ebu

and people get very defensive about this one too. like i’m pretty confident that coolboy004 on reddit is not giving a nuanced delivery on the ethics of a company running an ai-powered call center when he types “screws will not replace us” in all caps on /r/fuckai, and yet

i think it sucks that we’re stuck with, say, bluesky engineers genuinely trying to pull the most moronic variant of “but what if the stochastic text generator might have feelings in the future too”, but we still need to be able to talk about why people feel the need to make “clanka with the hard r” jokes (answer it’s racism)

from what i see, white people simply clamor for a context in which they’re “allowed” to finally call someone the n-word, and are willing to accept substitute targets for their racism

add in a protective cloak of “it’s ironic and a joke and YOU’RE the real racist for pointing this out” and you get a whole lot of people who are extremely okay slinging around barely modified racial slurs

dictionaries are obsolete bricks remembers that they are useful that’s why they’re actually ai when you think about it

1. no one is assuming iNaturalist is being malicious, saying otherwise is just well-poisoning.
2. there is no amount of testing that can ever overcome the inherently-stochastic output of LLMs. the “best-case” scenario is text-shaped slop that is more convincing, but not any more correct, which is an anti-goal for iNaturalist as a whole
3. we’ve already had computer vision for ages. we’ve had google images for twenty years. there is absolutely no reason to bolt a slop generator of any kind to a search engine.
4. “staff is very much connected with users” obviously should come with some asterisks given the massive disconnect between staff and users on their use and endorsement of spicy autocorrect
5. framing users who delete their accounts in protest of machine slop being put up on iNaturalist, which is actually the point of contention here, as being over-reactive to the mere mention of AI, and thus being basically the same as the AI boosters? well, it’s gross. iNat et. al. explicitly signaled that they were going to inject AI garbage into their site. users who didn’t like that voted with their accounts and left. you don’t get to post-hoc ascribe them a strawman rationale and declare them basically the same as the promptfans, fuck off with that

“emotional”

let me just slip the shades on real quick

“womanly”

checks out

“i reflexively identify with the openly-fascist right-wing base that has found its home on elon’s twitter, and since i’m a reasonable person, the evidence that they’re flagrantly conspiracy-minded and/or are CSAM posters simply must be fabricated”