m gonna clock you as a tremendous asshole.
I think there’s an important nuance to lmgtfy or RTFM. These two were clearly identifiable as the kind of - sometimes snarky - min-effort response, and sometimes absolutely justified (e.g. if I googled the question of OP and the very first result correctly answers their question, which I have made the effort of checking myself).
For the slop responses however, the receiver has to invest sometimes considerable time into reading & processing it to even understand that it might be pure slop. And in doubt, as a reader we are left with the moral dilemma of potentially offending the writer by asking “Did you just send me LLM output?”
It is both harder to identify and it drives a wedge into online (and personal) relationships because it adds a layer of doubt or distrust. This slop shit is poison for internet friendships. Those tech bros all need to fuck off and use their money for a permanent coke trip straight until they become irrelevant. :/
It’s really not that hard to identify the soulless drivel output by an LLM in an email. Nobody writes like that, not even a passive agressive middle management psychopath.
Becomes harder in shorter messages though.
Oh yeah, I was thinking of people who link to llm output, like this: https://chatgpt.com/share/697e8957-9494-8010-beb9-eb90c4760518
Copy-pasting llm summaries is definitely worse.
RTFM
This one really sucked post 2001 or so when everything stopped coming with a fucking manual to read. What M and I supposed to R, guy?
The only time it’s been kind of relevant in my dealings is the Arch wiki, because it really is a solid resource. However, sometimes my issue is a specific one and I need more than general information on a process. RTFM ruins communities when someone is looking for support. It’s just an entitled response to someone asking for help.
It’s not meant as an actual manual. What you’re really supposed to do is comb through ad-ridden google results until you find that one 10 years old reddit thread where someone thanks a deleted comment for solving the issue you have.
until you find that one 10 years old reddit thread where someone thanks a deleted comment for solving the issue you have.
I wasn’t gonna upvote you, but that one made me chuckle. Also because I have posted many of those “deleted comments” and wiped my reddit profile as clean as I could before leaving years ago.
I mean I don’t care if they use it like a search engine to remind themselves about the topic if they had some knowledge on it before they looked it up and if they put some cognitive power to go over the answer and absorb it and respond in their own words. But yeah a cut and paste or if they know nothing about it and parrot off what the llm tells them. Thats annoying.
while it doesn’t affect me directly if people use it “like a search engine”, it still empowers the tech bro billionaires who are the worst of the worst of scum of mankind, and it fucks up democracy, environment and hardware prices. So I’d rather everyone just boycotted this BS.
doesn’t using a search engine do the same? empower the tech bro. do you expect people not to use search engines because man. that is just not going to happen.
Not in the same way. People are more cautious (on average) with what info they give away there, plus pre-LLM search engines were unable to contextualize a user’s search history. Now though - yes people should boycott the big engines. Becomes easier, too, with AI slop rendering them near useless.
Specifically if you don’t even specify its ai, like I don’t mind using it, but be upfront that you don’t know and consulted an AI.
Like I see it happening at my work, people just straight copy pasting from copilot or w/e and it’s clear to me that’s what it is (especially if its discussing things I know that person has never heard of before lol)
I am slowly switching to increasingly less diplomatic reactions when I feel someone is using slop to respond to me or produce any kind of work text. Eventually I’ll probably advance to offensive reactions à la “Are you so f*cking incompetent that you can’t do better than copy-pasting into a glorified word prediction software?”
I definitely use it at work to “corporate” my emails or descriptions for things because my way of speaking would be frowned upon lmao. Literally “corpo this sentence please” or something along those lines.
Somehow, people don’t get that if we ask something to them, it’s because we want their personal interpretation of it, otherwise, we would use the internet as well
Specifically this - in terms of learning a language, understanding some nuances also absolutely requires an explanation by a native speaker that has a really good grasp of their language AND a talent of explaining. Both of which are criteria diametrically opposed to the average slop training data.
Receiving LLM output as an answer to a question, is the equivalent of getting a voice reply to the question:
“Quick question, are you free on Saturday afternoon?”
Downloading audio message… Duration: 45 seconds
Well, it’s common courtesy that if someone is asking you, assume they already asked google or whatever and think you might have the answer they can’t find.
That, and for some questions (i.e. nuances), a personal opinion is much more relevant to the asker than some random slop explanation. In this case I wanted to know which word construct in Turkish comes closes to the English “[ so and so ] is [ whatever ], isn’t it?” vs. “[ so and so ] is not [ whatever ], is it?” - Because Turkish has “isn’t it?” (değil mi? = not so?) but it doesn’t have “is it?”, mostly because “to be” is used much different in the language.
A google result wouldn’t help me at all - the pure grammar answer is “there’s no form of ‘is it’ to be coupled with a negative assumption/assertion”. But does a language construct exist to transport the nuance of “the speaker assumes that something is NOT [soandso], and wants to ask confirmation” vs. the speaker assuming that something IS [soandso], and asking for confirmation.
I still don’t know the answer, but it appears this nuance can’t be expressed in Turkish without describing around it in a longer sentence.
