16 ms·

Knitting bullshit

• eduction 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • phoronixrly 4mo ago
    Yeah, well good thing that LLMs are good at summarizing articles, unlike generating believable knitting images.
    • ivankelly 4mo ago
      I was a couple of images in before I sussed it. Bullshit images, but pleasing enough to look at. Without the images, it would have either been a big wall of text, which would have put me off reading, though I did give up about 25% of the way through after sussing the images and thus the incoherence in the argument. The images bring something to the article. They were cheap/quick to generate. The increase the potential payoff (more reader) without significantly increasing the cost. Without the images, the payoff(readers) would likely have been lower, below the cost of actually writing the article. Same goes for a history of knitting podcast or that video. Production costs would not be worth it for a very niche viewership.
      • Slow_Dog 4mo ago
        So you're saying you can spot AI generated bullshit, but not spot a deliberate and hilarious contrivance that the author uses to reinforce their point?
      • josh_s 4mo ago
        The AI images were deliberate and part of the narrative. Ie, you can generate slop with zero effort. from TFA: "All of the images in this post were generated by an ai in response to the simple two-word prompt “lovely knitting” Edit: ps: Kate Davies is an actual creator who has been creating knitting patterns for years.
        • ivankelly 4mo ago
          Yes, I saw. By giving up I meant I skimmed to the end. The images improve the article
      • frereubu 4mo ago
        Reading that made me feel like you wanted to be contrarian from the get-go and dismiss the article with the least effort possible. The whole point of the images is that they're low-effort AI slop, it's part of what she's trying to point to when someone is generating unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting.
        • ivankelly 4mo ago
          I came in indifferent but it doesn’t take much to make me give up on an article linked on hacker news. I use it as bubblegum while waiting for a compile/prompt, intent ally for stuff that can be dropped easily. I saw her disclaimer at the end. My point was that the slop images make a more appealing article than if they were absent
      • aakresearch 4mo ago
        I may have different perception facilities in the brain, but to me the images in the article are horrifying. Such bad, Frankenstein-level, criminal butchering of absolutely everything!
  • Igrom 4mo ago
    Not taking away the right to your opinion, but I couldn't disagree more; I found it an excellent sociological article. One, it takes the formal concept of "bullshit" and applies it to knitting in a very methodical and strict manner. I found it novel and convincing, and the examples were great; not contrived or forced at all. IMO it was much better than many academic books or articles; an immediate share. Two, the turns of logic are clearly laid out, in a conversational way, which would make it easy to stick a wrench in and form a polemic if you found any of her arguments or logical implications specious. That said, that does make the article quite long. But then, it is anything other than "elliptical", which I think you used as "runs in circles and repeats itself often", while it actually means "omits parts and thus is difficult to understand" (like the ellipsis sign: …). Also: what the heck is wrong with that podcast farm founder. I hope they have a bad year.
  • antonvs 4mo ago
    You only had to reach the second paragraph to find the example of an 8-person company that uses AI to generate “about 3000 podcast episodes per week, hosted by AI personalities.”
  • coffeefirst 4mo ago
    Maybe. But at least she gave a shit enough to actually write something you didn’t like. The sloplings don’t even bother.
• globular-toast 4mo ago
  Why does this site want to access apps and services on my local network? On topic, I do wonder how "the market" is going to sort this out. At this moment I'm leaning towards just banning this shit, but maybe there is a better way?
  • potatototoo99 4mo ago
    We can already see the market in action. Increasingly people are more hostile to online content and influencers, except for the few people they follow, just like everyone was already defensive against unsolicited email. Authenticity will become valuable in a sea of slop, and making high budget productions (think Mr Beast) will be worth nothing since it can be easily faked and hard to distinguish.
  • huflungdung 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • AlecSchueler 4mo ago
    > I do wonder how "the market" is going to sort this out Unlikely to do a better job than it did with anything else.
• dsign 4mo ago
  TL;DR: there are brainrot farms with help from AI. But I saw this one coming three or four years ago. Actually, I've been listening to AI-generated brainrot music. I prefer it to some human-generated brainrot music (there's "I Hate Boys" from Christina Aguilera. Sorry if you are a fan). Brainrot serves a specific social purpose: relieving stress, incoherently winning elections. It's a kind of drug that dulls the dangerous part of the brain while leaving the he-is-a-good-tool and she-is-blonde brain hemispheres in working order. In fact, I do believe that if there were to be an uprising in a couple of decades against AI, and the human side were to rise victorious, the aftermath's social order would be studiously anti-AI and anti-science, but they would make a carve-out for AI brainrot (yes, I published a short fiction story with that premise, because I'm brainrot-vers).
  • tovej 4mo ago
    Are you serious when you connect anti-AI sentiment to anti-science sentiment? To me, they are opposite sentiments, and my experience discussing AI with others supports this. The most pro-AI people I meet are very far removed from science, and my research colleagues are definitely more critical of AI than not.
    • pjc50 4mo ago
      AI's tendency to emit unsourced, untrue statements with authority is about the most unscientific thing you can get. AI is scientism: presenting science-flavoured things as a cultural marker.
      • nephihaha 4mo ago
        Unfortunately there is a lot of cargo cult science around. I am not just referring to alternative viewpoints (which vary in validity), but even things from mainstream outlets masquerading as mainstream science. One such example was businesses claiming physical cash was unhygienic while promoting dirty touchscreens for ordering. Real science has indicated that many of these touchscreens are covered in bacteria if they are not cleaned regularly. The Daily Mail has been telling us that the Yellowstone supervolcano is about to blow for nearly thirty years now at least. Maybe one day it will, but hasn't yet.
• quibono 4mo ago
  Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?
  • psychoslave 4mo ago
    No, but to misinform people you have two main strategies: limiting through tailored scarcity and dilute in extra-generic overabundance. Don’t get it wrong: both can be combined and even can sometime overlap. It doesn’t matter if no one is listening. Equally saturating all channels, metrics and indicator is enough to create hindrance so preventing relevant information to spread in meaningful time. Attention is all you need, so distraction is all that will be given.
    • ikr678 4mo ago
      Also, fracturing audiences to infinity.
  • mjd 4mo ago
    Or maybe Ms. McHealy was simply lying.
  • ryukoposting 4mo ago
    By McHealy's logic, we ought not be concerned about that. After all, it's low-stakes content.
  • api 4mo ago
    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 LARPing as one) telling you about their boogers and then being racist and then playing video games for 6 hours. But it's wildly popular. Millions of people stream this kind of shit for hours every day. There's a lot of people out there who just want to numb their brains, and there seems to be no floor. You can just keep making it dumber. The stuff people stream (and doom scroll) on the Internet makes 1980s daytime soaps look like high art from a lost golden age. So it's not at all surprising that millions of people listen to low-quality un-curated AI slop podcasts. I actually unsubbed from the podcast I heard. Meta discussion of crap like this isn't much better than the content itself. Keep driving. Do not look at the car accident. I had kind of an epiphany like that in the last year. The Information Age means information is free. It costs $0 and is produced to infinity. That means you are not missing anything. Your attention is actually 100% yours, and if you choose to ignore the car wreck that's fine. There are infinity car wrecks. There are infinity everything. Keep driving.
• frereubu 4mo ago
  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.
  • nilirl 4mo ago
    I'm afraid it'll lead to a weird music-ification of content. Music can make you feel good and keep you engaged just purely out of engaging our pattern recognition. AI videos and photos seem to have a similar effect. Even if it's not real, they encode enough patterns from good human work to be able to engage our attention. Just proving people with an attentional escape is valuable on the internet.
  • siddboots 4mo ago
    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.
    • latexr 4mo ago
      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.
      • dmd 4mo ago
        All human progress in history has been due to a VERY small handful of people who think “this is bullshit, things could be better”. The vast majority of people accept what they see as the way things are and it never occurs to them that things could be different.
• praptak 4mo ago
  I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion. I'm specifically thinking of a print magazine that was designed to make you feel like you are a smart reader of science articles, without any useful information about the actual science or technology.
  • latexr 4mo ago
    > I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion. Even if that were true (which I don’t think it is, this is a different kind of worthless content), you most definitely don’t remember it at this scale, and that’s a major point.
  • wvbdmp 4mo ago
    Yes, the article acknowledges this in the first paragraph by citing Harry Frankfurt’s „On Bullshit“ (1986). Of course bullshit (as well as even more insidious misinformation/propaganda) have always been around, but the incredible advances in its production and dissemination are worth considering. At some point, sheer quantity turns into its own quality. Indeed I would argue these issues have always been underconsidered. The article is a kind of inoculation against bullshit that every generation requires again and again. People aren’t born nearly skeptical enough, and the game keeps ever changing. I actually don’t think the article is sufficiently vehement in calling out just how brain-frying this is. And how destructive on a societal level. The razor’s edge between being too uncritical and too cynical is hella narrow.
• whilenot-dev 4mo ago
  Interestingly, Inception AI seem to have pivoted from content slop for "gardening, [...] knitting, cooking" - or "things we can afford to be wrong" - to "AI Immigration Drafting Software for Law Firms": https://www.inceptionai.co/ https://www.inceptionai.co/ I'm somewhat curious how that'll work out. Hint: I'm not. EDIT: My bad, wrong company, it's "Inception Point AI": https://www.inceptionpoint.ai/ https://www.inceptionpoint.ai/
  • donaldihunter 4mo ago
    There's also https://www.inceptionlabs.ai https://www.inceptionlabs.ai - it's not confusing at all.
• aigenluser 4mo ago
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• augment_me 4mo ago
  I like the blog but the premise of the blog is an engineering/epistemological perspective on the craft. The writer clearly cares more about the process, technique and history more than the feeling and validation. It could be, that a big part of the the future of hobby's and entertainment in this way is the feeling and validation over the actual performance. Or it can be that a massive amount of people find their value in this content.
  • ossopite 4mo ago
    The idea that we could create a world where 'a big part of the future of hobbies and entertainment' is people listening to meaningless words made up by machines that help them feel good about themselves sounds horrifying. How could anybody feel ok about that? What would it say about the society we've built?
    • augment_me 4mo ago
      It would say that society changes, and people who were not used to a new world get upset about it, as it has always been throughout the entire history of humanity. We were used to having psychologists and doctors in person, now the most common form is to have it through apps, and the younger generation does not care, it's in fact more efficient to get a prescription that you like than to spend time going places and having in-person meetings. But older generation finds it hollowing out and horrifying. You need to accept that society moves on, and it can look different from your perspective.
      • danparsonson 4mo ago
        You could justify basically anything with that logic. Change isn't always about progress.
        • augment_me 4mo ago
          In this case, the user is deciding that they choose what progress is. I am saying, that people who use the tool and value the utility of it decide what is progress. If people listen to the podcast, or use doctors in the phone because it provides them any value, it will be a change and a perceived progress for them. If the generated podcasts did not bring any value to the users, such as validation, or engagement, they would not use them, and there would be no change.
• afandian 4mo ago
  It's scandalous that no-one has yet posted Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon "Bullknitters". https://www.instagram.com/p/C2OQtokvzCa/ https://www.instagram.com/p/C2OQtokvzCa/ (or google image search)
  • penguin_booze 4mo ago
    Related: Four Yorkshiremen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE.
  • xnorswap 4mo ago
    Personally I think it's scandalous that the now top comment is an off-topic reference to something tangential to the title, and nothing to do with the article, which isn't really about knitting at all, except for being the hook to which the author was pulled in to the world of AI podcasts, and consequently found their output rather lacking in content. You could substitute the word knitting for almost any hobby, and the article would read almost the same. It's an article about the soulless content-free world of AI podcasting, and about how AI output is about validating the emotions of the listener rather than meaningful content.
    • afandian 4mo ago
      That wasn't meant to be the top comment, it was meant to be buried somewhere round the bottom! I did read the whole article and have some thoughts about it. But they are pessmistic and difficult, so I'd rather share something fun. My on-topic thoughts are that I just spent a long weekend in good company playing music and chatting. Returning to quotidien life made me think the solution is to get as far away from computers as possible, and back to the in-person interaction that we're evolved for. A big reason IMHO that we're susceptible to phony bullshit (whether it's knitting podcasts or broadcast propaganda) is that we're not evolved for it, and it misses many of the contextual clues present in in-person interaction for which we are evolved.
• tmountain 4mo ago
  For someone complaining about slop, I found this unreadable.
• Michelangelo11 4mo ago
  > one of the most pernicious things about this particular kind of bullshit is the way it casts any form of critical scrutiny as a terrible failure of sensibility. What a great line. And you'll probably notice this technique being used by very skilled bullshitters and master manipulators: any request for rigor or scrutiny is met by something like genteel condescension. You're treated as if you've committed a breach of etiquette, and that's one of the reasons the technique is powerful -- you're likely to feel embarrassed and, following that, to back off.
  • nyeah 4mo ago
    Great point. This happens on forums too. For example if Kate opposes knitting bullshit, a common strategy is to characterize Kate as 'hostile', 'overheated', 'overreacting', etc. Kate's actual argument doesn't need to be addressed. We just rule that Kate isn't posting content, she's causing conflict or experiencing an unfortunate emotional state. This strategy also indirectly helps overworked moderators by penalizing disagreement, which in turn discourages flame wars. Kate's critics can even say they support Kate. They just want to help her deal with her emotional overload.
• roxolotl 4mo ago
  Wow I’d never have expected Kate Davies to show up on Hacker News. I think it’s important to understand her background a bit when she talks about knitting as a matter of life and death. She was a scholar of 18th century literature before she suffered a stroke young[0]. She focused on knitting as a means of recovery and never looked back. She built a business and a community and attributes a lot of her physical and mental health to knitting. So while this post hopefully hits a chord for anyone in a creative field she embodies a particular type of person for whom slop is a genuine risk to their being. Not their job; their whole personhood. In a world where slop has chased out the humanity of things and the bullshit machines fill all content what are the chances someone like her could build a second life better than her first? 0: https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2015/01/28/five-years-on-part-1/ https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2015/01/28/five-years-on-part-...
  • getpokedagain 4mo ago
    Wild. This kind of empowerment and long lived effort is the type of story we should be sharing. I'm concerned that we've taken an amazing character like this and turned the world against her for frankly a bet against human intellectual development.
  • surgical_fire 4mo ago
    > Not their job; their whole personhood I hate so much that while I read your reply this particularly phrasing was grating to me. There's nothing wrong with it, and I have no doubts you, whoever you are, wrote it. What annoys me to death is that a perfectly fine language construct is tarnished to a point that a mere glance reflexively caused me to wince, and I had to actively interpret it as fine.
    • bellorap 4mo ago
      Interesting, sounds like a similar experience to my reading of this reply The root comment brings insight and value and stakes out a human position. I don’t see a need to snipe from the hedges
      • 4mo ago
• MITSardine 4mo ago
  Great article, thanks for sharing. I didn't know (but should have assumed) AI-generated podcasts existed. That's depressing. I imagined if mankind had the ideal machine, that could automate anything, we would get rid of dull office work and back breaking physical labor, but not the things that are actually enjoyable: sharing with each other, entertaining each other, making art. I imagined a lively world of live performance and creation, since all subsistence work had been taken care of. Instead we might end up in the world of fifteen million merits. It seems people don't mind letting their minds be hacked by machines that can create the form of what they find enjoyable, if not the substance. But I guess there's always been slop and the public for it. To imagine actual people wasting their limited time on Earth listening to these GPT logorrhea podcasts is truly depressing. The unchemical soma. What are we even supposed to spend our days doing in this bright future of the AI champions'? Stop automating away the things that give people purpose, tackle real problems instead.
  • jagged-chisel 4mo ago
    The incentives are at odds. In this capitalist landscape, you create podcasts and blogs (or have them created) to attract an audience which then attracts those fat advertising dollars.
    • philipallstar 4mo ago
      Ironically, these are both incredibly common, LLM-able takes: Lament: Oh why did we automate art? Answer: Capitalism.
      • card_zero 4mo ago
        It's superficially true, currently. We've had generative AI for a few years and people are using it to make a quick buck. But even if the world had been taken over by communism, or if the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea had got imperial ambitions and now we all lived in a gift economy, people would still be using generative AI to gain attention and status. This will work until it wears thin. Thinner.
  • 4mo ago
• tlb 4mo ago
  I like how the pictures got more and more sloporific through the essay. It doesn't mention an important group being harmed: the creators who make high-quality, sincere podcasts about knitting. Their genuine content gets buried under a mountain of slop. In theory, recommendation algorithms ought to surface the best stuff, but that doesn't seem to align with incentives. Sad.
  • onemoresoop 4mo ago
    Or even worse, it gets fed back into the AI slop machine
  • Michelangelo11 4mo ago
    Yes, I noticed and appreciated the sloporific (great word!) quality, too :) I stopped midway for a sec to try and figure out an image, then eventually realized they were just getting more nonsensical on purpose.
• card_zero 4mo ago
  I feel like the alt captions for the images, although diligent and thorough, don't really capture the most important aspects.
  • card_zero 4mo ago
    That got downvoted. But alt images are for inclusivity, for people who can't see the images. Only one of these says "surreal", the rest of them would lead you to believe that they are normal images. So it's performative inclusivity that actually excludes people. It would have been better to say "this AI generated image of the act of knitting is accidentally bizarre in a subtle way" as the alt text for every image.
  • buildsjets 4mo ago
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• telesilla 4mo ago
  I can absolutely recommend the book On Bullshit, it's a tiny read and makes an excellent gift. Kate's article summarizes it very well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit This reddit comment puts it perfectly: "What’s it about? Frankfurt tries (successfully) to define bullshit (rather academically). In short, a bullshit artist is solely focused on persuasion and making an impression, not caring about truth. Paradoxically, bullshit can be true. What makes it bullshit is how it is created - shoddily, hastily and without regard for fine work. A gifted liar does their thing carefully so that the truth cannot be found out. A bullshit artist just flings it out, overwhelming skepticism with sheer volume, until something sticks with the audience." https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1pidpb2/on_bullshit_by_harry_g_frankfurt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1pidpb2/on_bullshit_... An 1980s take on something that has taken over our 2020s digital airwaves, indeed.
  • thechao 4mo ago
    I'm from Texas and we use bullshit & tall-telling as an entertainment art (this is my background; I do t think it's specific!). This definition of bullshit is spot on; I'm pretty proud of my ability to bullshit-for-entertainment, so AI bullshit really grinds my gears... it's so bad.
• trgn 4mo ago
  it's really disheartening that so much youtube content is now AI generated.
  • tim333 4mo ago
    At least they don't get many views. Not sure why the system suggests them? Maybe they could have an "AI crap" feedback button to warn others?
    • nephihaha 4mo ago
      I have reported some of it to YouTube. No idea if anything will come of it. A lot of fake C.S. Lewis and Carl Jung content for some reason. It bears no resemblance to things they actually said.
      • tim333 4mo ago
        A problem with reporting it is the AI producers can churn out thousands or millions of the things. They need some sort of automated or semi automated way of dealing with it I guess.
        • nephihaha 4mo ago
          They do, but I don't know how to do it. I truly despise seeing some video supposedly quoting from a famous historical figure and which turns out to be AI. I saw a video of Irish quotations the other day. Among these great Irishmen were Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill. (I believe Churchill had family connections to Ireland but he would never have called himself Irish, let alone Einstein.)
• ipsento606 4mo ago
  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 one think, "Ah yes, this too is forever changed." Like sounding the depths of a dark well, where every day you lower the rope a little further, but every day there is nothing to feel but a pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.
  • mizzao 4mo ago
    It seems like Black Mirror's "Joan is Awful" is here, but instead of a quantum computer generating personalized content, we just have an endless parade of meaningless slop.
    • encom 4mo ago
      >an endless parade of meaningless slop This is, increasingly, the front page of HN. Direct slop is uncommon, but not rare. I skip any headline that mentions AI. But sometimes you get baited, you start reading, and it's about AI anyway. A few days ago there was an article about someone hacking some device, and it was just the author vibe-hacking with AI. It is not interesting. I have intense AI fatigue. Make a containment board for AI sloppers. It's so much worse than all the previous fads combined, like blockchains and Rust rewrites. I'm not even anti-AI, but the exposure to it is just overwhelming and unrelenting.
      • _dwt 4mo ago
        I think at this point the containment board is the entire Internet. I have no idea how, but we all need to "Atlas Shrugged" this shit and start over somewhere else with something else.
      • funimpoded 4mo ago
        It reminds me of how movie special effects making-ofs got super boring when most of the work started being done with computers end-to-end. But with everything.
• dzink 4mo ago
  The economist in me immediately asks: Where is the financial incentive to do this? Just the same way the programmer would ask what the stack is. Some possibilities: 1) Money laundering - large content farm someone can argue makes xyz in revenue to hide an alternate source of revenue. 2) Ad fraud - leading up podcast charts or SEO results to attract clicks to sell ads. Bot farms could also be making clicks to pretend sell ads as well. 3) Attempt to dominate the niche for sale of knitting products. Or to pretend to dominate it so they can sell their the business later at a larger multiple. 4) Test the waters of a much bigger engine for doing 1-3 above in an innocuous hidden subject, before they do it with elections or some other more profitable field. Regulatory waters as well - seeing what they can get away with. Feel free to brainstorm more incentives for making something like this.
  • williamdclt 4mo ago
    I don't understand your question, are you asking what's the financial incentive to AI-generate thousands of podcasts a week? Isn't it obviously the income from streams and/or ads?
  • Carp 4mo ago
    Did you read the article? Headcount went from 300 to 8, number of podcast per day went up and apparently listenership went up.
    • thechao 4mo ago
      I think the question he's asking is this: is it an ad ouroboros, or is there some other (nefarious?) intentionality behind it? My hot take: porque no los dos?
    • surgical_fire 4mo ago
      This only works if there are people willingly listening to crap. Perhaps there are.
      • catapart 4mo ago
        the bitch of it, though, is that it doesn't only work if people listen to it. it also works if a bunch of AI bots can convincingly fake people listening to it. and, of course, those types of bots exist and have financial incentive to continue faking it, too. at some point, these two competing interests are going to find out that they're paying each other to stare at each other's dwindling profits, but my bet is that it's going to be a while yet before that wake up call. and it will be an even longer churn into something else because no one is going to admit that they were funneling money into nonsense for years. they're going to "adjust strategies" to "modernize against changing markets" for "new potential growth". all shit that takes a long time to do because it's a half measure aimed at saving face to investors. so it'll work for a long time just based on the momentum of bullshit. =/
• alphawhisky 4mo ago
  Their dialogue on "substituting truth and validity with a register of emotional validation" is pretty prevalent across the entirety of US culture right now. The first thing that comes to mind for me are Christian groups that do a lot of celebrating during services or events with absolutely no goodwill, volunteering, or donating at all. They're real good at making you feel righteous, but awful at actualizing it. Hate the hollowing out of traditions that used to make communities and people great.
• firefoxd 4mo ago
  I didn't have the words to explain to my mother why those AI health/advice/story/etc videos she shares are harmful. > While a liar displays an underlying respect for the truth in the very act of intentionally distorting it, “the essence of bullshit”, Frankfurt writes “is not that it is false but that it is phony.” For Frankfurt, then, bullshit, is discourse from which incidental matters like truth and reality have been completely hollowed out and replaced by performance and simulation. She would often say "but I happen to know that some the underlying information is true." The answer is the videos are phony, even when part of it happens to be true.
• jameson 4mo ago
  There's something innate about AI generated contents that my instincts somehow knows these aren't creations by humans. I can't seem to state exact properties but they are hollow, out-of-norm, or as the author describes it -- bullshit
• duxup 4mo ago
  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 not really what I asked” you got an even odder response. This isn’t that strange as people will do that in a way… but i noted it because I saw a flurry of those accounts in Reddit and then they vanished.
  • munificent 4mo ago
    > 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.
• munificent 4mo ago
  If the kind of AI slop the article talks about entertains/infuriates/depresses you and you want more, you will definitely like the "kroshay" subreddit: http://reddit.com/r/kroshay http://reddit.com/r/kroshay
• divbzero 4mo ago
  > All of the images in this post were generated by an ai in response to the simple two-word prompt “lovely knitting” Touché.
• sharadov 4mo ago
  I think AI is the final nail in the coffin of meaningless slop that started pervading our lives after covid. I see people tiring of this brain rot, especially Gen Z, there are more offline events - music festivals, day time raves, running events, people are appreciating more things analog - LP records, cassettes, younger people getting turned off by social media.
• jancsika 4mo ago
  > but, Anne tells Jamie blithely, this really doesn’t matter because the topics under discussion are so low stakes Put differently-- it matters so deeply that the genre itself will inevitably become an unfathomably sad parody of what it could otherwise be.
• skeptrune 4mo ago
  I really thought the photos were real as i was reading. Wow
• giwook 4mo ago
  Did anyone else read this article and try to spot the differences between the first two photos? (appearing before and after the title)
• coffee_and_code 4mo ago
  the baking world has the same problem. when i search any baking recipe i just get ai generated recipes with photos that dont match the instructions.
• charles_f 4mo ago
  I used claude recently to generate a booklet about a system I had to ramp up on, and which is using technology I don't know. It was pretty interesting to read, especially because a) it was tailored to what I needed, b) didn't have to do the research myself, I had most of the information I needed to at least understand the system[^1]. Nevertheless, it was a very good bootstrap resource. But if I find an article that was obviously AI generated, I hate it. The podcasts I enjoy all have in common a great host personality, either funny, or very insightful, or have a particularly nice voice. I can't imagine listening to slop like that. I'm wondering if this is a bit the same pivot as TV -> youtube, media is similar but usage is different. Rather than finding a TV channel you like, you find videos on the exact topic you need -> rather than subscribing to a pod about a subject you're interested in, you generate the content you need at a given moment. New media that comes as a replacement, but as something new. So, not in this garbage form at all. [^1]: I gather that in the long run, this might be slightly detrimental because i have the information i need, and ONLY the information I need, not the information that would be useful in the future when adding to it.
• chr15m 4mo ago
  > No – knitting bullshit bothers me This is a great article. The presence of this single emdash threw me off for a bit though!
• classified 4mo ago
  Some of those AI-generated images are deeply disturbing with their disjointed body parts, but the 1950s vibes are just too endearing.
• aanet 4mo ago
  What a masterpiece, this article. BTW, if it's not already there, I encourage voting "Slop" as the Word of the Year. Along with its corollary: the "Slop Factory"
• johannesberlin 4mo ago
  does anyone else’s eyes just glaze over once they spot AI? there are MILLIONS of high quality public domain illustration, clipart, €5 illustration packs on etsy etc etc. It just never looks good and I assume your content is also AI generated so I ignore it
• incidentist 4mo ago
  This is a great post, but am I the only person who thinks the AI-generated images are brilliant? They are haunting and disturbing in a good-art kind of way -- if I saw them in a gallery I would think the artist has real talent. I'd certainly think they were better, and more interesting, than most other modern art I see, and there are many artists who try to unnerve the viewer in exactly this way and fail. Maybe I just have bad taste. But I'd love to know exactly which AI the author used to generate them. It certainly wasn't frontier models. Midjourney, maybe, but I don't see how you'd get those images from Midjourney without adding the adjectives "unnerving" or "surreal" or something.
• aaroninsf 4mo ago
  That's quite a lot of words.