Everyone knows (or should that as fascinating as your dreams are to *you*, they're eye-glazingly dull to others.
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That's not to say that we shouldn't aspire to participate in discourse about areas that seem interesting or momentous - but asking a chatbot to contribute on your behalf does not impart insight to you, and it is a gross imposition on people who *have* taken the time to understand and participate using their own minds and experience.
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Image:
Cryteria (modified)
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Remember: even the AI companies will tell you that the work of overseeing an AI's output is valuable labor. The fact that you can costlessly (to you) generate infinite volumes of verbose, plausible-seeming topical sentences in no way implies that the people who actually think about things and then write them down have the time to mark your chatbot's homework.
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@pluralistic Well said.
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Emailing a stranger a blob of unverified AI output is not a form of dialogue - it's an attempt to coerce a stranger into unpaid labor on your behalf. Strangers are not your "human in the loop" whose expensive time is on offer to painstakingly work through the plausible sentences a chatbot made for you for free.
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@pluralistic
...This leaves me curious as to whether someone did this to you. >_>; -
@pluralistic
...This leaves me curious as to whether someone did this to you. >_>;@pteryx Daily.
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@pteryx Daily.
@pluralistic
Oh geez. Awful that you have to not only go through that, but so *much* of that. -
Emailing a stranger a blob of unverified AI output is not a form of dialogue - it's an attempt to coerce a stranger into unpaid labor on your behalf. Strangers are not your "human in the loop" whose expensive time is on offer to painstakingly work through the plausible sentences a chatbot made for you for free.
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It's the latest iteration of "Watch this two-hour video, which will counter all your arguments!"
Flooding the zone with time-wasting bullshit, rather than actual engagement with the discussion.
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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It's the latest iteration of "Watch this two-hour video, which will counter all your arguments!"
Flooding the zone with time-wasting bullshit, rather than actual engagement with the discussion.
@juergen_hubert This is exactly right.
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That is a fatal flaw in the idea that we will increase our productivity by asking chatbots to summarize things we don't understand: by definition, if we don't understand a subject, then we won't be qualified to evaluate the summary, either.
There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws.
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@pluralistic education and art are processes, not merely products. You get educated by engaging in the process not by having outputs to be measured (which you can buy or have a chatbot make).
If you read the solutions at the end of a maths book and copy them into an answer sheet you haven't learned anything.
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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I will stipulate that there might be friend groups out there where pastebombs of AI chat transcripts are welcome, but even if you work in such a milieu, you should *never, ever* assume that a stranger wants to see or hear about your AI "conversations." Tagging a chatbot into a social media conversation with a stranger and typing, "Hey Grok‡, what do you think of that?" is like masturbating in front of a stranger.
‡ Ugh
It's rude. It's an imposition. It's gross.
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@pluralistic … and I am seeing it more and more in professional circles. “I’m starting a conversation!”, I’ve been told. No, you’re imposing on me, an actual expert on certain topics, the obligation of correcting the word salad you had generated and then vomited into the world. You’re then adding the puss-filled cherry to this shit sundae by suggesting that you deserve credit, rather than opprobrium, for this selfish act.
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@pteryx Daily.
@pluralistic @pteryx I'm just dumbfounded people have the nerve to do this to you. Just gobsmacked.
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@pluralistic Sometimes I'll have an LLM argue me out of making a post I know won't help
There's a disconnect in how different people use them that chatbot vendors need to contend with.
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Everyone knows (or should that as fascinating as your dreams are to *you*, they're eye-glazingly dull to others. Perhaps you have a friend who will tolerate you recounting dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever *presume* that other people want to hear about your dreams.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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@pluralistic Spot on: "stochastic word-salad"
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@juergen_hubert This is exactly right.
Chatbots & AI are information pollution, funded by the same people polluting the commons; air, land, and water.
Trump and the Energy Industry Are Eager to Power AI With Fossil Fuels
At a Pittsburgh summit, the Trump administration, energy executives, and tech barons joined as one to promote AI as the future of fossil fuels.
WIRED (www.wired.com)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/15/trump-ai-oil-energy-summit
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/ai-turns-the-firehose-into-a-funnel/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/04/pfas-pollution-data-centers-ai
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/contaminated-the-carpet-industrys-toxic-legacy/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260226042449.htm
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Everyone knows (or should that as fascinating as your dreams are to *you*, they're eye-glazingly dull to others. Perhaps you have a friend who will tolerate you recounting dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever *presume* that other people want to hear about your dreams.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Today I learned there are people who will send other people transcripts of AI chatbots and I could never have imagined such a thing.
