critic-of-pure-bogus
Table of Contents
This website is made without the use of generative AI (except in paragraphs marked as such).
Thought feed on the ongoing accelerating enshittification of the internet and everything.
Credentials: I am just a software engineer.
A thought feed is a website with snippets of text, which are produced diary-style. The coherence between snippet might be low. The idea is that it reflects the ongoing thought process of a person.
Currently, artists are being ripped off, the world is flooded with unethical gargabe AI generated content. Google search is full of commercial bullshit (SEO is a discipline - Jesus). Code quality goes down from generated code.
It's not the case that all deep learning is gargabe. For instance alpha fold seems to be an impressively useful tool.
What better time than now, what better place than here?
Unite and raise your voices, gen ai critics of the world!
Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said.
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem (quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8741909-bulshytt-1-in-fluccish-of-the-late-praxic-age-and)
Anathem is one of my favorite books. Stephenson is coining alternative words with alternative ethymologies. One of many aspects that make this world rich and beautiful. This is an alternative world with alternative science history!
Gary Marcus has called LLMs a fluent spouter of bullshit.
"Fluent Bullshit" or Bulshytt is a good name for generative AI content, including 'hallucinations'.
Hallucination
dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hallucination:
computing : a plausible but false or misleading response generated by an artificial intelligence algorithm
But hallucination is the modus operandi of generative AI. In a deep sense, all it's outputs are hallucinated.
When I think of powerful computer technology, what comes to mind is linux, the internet, programing languages, git. When these technologies are brought to the user in the right way, they enable what we experience 'the modern world'.
The only thing missing is that AI systems talk to each other, producing bulshyt catered to AI. Then they become tremes (S. Blackmore), replicators that replicate on information processing systems. In the inter-computer reality (Y. Harari 2024), the shared fiction created between computers.
Neal Stephenson has that in Anathem already, too. 'Bogons' or something like that. TODO: find the quote, which had clear memetic connotations iirc.
The warning is that this might break the internet.
Once there is enough garbage, you won't trust anything on the internet anymore. Then, it becomes mere bogus, or total gargabe.
This concept already was called informaton Apocalypse.(Sam Harris with guests).
It is unethical to contribute to bogus. It is one of the great cultural problem of our time to fight the bogus.
Slop
AI slop, commonly referred to simply as slop, is low-quality media—including writing and images—made using generative artificial intelligence technology. Coined in the 2020s, the term has a derogatory connotation akin to "spam".
Commercial Bulshyt: marketing speech. It is bulshyt in the service of selling stuff.
Gen AI Critic on Yotube (selected)
Angela Collier is refreshingly down to earth and non-bullshit.
Thanks to Freya Holmér, you are not alone.
Gary Marcus is an extre
Brainrot
Non-adult people understood the effects of digital media on their brains and have a word - Brainrot.