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Knitting bullshit

katedaviesdesigns.com

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Re: Knitting bullshit

#141

Post by bluGill »

api wrote: post #68
quibono wrote: post #11

Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?

I listened to a podcast a while back (human authored I'm pretty sure) about low-quality gutter level streamer content and how popular it is, speaking of personalities like asmongold and a vast number of even worse imitators. This content is made by humans but is pointless grindingly stupid filler spiced with a dash of obviously performative offensiveness. You're basically listening to a complete loser (or someone LAR…

The problem is I want to live in the "correct information age" - that qualifier is hard to find. I suspect that correct will cost money. Unfortunately I don't know how to pay for it. Many of the major publishers are also using AI with questionable fact checking. Where I most need correct information is my local small town news, and there isn't even a newspaper anymore. (there is the nearby big city newspaper, but they don't cover my local issues well)

Re: Knitting bullshit

#142

Post by munificent »

dontwannahearit wrote: post #114
ipsento606 wrote: post #93

Increasingly, my reaction to AI-generated content of basically all types is simply a deep, resonant sadness. The growth of AI feels a little like losing a limb - there is an initial shock of sadness, an initial dose of loss, an initial sense of what has been taken away. But then for months and years afterwards, the daily occurrence of some other little humdrum experience, and only at the moment of the encounter does…

[flagged]

> What have you lost exactly?

Connection to other humans.

Imagine your favorite third place[1], a library, park, bar, etc. The place you regularly go to get connection to people without having to jump through all of the hoops to create and organize an actual event. It's a way to satisfy your innate need for conviviality without requiring much effort or willpower, which are always in finite supply.

You've been going to this place for years. You're a regular. You've made friends with other regulars. It feels good to be a familiar face and to see those familiar faces. A kind of warm sense of safety that we have evolved to experience since we first sat around a fire in prehistoric days. That sense of "Ah, good, I'm here nestled among my tribe."

Now imagine how it feels to walk into that room and discover that half the seats are occupied by mannequins. Each mannequin has a loudspeaker attached to it constantly playing random word salad.

Some of the regulars are still there, maybe. It's hard to see them through all the plastic limbs or hear them through the cacophony of meaningless noise.

How does being in that space make you feel? Now compare it to how you felt before the dead-eyed inanimate bodies showed up. That's what we've all lost.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Re: Knitting bullshit

#143

Post by [deleted] »

surgical_fire wrote: post #122
chromacity wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN sends tens of thousands of views to AI-farmed articles about why AI is good or why AI is bad. These articles get upvoted to the front page literally every day. They don't say anything interesting, but many of us just like having our existing beliefs recited back to us. So to answer your question, I think we all do, it's just that different audiences have different sets of topics for which they let their guard down…

How is a listen to a podcast counted? If someone listens to a couple of minutes of a 30 minute slopfest and nopes away, is that counted as a listen? Your example of HN sending views to shit is interesting, because I presume a lot of people sometimes click on a link expecting something insightful and is greeted by bullshit. A view is counted, but no meaningful interaction happened.

[deleted]

Re: Knitting bullshit

#145

Post by t-3 »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #132
dontwannahearit wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want human things? Put down the technology and go and connect with some humans. But yes, the original poster with their allusions to lost limbs and "pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.." is overreacting, depressed or both. The slop will continue until it is no longer profit-making for someone.

Appeals to individualism and capitalism, why am I not surprised.

The fact that profit motives exist and motivate people isn't an "appeal to capitalism", it's just a statement of reality. The best way to stop slop is to put it out of business. People don't make slop for social prestige.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#146

Post by munificent »

duxup wrote: post #123

The summary but no content thing is interesting. I’ve seen it in many forms and I’m not sure why it plays out that way. Maybe the summary is tied to the prompt tightly? The rest not? I saw some bots on Reddit that were very odd in that if anyone asked a question in relation to something like an news article some account would respond with a non answer but sorta summarized bit of the article. If you responded “that’s…

> The summary but no content thing is interesting. I’ve seen it in many forms and I’m not sure why it plays out that way.

I would guess that it's because the incentives and goals are different.

The point of a summary is to entice a listener to begin the podcast. So it has to offer the promise of interesting depth.

Once they've started listening, all the body of the podcast has to do is be soothing enough to get the user to keep listening until the next ad comes on. It has no need to actually keep the promise unless the listener is paying enough attention to hold it accountable.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#147

Post by thevillagechief »

latexr wrote: post #30
siddboots wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time I thought that the AdSense business model was ultimately doomed because I assumed that people hate ads as much as I do. It turns out I was just wrong about what most people are willing to put up with.

I remember visiting a friend over a decade ago, and for some reason I had to use their computer for a bit. I was immediately thrown aback by all the ads everywhere and installed an ad blocker before anything else. They were very grateful, but the part that surprised me was they were annoyed by the ads but never thought to look for some way around it. It never even crossed their minds it could be done or to search for…

It's always absolutely shocking using a regular person's computer. How can they live like this? I have lived in this ad-free bubble for so long that I forget that's not the real world. If I had to live without adblockers, I don't think I'd ever visit the internet.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#148

Post by dalmo3 »

pc86 wrote: post #110
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other bots? Dead Internet Theory. AI produced, AI downloaded. No humans in the loop.

There was one of those "memes" a few years ago that is just a screenshot of someone's Twitter post that was essentially: "My wife is a teacher, she used AI to help create an assignment, all the kids used AI to complete it, and now she's using AI to grade it. Nobody learned anything, nobody really did anything. What's happening?"

Being the devil's advocate, it sounds like no one involved see any value in that exchange, therefore they don't care.

In that sense AI slop is a symptom, not a disease. But perhaps also a catalyst.

I really wonder if there is a sort of silver lining here, and in the long term low value activities will be filtered out of society. Though that borders on the AI maximalist view which I don't fully agree with.

Of course the glaring question is what value even is.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#149

Post by mwigdahl »

revolvingthrow wrote: post #113
frereubu wrote: post #13

I wonder if (or, more accurately hope that) this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. I am more and more convinced that if the devil existed he'd take care of the bigger stuff, but have an army of little devils that encourage people to do things like make unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting, relentlessly chipping away at the messy joys of living.

Boomers love slop. Even when they know it’s ai (and it can be increasingly difficult to tell even for people who don’t struggle to send an email) they love it almost as much as they love political ragebait, and they love political ragebait more than their own families. My ancient grandpa is on some facebook groups and they share bottom of the barrel ai videos and images all day. If it can be consumed with zero effort…

Eventually they will all die, and then the upcoming Gen-Z and -Alpha will save the world with their well-documented refined tastes for artisanal, purely human short-form video slop.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#150

Post by compiler-guy »

api wrote: post #68
quibono wrote: post #11

Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?

I listened to a podcast a while back (human authored I'm pretty sure) about low-quality gutter level streamer content and how popular it is, speaking of personalities like asmongold and a vast number of even worse imitators. This content is made by humans but is pointless grindingly stupid filler spiced with a dash of obviously performative offensiveness. You're basically listening to a complete loser (or someone LAR…

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

--H. L. Mencken (or at least attributed so.)

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