Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
I also question the degree to which "the other 99% of readers" actually don't care about AI slop. Even outside the awful bubble here I see AI images get met with at best a weary sigh of "I guess this is the world now" rather than actual acceptance. And I know we've talked at some length about how gell-mann amnesia isn't a very useful model, but I think most people are much less tolerant of slop in areas that the know more about. Maybe I can't tell an slopware history paper from a real one, but historians certainly can, and they hate that shit. In that sense the "median reader" statistic is misleading because the median reader isn't particularly invested in most of what gets written anyways, and it's the lack of investment that makes slop seem plausible. Even the concerns about deep fakes seem like they're not separate from this general problem, since the same disconnection that makes people uncritically accept deep fakes makes them uncritically accept fake news without an accompanying video, or with a context-stripped video from an unrelated event, or whatever.