• 33 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • There’ve been occassions here on Lemmy when people have responded to questions with AI overviews or chatGPT. They acknowledged that source for the copied text, which I thought was good, and while the answers were generally too vague and hedge betting to really be of massive help they were sometimes at least providing something of an answer to questions for which there could be a definitive or at least actionable answer. The responses were not received well, a lot of downvotes and chiding, there’s a sense that, choosing to do that showed a kind of contempt for the original poster and rest of the forum. Usually the commenter was silent after the downvotes but occasionally would defend on the grounds that they were just trying to be helpful. Assuming good intent, I could empathise, sorta, especially when there were basically no other answers being provided by anyone, though I absolutely have sympathy for the offended in that context too, it really does feel pointless and dismissive more than helpful.

    This brings us now to this specific context, on the face of it it could be a question with a definitive answer, like maybe there was an actual specific reason why that particular phrase and not just many similar constructions was being googled at that time, maybe a popular figure said it, or it appeared in some work of narrative fiction and resonated. Had that been the case and had the AI told you that and you copied it here, then providing that answer and even, perhaps to a fault, being so honest as to cite AI just for a simple statement of fact might have been helpful and laudable. However, unsurprisingly it appears to be a much vaguer and more open ended question, or at least it doesn’t seem to have a straightforward answer. That leaves only speculation and discussion, in lieu of hard facts and that’s something for which a forum is well suited. That you got an AI overview on the topic and it had no specific insight only musings makes its inclusion far more aggravating because you’re essentially outsourcing the theoretically enjoyable job of discussion and human connection, for which a forum is ostensibly for, to a machine, for no gain to anyone. I don’t know if you had genuinely good intentions of trying to be helpful, but the sense that, you didn’t have to say anything at all, yet you still felt the need to basically phone it in will inevitably rub people the wrong way. If you didn’t particularly want to engage with this topic or connect with the rest of us and didn’t even have anything useful to say either, what’s this for?

    Unlike a lot of Lemmy I don’t think it’s inherently bad to have made use of an AI overview in the initial forming of an opinion or finding information to help you contribute, but since it turned out to be a dead end, that is, it didn’t really know, then simply not saying anything here was always an option.








  • I don’t really get what you mean by preswapping, like you changed the sheets on a spare duvet and just swapped out the entire duvet, but then what about the sheets on the mattress? Or do you just mean you do the entire task of changing the bedsheets unobserved and then tell your wife you’re about to change them and announce that you’ve finished a few seconds later?




  • The thing is, this would just be equivalent to leaving it on at all hours, because who would join such a chat room without the intention of switching it on. Even if you joined such a chat room and had some restraint and decided to wait till the moment you thought would be most amusing, someone else would definitely just decided that it should be on now and basically the only lull would be if the number of users was relatively limited and mostly in the same timezone so everyone is sleeping.





  • I wonder if there’s a kind of positive feedback loop with one’s own thoughts being mistaken for other entities’ voices and the contents of the those thoughts.

    For example, if you get a bit freaked out by suddenly hearing an unidentified voice in your head, you might fear it, and if you fear it and think it malevolent, you might start to imagine what type of things it might want or say and then by imagining it and simulating it, you essentially create the very thoughts this malevolent entity ultimately speaks to you but since you can’t identify the source as yourself and it becomes the voice of this malevolent entity.


  • I guess that’s sort of the whole money making appeal of new AI tools, previously it didn’t make much sense to spend your time and often/usually money to make something if very few would see it, so you focussed on things that get a lot of eyeballs. Now you could more feasibly make something on kind of any topic and not even have to try very hard to do it since it’s pretty well automated. With such low costs, even a tiny return is a positive return and you can just make a lot of stuff.

    That said, I would think it still at the moment required someone directing the tools to generate something on a given topic and it does seem pretty unlikely someone trying to pump out videos with ads on any and every topic for a few cents of revenue hoping it all adds up would be able to have conceived of the topics you’re seeing so I guess my theory falls apart there.




  • They probably did have recent success with a variation on the theme. While they’re likely old enough and established enough now that they’re not having to walk around to retail businesses off the street and attempt to get a job like they did when they started out, this approach likely helped in more recent times in their career in the context of promotions or switching to a new job in their same field or at a similar level in a new field. They might have succeeded in getting that new job or promotion in large part due to their social connections and direct interface with the right people just like they’re advising you to do, except in their case it’s now at the higher level, which is probably one of the few places left where showing up at the right time, having the right manner and air about you and dressing nicely actually still makes the difference. The tactics wouldn’t work on their own, they still needed their credentials and connections and experience to get that far in the first place, but it probably helped cinch the position. Now they’re trying to give practical advice to someone just starting out and for them those tactics genuinely are still helping even if they’re not the sole factor in their success and when they cast their minds back to when they started out it helped a lot then too. With this experience in mind, in their shoes, it worked way back when, and it still works now at the higher level and the youngster you’re earnestly trying to help doesn’t have much else going for them since they’re starting out so of course they should at least do this and if everyone else is applying online then this alone will make them a memorable candidate for putting in the extra effort and place them ahead of 90% of the pack.

    In reality, it doesn’t really work that way, the processes are centralised, the people physically in the office or location don’t really handle this themselves so they don’t care what you were like to talk to or how you dressed because it’s not their decision and the way the jobs market is, the employers have the leverage and there’s way more people looking for the jobs than there are jobs so it’s not going to be practical to have them all turning up in a suit because they want to be remembered and they prefer to streamline the process rather than deal with people directly.

    I totally see why it would seem like sensible advice to someone who started working when these simple steps were a marker of basic competency and motivation and for whom it now continues to matter to this day. They’re just insulated from the way the situation has shifted.


  • So this will obviously be personal, as you said maybe you just want validation for something you’d do anyway, but on the face of it without having access to the emotional and self fulfilment aspects of each proposition, leaving sounds like a really bad idea.

    Leaving for higher pay, leaving for a new lifestyle and adventure in a new location, leaving for work you’d never have considered but will be really unusual and interesting or leaving for lower lay and insecurity but in a field you’ve always wanted to be involved and is worth more to you than the money and security; sure that all makes sense but unless I’m mistaken this sounds as though the other job is just a different job not one that holds a special appeal to you.

    So unless there’s some extra psychological component to this, I can’t really see the advantage.