By this logic you could taste 100 wines per day by looking at highly compressed photos of their labels.
Fuck AI
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
Finally a healthy way of tasting wine! /s
You don't even have to go that far, just read the back cover.
You won't learn anything from mere summaries. But the better way to use AI, is to just get it to reference tons of material, then go do the research yourself.
I used to say this about social media when everyone was going off about Critical Race Theory and saying all these "gotchas" that were addressed in the book: Just read the book. Don't listen to random people to tell you how to think, just read it and form an opinion. If the entire thought process could be summarized in a tweet, then author would've done that. It's a book because you need that much information to understand it.
Not looking good for us all.
Finding sources is part of the research process btw.
pro tip: you can basically visit > 100 cities per day for free by using google street view.
As a poor person in the US, I treat Geoguessr like a virtual street tour around random parts of the world. Actually traveling would be nice, but seeing real life on street view is fascinating in its own way.
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.
Pro tip: you can basically... 100... free of charge... without consent... not committing a single crime... by visiting PornHub... Never mind.
OP missed the point, Packy McCormick is an LLM...
Or is ZDL an LLM?
bruh you cropped out the Tolstoy. it's like leaving in the middle of a knock knock joke.
War and Peace is funny.
Almost a thousand? (idk i read it in high school) pages about how Great Man theory is bunk, the individual doesn’t matter, but we get drawn into the drama of individuals for the entire bulk of the thing.
Ivan Illych is the better of his work.
You can experience what every living thing has experienced by dying. Everything dies. May as well skip the journey and head to the end/summary?
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.
Yes, but you see, now they can "read" the outline, and end up with just enough memory of it to reference the work in a condescendingly authoritative opinion about it.
I'm sort of looking forward to a techbro trying to condescendingly tell me that Crime and Punishment is about a man who goes to prison or The Stranger is about a guy who randomly kills another guy or One Hundred Years of Solitude is about a Mexican family.or Moby Dick is about a whale.
I was trying to look up a quote I thought was from parody CEO Hand Scorpio from the Simpsons, but it's from Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec.
"Metaphors? I hate metaphors! That's why my favorite book is Moby Dick; no froo froo symbolism, just a good simple tale about a man who hates an animal".
Either way, it's a great parody of artistic illiteracy of business bros, even without the A.I summary, they would have said the same shit. Most the time they're reading non-fiction guru-self-help with a bro friendly veneer anyway.
As an entirely different tangent, I'm someone who is qualified in the arts and pretty bad at the sciences, but I'm always amazed how naturally people in the sciences pick up the art. I'm talking mathematicians and electrical engineers. I have no idea if it's that they know how to learn from a background where it's necessary, or if their brains have just developed connections in a transferable place. Maybe it's even just a coincidence and just random correlation I've seen. Either way, I'd worry art was deceptively easy if not for the fact that armchair pseudo-intellectual business bros are absolutely awful at making and understanding it.
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!"
Leave it, Babe. ‘E’s not worth it!
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.
You are the OP, you literally removed someone's tweet from it's original context (or reposted without fact checking) and presented it here with an entirely different, false context. The fact that it's being misinterpreted is 100% on you for presenting it inaccurately, not the guy who's words you misrepresented.
I actually upvoted this before deciding to fact check which took me no more than ten seconds.
Ho ho ho, you fell for my little trap by believing the words I wrote!
2 definitely does happen a lot with conservatives, but I think it's a stretch to suggest it happened here. The evidence @kirk@startrek.website provided seems a little inconclusive to me (I'd really want to see a broader history of satirical comments and/or anti-AI-hype comments prior to this tweet to be the real proof, not an after-the-fact comment which could be taken either way), but on the face of it taking the first tweet seriously is a bit ridiculous. Had they used some self-help book or a piece of genre fiction (even excellent quality genre fiction) it might have become a bit more ambiguous (even then, the idea that someone would sincerely hold out the idea of AI summaries as being equivalent to actually reading a book is a fucking stretch), but using Tolstoy? Someone famous for the quality of his prose? Give me a break. Nobody believes that.
1 is obviously just subjective and meaningless. Personally, had I seen the original tweet without context, I think I would have found it funny as a parody of the AI-hyping techbros. You're welcome to disagree, but only insofar as you disagree that you personally found it funny. You are not welcome to make a generic sweeping statement that "it was not funny".
Read.
The.
Thread.
You claimed to have read the evidence.
Read it.
Closely.
A very large proportion of respondents took it straight. Apparently it was not funny to a lot of people.
So if a large number of people didn't "get" your joke (presuming the joke isn't something deeply technical like half the jokes, say, of XKCD), your joke just sucked. Or it wasn't a joke until people reacted badly. One of the two.
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 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.
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.
This is kind of like me when I don't really want to watch a movie or show but I want to know what is it about so I just watch a summarized commentary on YouTube for a fraction of the time
... only I'm aware I don't really want to watch it in the first place
There's so many movies I get recommended which are just awful. Reading the Wikipedia entry and plot is often all I need to understand if it's worth it or not.
Imdb rating does it for me. Unless it's something I want to watch regardless, I'm unlikely to bother with anything below a 7/10.
I always discover that one or two episodes in. It's always that it's a good idea executed poorly.
The fan wiki is great when you just want more of the idea but to skip the cruddy details.
OK, I'm taking it all back. This really works!
Country | Work & Author | Elevator Pitch |
---|---|---|
Russia | Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) | A married woman’s passionate affair shatters her life and exposes the hypocrisy of high society[5]. |
Nigeria | Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe) | A proud Igbo leader’s world unravels as colonialism and tradition collide. |
France | Les Misérables (Victor Hugo) | An ex-convict’s quest for redemption transforms lives amid revolution and injustice. |
Japan | The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu) | A nobleman’s romantic adventures reveal the beauty and fragility of Heian court life. |
Colombia | One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez) | Generations of a family grapple with love, loss, and magical fate in a mythical town. |
United States | To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) | A young girl confronts racism and injustice in the Deep South through her father’s courage[5]. |
Germany | Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) | A scholar makes a deal with the devil, risking his soul for ultimate knowledge and pleasure. |
India | The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy) | Twins recall a childhood tragedy that forever alters their family in postcolonial Kerala. |
China | Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin) | A noble family’s rise and fall mirrors the fleeting beauty and sorrow of love and fortune. |
Italy | The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri) | A journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise reveals the soul’s path to redemption. |
I am now a great knower of literature from all around the world!
Who knew that 石头记 was so simple in the end?! Why did 曹雪芹 spend so much effort writing such a simple observation!?
The best part is that they don't even need to be real books! Here's one from DeepSeek: "The book 'Lunar Employment for Undergraduates' by Kurt Langer offers practical advice and strategies for finding employment after completing undergraduate studies in Southern Africa."
Ugh seems like a bore to read. AI, please summarize and ELI5 using 2010 memes.
Why eat, when you can just get someone else to lick it and tell you what it tasted like?
No thanks. I'd rather feed a robot and have it vomit into my mouth.
Or you can just read the plot summary on Wikipedia which is going to be vastly more accurate because it was written by humans and not some shitty LLM.
Old Yeller: a book about murdering dogs.
to kill a mockingbird: a book about justice properly administered in the american deep south.
Just ignore what random people write on X. They write all kinds of stupid opinions there.
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.
I can also ask someone else to read a book for me, but I don’t get any enjoyment from that.
Even AIs know this is bullshit.
Summaries and shortcuts can provide surface-level knowledge, but the true benefits of reading—expanded perspective, personal growth, and the joy of discovery—are only realized through immersive, attentive reading. In a world that values "time efficiency" above all else, the richness and depth of art are flattened, and the very qualities that make us human—our capacity for reflection, connection, and wonder—are diminished.
OP, LLMs don't "know" shit. When they say something that conforms to a preexisting bias of yours, that's nothing. That should affect the strength of your argument in no capacity. It's not a knowledge base; it's a transformer model that exists to tell you what you're most likely to want to hear given what's come before.
The part of the anti-AI crowd who denounce rampant, uncritical use of LLMs but who also shit their pants and clap every time an LLM says something against LLMs tells me they don't have even a bare minimum understanding of machine learning or of cognitive biases like confirmation bias.
(Your link results in an internal runtime error btw.)