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#Ouija

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Space Hobo

I realised that my generation of nerds played heavily with Markov generation of text, back in the 90s and early 2000s. We enjoyed the hilarious monkey-cheese nonsense it spat out, and occasionally shouted in amazement as the roll of the dice landed on a unique or inspiring turn of phrase.

But that's how I see #LLMs: they're not a tool to write things in place of humans; they're a #OuijaBoard. It's fun to sit around the thing and turn the crank, generating eerie effects and complex narratives! But we all know it's a pseudo-random system based on reflexes rather than fact or conscious thought. The #kaleidoscope makes pretty patterns, but not out of any sort of artistic vision.

That doesn't mean we need a world without #kaleidoscopes or #Ouija Boards. But we're in a massive PR campaign from people who make money if we all succumb to FOMO and think "Oh gosh I dunno, I heard the AIs are smarter than us, so I should use this to generate my work for me. At least I think that's what my company's #AI initiative is about?"

I love that we're referring to the output as #slop now. I think that's a good way to deride the clear drop in quality these things bring. But we should look for more neutral metaphors like the ones I tagged above, so that people understand the limited role this stuff should play.

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