This is why the aitechbrodude will never understand opposition to AI. They don’t understand anything of substance.
To be sort of fairish, I get the impression that anyone who would say that is the sort of person who could read a book cover to cover and manage to not get anything more than a rough outline of the plot out of it anyway.
This is an obvious joke though lol
This guy made a joke and a bunch of Twitter users took it seriously. Context.
This guy made a joke that reads identically to the kinds of things people have been saying without a hint of humour since the ignoble days of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books up to, yes, people saying almost exactly the same thing as he said here and people took him at face value. This is despite knowing that Poe’s Law is a thing.
How terrible.
Generally if people don’t “get” your joke, there’s one of two things likely happening:
- Your joke wasn’t funny.
- This was a Schrodinger’s Joke: serious until someone says something bad about it after which it becomes “Gosh, all y’all just can’t take a joke!”
Generally if people don’t “get” your joke, there’s one of two things likely happening:
Or option three, which happened here: someone attempted satire or dark humor and didn’t realize society had degenerated so much that people were genuinely, seriously, advocating for the satirical claim.
Imagine Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” - a suggestion that poor Irish people sell their children to be eaten for food, which would both reduce the burden on poor families and provide delicious sustenance for wealthy Englishmen. Now imagine a bunch of English people saying “this is a great idea, I’ve supported it for a long time now”. And then a bunch of Irish people attacking Jonathan Swift, believing he genuinely supported eating Irish children, because a bunch of English people actually supported it.
You might wonder how it could be possible, that people would confuse satirical attacks on exaggeratedly stupid and evil positions for actual support for those positions.
But then you might remember there are sitting members of Congress suggesting we literally feed immigrants to alligators to thunderous fucking applause.
And then you might remember satire is dead.
Or option three, which happened here: someone attempted satire or dark humor and didn’t realize society had degenerated so much that people were genuinely, seriously, advocating for the satirical claim.
Oh? This was his first time on Twitter then? If so, the error is forgivable.
No, wait. It isn’t. Reader’s Digest has been doing “condensed books” in its magazines since the 1930s. People have been pitching things like Coles Notes since 1948 and Cliffs Notes since 1958. And even in the world of tech there’s been Blinkist since 2013.
So expressing surprise to negative reactions to opining that LLMbeciles are “good” for summarizing complex novels given – checks notes – almost a century of people gleefully doing just that is either ignorance of staggering proportions or disingenuousness of even more staggering proportions.
This was pretty much a Schrodinger’s Joke.
This has got to be sarcasm.
We are flirting with Poe’s Law, yes. But I have seen people express similar thoughts in dead earnestness dating as far back as Reader’s Digest condensed books, so for decades people have been looking for shortcuts to comprehension of art.
Same thing with whatshisface that runs Microsoft.
There was an article recently about how he “enjoys podcasts”… by feeding the transcript of the podcast into the AI, letting it summarise it, and having a conversation with the AI about the podcast on his commute to work.
Comically missing the point that a podcast is a performative medium; the presenter(s) telling you the story is a part of the artform, which you’ve just lost. Turn off tech-bro brain, just for a minute, and actually engage in the product as it was intended.
It just boggles the mind, do they really think they’ve stumbled on some sort of secret the rest of us have been sleeping on?
I think thats the whole thing people love about AI, it was the same with the expensive pictures. Tech lads thinking they were early with the secret sauce no one had found. The boys just wanna feel like they are the smart ones for once.
I remember studying a Broadway play for drama class in middle school, and the original plan was to go watch it alongside our studying of it. However, 9/11 had just happened, and the idea of going to New York City at that time scared enough parents that the fieldtrip was cancelled.
The teacher lamented that we weren’t going to get the full, proper experience of the play without seeing it performed live. Even reading it in a classroom was considered a low bar.
And now, here we are, expecting AI to summarize a script, a script which already fails to capture everything the play would’ve provided.
We’re making copies of copies, and nobody’s refilling the toner.
pro tip: you can basically visit > 100 cities per day for free by using google street view.
VR does kind of scratch this itch a bit. I’ve done flyovers/360 tours of places I’ve lived and visited and its certainly more immersive than photos.
