Proof of thought

For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity.

Now, AI has made text very, very, very cheap. Not only text, in fact. Code, images, video. All kinds of media. We can’t rely on proof-of-thought anymore. Any text can be AI slop. If you read it, you’re injured in this war.

– Alex Martsinovich: It’s rude to show AI output to people

Personlighed som metafor – eller som illusion

I’ve never had an issue with the anthropomorphization of digital processes. When someone says “if you enter this kind of command, the tool knows that it needs to look up this thing over here”, it’s an adequate metaphor of what’s happening, and the language flows well. People get a decent visualization of boxes and arrows in their heads that captures what the processes are doing.

It’s different when you’re anthropomorphizing an LLM. Please don’t, be very technical and precise about what it does. There’s a kind of uncanny valley of behavior that makes the metaphor collapse.

Clacke på Mastodon – link til indlæg

For nemt at være vanskelig

Cynicism is the cheap seats. It’s the fast food of intellectual positions. Anyone can point at something and say it’s broken, corrupt, or destined to fail. The real challenge? Building something better.

The cynic sees a proposal for change and immediately lists why it won’t work. They’re usually right about specific failure modes — systems are complex, and failure has many mothers. But being right about potential problems differs from being right about the whole.

– Joan Westenberg: We Don’t Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.

Indgroet ubehag

People learn to use terrible UI all the time. It’s not good to dismiss complaints about UI, because that’s insular. And the insular quality isn’t very welcoming.

But email remains a dominant force in communication. If email were invented today everyone would have to use gmail or not be able to email someone not on the same service. A few crazy people would talk about “open email” and try to get people to try it.

– Mymepropagandist på Mastodon (link)