ladybugs

As a writer and reader, I hate LLMs.

I hate the way they were built. I hate that my past writing has been used for LLM training. I hate that specific people I know have used LLMs to try to replicate something I personally had been doing, and they didn’t give a damn if the result was shitty. I hate that I can’t use some of my favorite punctuation and phrasing patterns anymore without people thinking my writing is AI-generated, because surprise, that’s what happens when AI is trained on text written by people like me. I hate that I can’t fully prevent anything I share publicly from being used for AI training, although I’m damn well going to try. (Hey nonconsensual AI crawlers, enjoy trapping yourselves in Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth honeypot after I publish my next blogging project.) I don’t want my writing to contribute to this BS.

I hate that the writing communities where I first shared my writing as a teenager are (a) now populated with a fair amount of obvious AI slop and (b) scraped for AI training. I hate that self-publishing spaces are inundated with AI slop. I hate that websites that previously paid writers are now paying less, or not at all, or using the writers’ work to train/build AI. I hate the way my search results are filled with articles “written” with AI instead of humans. I hate that I can’t trust that information is accurate from sources I might have trusted in the past, just because I don’t know who was using AI for “research” with less caution than I would want.

I hate the way people reply to me with AI slop text and don’t even check it over it first in work-related situations. I hate many, many other things about how it’s impacted my career that I won’t get into here.

I hate the way so many people no longer respect the art form I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I hate knowing how little people care about good information, creativity, or any consideration other than speed of “production.”

I hate that I can’t even avoid AI by disconnecting from the internet. I hate that I can no longer trust that books were written by a human, depending on where I get them. I hate the way certain apps constantly remind me of all this BS, because they just had to make a really prominent AI button instead of a normal or (better yet) removable button. I hate that my friend’s goddamn washing machine has an AI setting, even though it has nothing to do with LLMs, because the world can never stop reminding you about AI.

Believe it or not, I too was once somewhat excited about AI. I thought AI would free me from the boring tasks so I could spend more time lovingly creating and appreciating art. Silly me.

Huh, interesting. I might try it and just lurk for a while. Thank you so much for sharing!

We can abbreviate it to K-Dub! Or maybe kʷə for those either have an expanded keyboard or are willing to copy-paste or find the superscript tool in whatever app they’re using or whatever. Kind of like how people shorten the country’s full name to America or the USA or the U.S.

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Even the young people are nostalgic for a time when new technology was actually cool rather than mostly being a way to more effectively use everyone’s data against them.

There’s also that 30-year cycle phenomenon where things from 3 decades ago become trendy again, like how 80s stuff got more popular again in the 2010s.

Hi, thanks for this comment! I'm not a very technical person and am still trying to sort through what all of this is. If I'm understanding correctly, the tildeverse is a bunch of connected communities for people who are interested in exploring Linux and other unix-based operating systems, using servers built on those systems, right? I might try Linux in the future, but I probably won't switch over until my hardware is no longer compatible with new versions of MacOS. At the moment, the tildeverse looks a little over my head. Maybe I'll come back to this idea later!

Yeah, I really don't want to contribute to the ongoing loss of accessibility. People with disabilities have enough crap to deal with. They don't need random extra barriers on websites they'd like to read. Otherwise, I'd probably use that font.

I hate Cloudflare as an internet user, but maybe that's the best option right now. The AI Labyrinth looks pretty cool! That's basically the only use of generative AI I'm ok with right now. Does it cause any accessibility issues for humans using screen readers or other assistive tech?

How would Unreal Engine or Godot work for that purpose? I haven't heard that idea before!

As for putting the text in an image, my understanding is that scrapers can automatically use OCR.

Unfortunately, that analysis work is done by humans in poorer countries who get paid under $2/hr to sort through horrific content all day. The content might still get scraped, but the problematic parts would probably be de-weighted or left out. All you'd accomplish with that tactic is maybe contributing to an exploited Kenyan worker's PTSD.

This is what "analysis done on content" looks like: https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

Yes. There have been plenty of cases of people prompting an LLM to write "in the style of" of a specific author. There are also AI-generated books being sold on Amazon under real authors' names, AI-generated books flooding self-publishing spaces, and plenty of other issues. Sometimes that stuff gets taken down, but most of it continues and makes it harder for real writers to gain visibility. On the technical side of things, if you want to run a "successful" blog with useful information these days, good luck. Google doesn't send nearly as many people to actual websites today, mostly because of AI overviews, and a lot of AI-powered SEO content is outranking the human writing in SERPs. Sites like Medium are also mostly AI slop now. Human writers are getting crowded out.

Much worse, a lot of real writers have been falsely accused of using AI. This is more of an issue if you blog or write articles, but it's happened in fiction too. People will run your work through "AI detectors" even though none of them are that reliable. I've run into this issue before with my past writing (some things I wrote were "detected" as 20-60% AI-generated). AI is trained off of human writing patterns, so inevitably, people who have had their work over-represented in training data end up having AI-like writing patterns when really it's the AI that sounds like them.

I hate what AI has done to writing communities, too. People accuse writers of using AI on social media all the time. The site where I posted fiction as a teen has a lot of unlabeled AI-generated stories these days, and it's known that a lot of older stories were scraped, so things are looking worse for the next generation of writers.

I've also felt a huge decline in respect for writers of all kinds since 2022. A lot of people don't read that closely and genuinely believe a chatbot's output is equivalent, or at least good enough. And some of the people who do read closely are more suspicious. Like I said, there are plenty of false accusations of AI use going around. It's just a much more antagonistic environment to write in.

And those are just some of my issues with AI. I really, really hate being forced to contribute to the technology causing all this bullshit.

Yeah, I was looking around at different posts, and that's the conclusion I came to as well 😔 The closest thing to a functioning equivalent doesn't appear to work much like Pinterest at all, at least not the way I've used it. I just want to add pretty/interesting images to boards for inspiration

Slightly off topic, but is there a Fediverse equivalent of Pinterest? I’m feeling the urge to make some boards. I want all the aesthetics please