25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2024

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  • Not sure who you’re used to dealing with, but I use AI all the time — damn near every day — and have done for 6 years. I’ve written a discord AI dungeon master. I’ve written hundreds perhaps over a thousand short stories often starting from a scenario I’ve written and watched them all play out time and again. I know LLMs inside and out. I’ve jailbroken them to see how far they can be pushed in terms of violence, evil, and intimacy.

    I’m no professional author to be sure, but because I lack the knack for storytelling, not because I don’t understand the craft. So I understand the tools pretty well, and I can tell when they are poorly employed.

    And I’m irritated because I 100% can tell, and I wish you were right.



  • First, I rarely am fully self-confident about factual matters. I’ve been around the block a few times but I can’t possibly have experienced everything from every perspective or maybe there’s an unspoken assumption that another person has that differs from mine. I see that in a lot of code discussions. You have to do this or that is always bad, but they just work in a different industry and what has been true every single time for them has never been true for me.

    Second, I never block anyone just because they disagree. I block them because they are being an asshole about it or maybe because I’m emotionally compromised and need to prevent myself from engaging with them. On Bluesky I’ve created a timeout block list I throw people in when it’s me and not them, and I clear it out every so often.

    Anyway, sometimes it’s just not fruitful or pleasant to talk with some people even if they are good people. I wish Lemmy had something I could use as a timeout like named block lists or block reasons. I don’t know who is a spammer, who is an asshole, or who was just on the other side of an issue or post I needed some distance from.

    I’ve blocked a couple of people who just wanted to harp on one thing ask day every day and even though I agreed with them or at least didn’t hate them I needed to block them for my blood pressure. I’m not letting any of you fuckers give me a heart attack in the name of civil discourse.

    But also, it is doing everyone a favor. I am an AI enthusiast / realist, which means a lot of people who just hate everything AI probably have me blocked. And that’s a good thing for us because we aren’t constantly bickering about it, but also good for the community because no one really likes to watch people constantly argue, no matter how considerately.



  • I remain hopeful that interest will drop in AI generated products because the quality just isn’t there. You can tell the voices aren’t right, the pictures are soulless, the prose is stilled and often self-contradictory. I think people will respond negatively to that.

    But how long it will take for that to be clear to CEOs and CFOs, I don’t know, and lives are being destroyed in the meanwhile. I think AI is a good tool, but I don’t know how to keep it as a tool but prevent amateurs from thinking the output is professional level when any professional will tell you it isn’t.

    I’ve generated a lot of text — mostly code and fiction. I’ve seen AI write some really good phrases I’d never have thought of. But I’ve never seen it generate so much as half a page before it writes something that requires editing. If you don’t write like 90% of a thing, its voice takes over and everything sounds terrible and flat even if you keep it from making factual errors.

    And even the great bits require context or it won’t have any impact. AI is god awful at artistry. Sometimes I’ll ask it to analyze something I’ve written and it always wants to rewrite the bits that have style or panache and replace them with the most generic crap. I’m a terrible visual artist but I’m going to assume it does the same thing with image generation.