Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
people who talk about “prompting” like it’s a skill would take a class[1] on tasseomancy because a coffee shop opened across the street
read: watch a youtube tutorial ↩︎
I think this is more about plausible deniability: If people report getting wrong answers from a chatbot, this is surely only because of their insufficient “prompting skills”.
Oddly enough, the laziest and most gullible chatbot users tend to report the smallest number of hallucinations. There seems to be a correlation between laziness, gullibility and “great prompting skills”.
is the deniability you are referring to of the clanker-wankers (CW[1]) themselves or the clanker-producers (e.g. sam altman)?
because i agree on the latter[2], but i do see CWs saying stupid shit like “there is more to it than just writing a description”
edit: credit, it was @antifuchs who introduced the term to me here
edit2: sorry, my dumbass understands your point now (i think). if i wank clankers and someone tells me “that shit doesn’t work,” i can just respond “you must have been prompting it wrong”. but, i do think the way many users of these tools are so sycophantic means it’s also a genuine belief, and not just a way to escape responsibility. these people are fart sniffers, after all
unrelated, but i miss when that channel had superhero shows. bring back legends of tomorrow ↩︎
i.e., someone like altman would say “you’re prompting it wrong” to skirt accountability or create an air of scientific/mathematical rigor ↩︎
To put it more bluntly: Yes, I believe this is mainly used as an excuse by AI boosters to distract from the poor quality of their product. At the same time, as you mentioned, there are people who genuinely consider themselves “prompting wizards”, usually because they are either too lazy or too gullible to question the chatbot’s output.
For all that user error can be a real thing it also gets used as a thought-terminating cliche by engineer types. This is a tendency that industry absolutely exploits to justify not only AI grifts but badly designed products.
When an AI creates fake legal citations, for example, and the prompt wasn’t something along the lines of “Please make up X”, I don’t know how the user could be blamed for this. Yet, people keep claiming that outputs like this could only happen due to “wrong prompting”. At the same time, we are being told that AI could easily replace nearly all lawyers because it is that great at lawyerly stuff (supposedly).