*Edit*: here at least, I am clearly not isolated!

[tschenkel@mathstodon.xyz]

@neil @amin

Add me to your list.

But I'd add: there is a space for texts that are read purely for information. Which would be something that could be machine generated. Unfortunately those texts require (a) correctness, and (b) transparency about sources. Both things a transformer cannot give, due to it's architecture.

So genAI fails completely for me.

[matzeller@mastodon.social]

@neil You're not isolated, just normal.

[pixl_xip@pleroma.envs.net]

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk Yes! I read to hear other people's ideas, not for cobbled together fragments of ideas from an AI's training data!

[justincrozer@mastodon.green]

@neil I’ll never post AI generated content on my blog because why would you expect/want someone to take the time to read something you didn’t even create?

[revk@toot.me.uk]

@neil I should apologise for my current avatar, to be honest. Someone made it for me and it seemed amusing, and, to be frank, close enough to reality. But I agree, trying to read AI writing is hard work.

I have read a few auto translated books, not sure if “AI”, but the writing style stays as the original author I think, just gets the gender pronouns messed up occasionally.

Reading the occasional AI C code is similarly tortuous even if it is “right”.

[avatar now changed]

[noodlemaz@mstdn.games]

@neil @signaleleven lol then they don't understand how those 'tools' were made. You can't have a company run by (mostly) tech bros and feed it content from humans then expect no bias to come out. Sigh.

[alter_unicorn@masto.bike]

@neil same goes for music, code, 3d printable designs and much more.

[david_chisnall@infosec.exchange]

@neil @amin

Before Christmas a couple of big companies cancelled AI-generated ad campaigns because the negative feedback was causing harm to their brand at the start of their peak selling season. The more people complain about these things (don’t share the ads, just say ‘company X used to be okay but their latest ad campaign is slop and it makes me hate them’ - ad agencies consider people sharing the ads to be positive for raising brand awareness even if people hate them), the more that feedback will go from ad companies to their customers.

For an example of the parenthetical: about 15 years ago, Tango did an ad campaign that had people rolling fruit down Constitution Hill in Swansea, where it smashed at the bottom. There were a bunch of news articles about how they didn’t bother to clean up and left the mess for residents. There was only one problem: all of the fruit was CGI, there was no mess. The negative press made a load of people watch the ad. The claim that they made a mess was ‘leaked’ from the ad agency to news sources who didn’t do any basic fact checking (I lived just around the corner, it was easy for someone to pop down and see there was no mess). The campaign was considered a big success. So if people share an ad and say ‘I hate this’, it won’t necessarily have the right result. But if they share a single terrible frame, it might.

[noodlemaz@mstdn.games]

@rubyjones @ahnlak @neil and Unsplash. And Wikipedia commons. And more besides I'm sure. There's just no need to use slop images, really.

[sarahw@mastodon.green]

@neil
I quite agree. It's just not necessary.
AI has its uses in certain fields but generally I despise it
People need to remember that if AI doesn't know something, it makes it up, so we can't ever rely on it.

It's all part of a bigger picture of needing to be constantly entertained.
Yesterday I heard about kids' AI soft toys that talk to them. Some of the results are extremely disturbing .
AI is not a baby-sitter.

I honestly don't understand why people use AI instead of actual people.

[noodlemaz@mstdn.games]

@neil @rubyjones libraries are also great! I get loads of ebooks from mine.
And authors support them too. Reading is very accessible thanks to them

Sorry for flurry of replies

[petitcoeur@hachyderm.io]

@neil You're not isolated. I also have zero interest in reading / watching / hearing AI generated stuff. Totally pointless.

Humanity grew by exchanging ideas. Between people.

[iwein@mas.to]

@stroobl
AI can write good docs is an unpopular opinion among people that know the value of documentation. Rightfully so because:

1. "AI" doesn't exist, and LLM's can't "know" meaning. They hide it well.
2. Writing documentation proves the author cares about the thing they document.
3. Documenting something surfaces it's subtlest bugs.

If devs use llm for documentation, the software is shit. If you use llm to describe others' software, you're taking a great risk of misunderstanding it.
@neil

[derickr@phpc.social]

@neil I made that exact point in my closing keynote at #dpc last Friday. There was a lot of LLM generated images in many presentations, even when actual photos existed. My line was something akin to: I'd rather see badly drawn stick figures illustrating my points than fake generic "art", and I also made the point about the different ideas and writing styles of authors.

I'll turn it into a blog post soon.

[sephster@fosstodon.org]

@neil best book you read last year? Looking for recommendations

[alex@social.alexhyett.com]

@neil I am definitely in the “if you couldn’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it” category.

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@sephster Let me reply when I have my eReader or calibre in front of me!

[solderandchaos@mastodon.me.uk]

@neil definitely not isolated. It is a hill I will almost certainly be at least critically injured on.

[slothrop@chaos.social]

@neil most of my early professional training was as a text person. Literature, journalism, history. Professions where you obsess about individual words, sentence structure, context, and layers of meaning.

For this reason, I find LLM-generated text supremely exhausting to read. I keep looking for meaning and intention, and it just isn’t - can’t be - there.

[nobody@mastodon.acm.org]

@neil
I very much relate and, at least for myself, I'd say it's not even anthropocentrism, not "human supremacy". It's largely about SOTA, it's about information hygiene. SOTA in thought, SOTA in language and expression, which are achieved through struggle and experience that today happen to mean specifically human experience. As for hygiene, there's the matter of attention being a very scarce resource, and the matter of contamination: exposure to information affects the thought...