Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 you’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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(December’s finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I clicked as I was curious as to what markers of AI use would appear. I immediately realised the problem: if it is written with AI then I wouldn’t want to read it, and thus wouldn’t be able to tell. Luckily the author’s profile cops to being “AI assisted”, which could mean a lot of things that just boil down to “slop forward”.
The most obvious indication of AI I can see is the countless paragraphs that start with a boldfaced “header” with a colon. I consider this to be terrible writing practice, even for technical/explanatory writing. When a writer does this, it feels as if they don’t even respect their own writing. Maybe their paragraphs are so incomprehensible that they need to spoonfeed the reader. Or, perhaps they have so little to say that the bullet points already get it across, and their writing is little more than extraneous fluff. Yeah, much larger things like sections or chapters should have titles, but putting a header on every single paragraph is, frankly, insulting the reader’s intelligence.
I see AI output use this format very frequently though. Honestly, this goes to show how AI appeals to people who only care about shortcuts and bullshitting instead of thinking things through. Putting a bold header on every single paragraph really does appeal to that type.
Also endless “its not X— its Y,” an overheated but empty style, and a conclusion which promises “It documents specific historical connections between specific intellectual figures using publicly available sources.” when there are no footnotes or links. Was ESR on the Extropians mailing list or did plausible string generator emit that plausible string?
Chatbots are good at generating writing in the style of LessWrong because wordy vagueness based on no concrete experience is their whole thing.
Could be part of its RLHF training, frequent emphasized headers maybe help the prediction engine stay on track for long passages.