ebu

i needed this giggle, gods bless our dubbers

you have to scroll through the person’s comments to find it, but it does look they did author the body of the text and uploaded it as a docx into ChatGPT. so points for actually creating something unlike the AI bros

it looks like they tried to use ChatGPT to improve narration. to what degree the token smusher has decided to rewrite their work in the smooth, recycled plastic feel we’ve all come to know and despise remains unknown

they did say they are trying to get it to generate illustrations for all 700 pages, and moreover appear[ed] to believe it can “work in the background” on individual chapters with no prompting. they do seem to have been educated on the folly of expecting this to work, but as blakestacey’s other reply pointed out, they appear to now be just manually prompting one page at a time. godspeed

“AI is just like smartphones” yes thank you for this statement that we definitely haven’t heard dozens of times before

ah, yes, i’m certain the reason the slop generator is generating slop is because we haven’t gone to eggplant emoji dot indian ocean and downloaded Mistral-Deepseek-MMAcevedo_13.5B_Refined_final2_(copy). i’m certain this model, unlike literally every past model in the past several years, will definitely overcome the basic and obvious structural flaws in trying to build a knowledge engine on top of a stochastic text prediction algorithm

no worries – i am in the unfortunate position of very often needing to assume the worst in others and maybe my reading of you was harsher than it should have been, and for that i am sorry. but…

“generative AI” is a bit of a marketing buzzword. the specific technology in play here is LLMs, and they should be forcefully kept out of every online system, especially ones people rely on for information.

LLMs are inherently unfit for every purpose. they might be “useful”, in the sense that a rock is useful for driving a nail through a board, but they are not tools in the same way hammers are. the only exception to this is when you need a lot of text in a hurry and don’t care about the quality or accuracy of the text – in other words, spams and scams. in those specific domains i can admit LLMs are the most applicable tool for the job.

so when ostensibly-smart people, but especially ones who are running public information systems, propose using LLMs for things they are unable to do, such as explain species identification procedures, it means either 1) they’ve been suckered into believing they’re capable of doing those things, or 2) they’re being paid to propose those things. sometimes it is a mix of both. either way, it very much indicates those people should not be trusted.

furthermore, the technology industry as a whole has already spent several billion dollars trying to push this technology onto and into every part of our daily lives. LLM-infested slop has made its way onto every online platform, and more often than not, with direct backing from those platforms. and the technology industry is openly hostile to the idea of “consent”, actively trying to undermine it at every turn. it’s even made it all the way through to the statement attempting to reassure on that forum post about the mystery demo LLMs – note the use of the phrase “making it opt-out”. why not “opt-in”? why not “with consent”?

it’s no wonder that people are leaving – the writing is more or less on the wall.

1. no one is assuming iNaturalist is being malicious, saying otherwise is just well-poisoning.
2. there is no amount of testing that can ever overcome the inherently-stochastic output of LLMs. the “best-case” scenario is text-shaped slop that is more convincing, but not any more correct, which is an anti-goal for iNaturalist as a whole
3. we’ve already had computer vision for ages. we’ve had google images for twenty years. there is absolutely no reason to bolt a slop generator of any kind to a search engine.
4. “staff is very much connected with users” obviously should come with some asterisks given the massive disconnect between staff and users on their use and endorsement of spicy autocorrect
5. framing users who delete their accounts in protest of machine slop being put up on iNaturalist, which is actually the point of contention here, as being over-reactive to the mere mention of AI, and thus being basically the same as the AI boosters? well, it’s gross. iNat et. al. explicitly signaled that they were going to inject AI garbage into their site. users who didn’t like that voted with their accounts and left. you don’t get to post-hoc ascribe them a strawman rationale and declare them basically the same as the promptfans, fuck off with that

“emotional”

let me just slip the shades on real quick

“womanly”

checks out

don’t post slop, nobody wants to read any of that

this one is a joke, i think. he is definitely on the fashy bullshit though

i retain a pretty dismal view of AI for just about any use case, but had some distant friends / people i follow on social media say they used it as a rubber duck for troubleshooting a problem they had, or a place to just dump emotions into. i figured this, at the very minimum, could and should be harmless. i guess i wasn’t cynical enough

your third sentence here is a non-sequitur – do you mean to say disposable razors better work on longer hair that safety razors?

i aim to please

alright, fine, i’ll do it.

webshit weekly (2025/03/27)

How to Use Em Dashes (—), En Dashes (–) , and Hyphens (-)

Grammar Nazis (as opposed to the regular kind) publish a guide on how to best calibrate your printing press to 17th-century standards. Several Hackernews (some of which are the regular kind) offer their own competing, more-detailed guides in response. The concern is raised that using too many typographic dashes makes you sound like ChatGPT, to much dismay of those still diligently copying from the Google (business model: “Uber for glue pizza”) results page for “em dash”. Multiple Hackernews take the opportunity to call the group of people who do not care about the millimeter difference between the types of dashes “NPCs”.

claiming to have customers you don’t actually have so vocally that they have to sue you to get their names out of your mouth should be a death knell on its own, but the whole “pretending their already-expired three-month trial contract is still in effect for the full year” is a great way to find yourself pulling a Sam Bankman-Fried, except that you don’t have a side company to pull $$$ from to cover your tracks

Al sales startup AI start-up claims…

much better :3

random guess, but: "11x” is the name of the company, that’s not “eleven times”

some video-shaped AI slop mysteriously appears in the place where marketing for Ark: Survival Evolved’s upcoming Aquatica DLC would otherwise be at GDC, to wide community backlash. Nathan Grayson reports on aftermath.site about how everyone who could be responsible for this decision is pointing fingers away from themselves

[hacker voice] i’m in

it’s the same playbook, to be sure

it’s cool that you discovered a word that lets you call Asahi Lina unnecessarily dramatic and attention-seeking in a way that lets you believe you “never gave an oppinion on the matter” and that you’re just neutrally observing a scientifically studied phenomenon!

wait no “cool” isn’t the right word now is it