I'm becoming AI-blind
cymerys.com
I'm becoming AI-blind
1–10 of 533 posts
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#2As people rely more on AI they experience cognitive atrophy. This is measurable in IQ loss, and other symptoms we might otherwise associate with early onset dementia or Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#3I also find it impossible to parse half the comments that Claude tries to sneak into our pull requests. I’ve never had an issue understanding code comments written by humans like this before. The structure of the information is like a waterfall that leaves me unable to swim to the surface and grab the air of comprehension.
So, “Please write a one-liner comment manually to replace these 5 lines of AI generated comment” is a common refrain in my PR reviews to colleagues.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#4 "There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. "
And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who really care?
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#5Something that bothers me about AI generated content more broadly is how unmemorable it is. I don't mean as in bad. I mean literally, as in hard to remember or recall.
Despite seeing a lot of them, I cannot think of one AI-generated photo that I can picture clearly in my mind; a few are partial but elusive. Whereas I can recall (visualise) a whole bunch of traditional photographs.
The same is true of AI generated text. Only the annoyances stick. I cannot recall real details of text I have generated, until I commit it to memory some other way.
I don't think this is about ephemerality either. If we assume it's about celebrated/famous/infamous images, there are definitely non-ephemeral, cultural moments in AI generated images in particular, like Boris Eldagsen's Sony Prize winner:
https://petapixel.com/2023/04/14/artist-refuses-prize-after-...
This really should be memorable, but isn't. I had forgotten the second person is in the image.
Or Jason Allen's fake painting:
https://petapixel.com/2022/09/01/ai-generated-artwork-wins-f...
I had already forgotten there's more than one figure in it, and I only looked at it a few weeks back. I remember the colour, the bright circle, some vague hints of texture; one figure. And that is it. Only the crudest shape elements.
For me, something about AI-generated text and images confounds recall. It is really peculiar.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#6Claude has become noticeably, painfully worse at writing in the last six months. At this point it’s practically useless for anything except code.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#7That last image is bizarre. The quiche, cream and even the salad look like they've been given the trypophobia treatment.
Which might even make sense, because there were always (still are?) those horrible ads in the chumbox area of news sites that used trypophobia and other creepy body-horror stuff to get you to click. [1] So maybe the hope is that you don't really look closely at the quiche, but some reptilian party of the brain gets oddly activated and drives you towards the restaurant?
1. https://medium.com/the-awl/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-c...
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#8"There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. " I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good. And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who r…
> but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good
I think they may just be to trusting and/or naive. People in tech right now are hyper aware of this and are actively looking while people outside of that bubble barely give it a second thought.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#9Claude has become noticeably, painfully worse at writing in the last six months. At this point it’s practically useless for anything except code.
Perhaps a one-trick pony is all we need.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#10"There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. " I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good. And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who r…
I partially think the difference is “can you tell something is the output of Claude without any real prompting”. People can absolutely use LLMs to generate text that I wouldn’t recognize, but people who don’t care and are producing slop with the major models set to default settings leave these incredibly obvious signatures behind