Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 20 October 2024 - eviltoast

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    2 months ago

    I bear news from the other place!

    https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1g3zt5b/hsc_english_exam_using_ai_images/

    Post content reproduced here:

    autoplag image of some electronics on a table

    hello, as a year 12 student who just did the first english exam, i was genuinely baffled seeing one of the stimulus texts u have to analyse is an AI IMAGE. my friend found the image of it online, but thatā€™s what it looked like

    for a subject which tells u to ā€œanalyse the deeper meaningā€, ā€œanalyse the composerā€™s intentā€, ā€œappreciate aesthetic and intellectual valueā€ having an AI image in which you physically canā€™t analyse anything deeper than what it suggests, itā€™s just extremely ironic šŸ˜­ idk, [as an artist who DOESNT use AI]* i might have a different take on this since iā€™m an artist, what r ur thoughts?

    *NB: original post contains the text: ā€œas an artist using AI imagesā€ but this was corrected in a later comment:

    also i didnā€™t read over this after typing it out but, meant to say, ā€œas an artist who DOESNT use AIā€

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      In a twisted way, this makes sense as an exercise for English class. Why would someone go to an autoplag image generator, type in a prompt (perhaps something like ā€œlaptop and smartphones on a table at a lakefrontā€) and save this image. Itā€™s a question I canā€™t easily answer myself. Itā€™s hard to imagine the intention behind wanting to synthesize this particular picture, but itā€™s probably something weā€™ll be asking often in the near future.

      I can even understand the shrimp Jesus slop or soldiers with huge bibles stuff to an extent. I can understand what the intended emotional appeal is and at least feel something like bewilderment or amusement about the surreality of them. This one would be just banal even if it were a real photo, so why make this? The AI didnā€™t have intent or imbue meaning in the image but surely someone did.