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I do not want AI to "polish" me

thebloggess.com

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Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#51

Post by nicbou »

thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #11

I've only recently started using AI, and have discovered my use or rejection of it is predicated on my feelings for the task. This argument of "authenticity" really resonates. I'm a manager, so when I'm sending emails to a customer or talking with one of my reports, I care deeply - so you might get some overwrought florid prose, but it's my overwrought florid prose. On the other hand, I have to lead a weekly meeting…

That's also what I do. I hand-write every email because these words have my name under them. On the other hand, if I'm asking the tax office to issue a specific document, I let AI handle it.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#52

Post by bloomingkales »

mavhc wrote: post #47
bloomingkales wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to look at it holistically. This is the current modern Human: 1. Born into the beast, enters social media by 5-7 years old 2. All math and writing is done for you (becoming illiterate) 3. You don't have to spell ever again (becoming illiterate) 4. You cultivate a virtual persona since childhood (becoming vain) 5. Did your life really happen if it wasn't posted online (the digital existentialist crisis -- do…

The old human: 1. Born into plague 2. Never learns maths or writing 3. Nor spelling 4. Half the time your life ends before childhood does 5. Nothing happens in your life

Touche.

So what’s the takeaway, life a bitch and then you die?

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#53

Post by sneak »

flatline wrote: post #26

> It’s like my whole computer is a toddler screaming “LET ME DO IT!” every time I try to create something. Every autocorrect or auto suggestion ever has felt like this to me, but the volume has been turned up to 11. The otherwise drab Adobe Reader is covered with colorful sparkly buttons and popups suggesting I need not even read the document because it can give me “insights.” First, no you may not ready my proprieta…

Somehow I don’t have this problem with notepad.exe or vim or pandoc or imagemagic or textedit.app or resolve or blender.

Maybe it isn’t the tech industry, and just consumer-facing apps.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#54

Post by lacoolj »

I ran into this exact situation when I went to post something on reddit, thought it was too "rude" and ran it through chatGPT to make more polite

After I posted I immediately regretted it. It sounded too structured and should have been more whine-y. Weird, but it would have been more like-able.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#55

Post by oldwebguy94 »

MrMcCall wrote: post #25

AI does not want to do anything, whatsoever. It's owners , however, definitely want you to fall into lockstep that cooking the Earth for their billion$ is perfectly fine and that waking up to a life of low-impact, serviceful compassion to the Earth and its peoples is just virtue-signalling when, in fact, it is simply virtuous in the face of demented psychosociopaths. Note that this all started with all that digital c…

> Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining. Just more burning the Earth for fakeass money so callous bastards can get richer.

Always strikes me as interesting that "Nvidia" sounds like the syllables in the middle of "invidious"

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#56

Post by elric »

I need an AI detector which just straight up sends any generated emails to /dev/null. If you can't be arsed to write something, why should I waste my time reading the slop?

Yes yes, languages and translations are a potentially valid use case, but irrelevant for the vast majority of people I communicate with.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#57

Post by pjc50 »

ubermonkey wrote: post #33

A quick glance suggests that, because the site is pretty far afield of usual HN fare, folks here don't realize that Lawson is the author of several books. I personally do not want you -- for any value of "you" -- to use an AI to "polish" any writing sent to ME. I want the author's actual thoughts, not their thoughts massaged by an LLM.

While not as longstanding as, say, Lileks, thebloggess is someone from the blog era of the Internet, and publishes an RSS feed. She's well known in other internet communities.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#58

Post by XorNot »

sneak wrote: post #53
flatline wrote: post #26

> It’s like my whole computer is a toddler screaming “LET ME DO IT!” every time I try to create something. Every autocorrect or auto suggestion ever has felt like this to me, but the volume has been turned up to 11. The otherwise drab Adobe Reader is covered with colorful sparkly buttons and popups suggesting I need not even read the document because it can give me “insights.” First, no you may not ready my proprieta…

Somehow I don’t have this problem with notepad.exe or vim or pandoc or imagemagic or textedit.app or resolve or blender. Maybe it isn’t the tech industry, and just consumer-facing apps.

Open source has been looking better and better lately because it's not in a mad rush to bolt "AI" features onto it (an LLM will do something) and then shove a huge amount of interface in your face to try to get you to use it.

On some level it's enormously baffling that this was the thing they decided they needed to do...conversely Adobe Reader on my phone won't shutup about liquid mode either (which uploads to Adobe servers) and Microsoft and Google's solution to "people don't want to use our AI assistants" was to ensure they literally can't be disabled or removed.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#59

Post by jerf »

pjc50 wrote: post #49
jerf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You phrase it well. It's not the AI themselves. You can as easily get an AI to take something fundamentally banal and write it into something exciting, dynamic, exotic, or strange. If you analyze these systems as a work of art, using the postmodern toolset, the people and systems taking one of the most potent technologies humanity has ever created and using it to craft a banality machine is just... very revealing. Li…

> postmodern It is, isn't it. It's the Sokal Hoax on a society-wide automated scale: rather than being concerned with what a "text" might "mean", generate millions upon millions of "text" sequences and mechanically separate those which pass as real enough. Baudrillard's simulacrum. > It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art. People seem to be very insistent that the output of AI is not capi…

I mean the system itself is art. The output is some kind of anti-art, but the system that uses the world's most amazing technology to extract the art out of everything that passes through it is an amazing piece of inadvertent outsider art on its own.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#60

Post by danparsonson »

MrMcCall wrote: post #25

AI does not want to do anything, whatsoever. It's owners , however, definitely want you to fall into lockstep that cooking the Earth for their billion$ is perfectly fine and that waking up to a life of low-impact, serviceful compassion to the Earth and its peoples is just virtue-signalling when, in fact, it is simply virtuous in the face of demented psychosociopaths. Note that this all started with all that digital c…

Oh come on - we've been doing this since way before crypto was a thing. We knew about climate change in the 80s.
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