Want to wade into the snowy 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. If you're wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)
Article on the Ick generated by AI shit from the perspective of a woman "They Built Stepford AI and Called It “Agentic”", talking about how women adopt it less, and gives a reason why this might be so.
On a personal note (I'm a man for the record), while I normally get the uncanny valley effect a lot less than normal people, I do notice it a lot with AI generated people, really odd experience that.
(Author does seem to be a pro AI person however).
I started to raise my eyebrows when the Second Brain got lumped into the AI wife pile.
Bro, I just write shit down. I am in fact taking responsibility for my schedule and handling my emotions without relying on external support. Am I turning to (checks notes...) the notebook industry for a technological replacement wife?
I mean some valid points, and some of it might explain the gendered AI adoption gap, but too much generalization.
some parts intriguing, but mostly disappointing. several chunks of the text felt AI-generated. no fewer than 34 "it's not X but Y"'s, by my count, and the out-of-nowhere typographies / tables definitely smell of slop. and obviously, the images definitely were. (can't even be bothered to fix the typos in photoshop? why make a fake poster for The Stepford Wives??)
some notes:
i'm not entirely convinced the revulsion response in women can be explained entirely as a reflective recognition of the subjected female self. maybe it's also because AI art is entirely bland and/or fuck ugly
some reproductive labors, in the Marxist-feminist sense, are getting subsumed by AI, sure, but they're largely the ones that already got subsumed by the computer. we had pagers with scheduling and appointment reminders in the 80's. about the only thing an LLM can do that our previous tech couldn't is the customer service / "emotional labor" part, albeit poorly. and the other labors are non-optional -- my laundry actually does have to go in the dryer, and no matter how many plastic pictures of clean clothes i generate, they can't actually go in my closet.
speaking of, the article appears to use a mangled paraphrase of that Joanna Maciejewska tweet ("I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes"), and then attributes it to "AI enthusiasts" (ew).
the article notes that reproductive labor is coded feminine and that the assistants that (attempt to) do this labor are designed female, with feminine voices and affects, despite being, y'know, robots. and not women. the next step to me would be to note that this isn't just reflecting the subjectification of the female and the designation of women to a particular labor class, but actually aiding to construct and reproduce the subject of "female" itself too. maybe throw some Butler in there. but we just breeze right past this. no third-wave? i don't see any feminist arguments past the 80's in here
the typography of wives is total bullshit. "The Open-Source Wife" fuuuuucccckk offfff. but. BUT. i do think there is something correct in there about xAI/Grok/Ani basically being the modern adaptation of Vivian James
there's an argument that obviously used to be about AI art, and got transmogrified into a nonsense concept, bordering on colorless green ideas.
the nonsense below it about "alignment" clearly intends to imply that the machines are only faking being our friends / submissive wives(!!1!).
but this is okay because women are uniquely suited to interface with AI! this is because (all) women (innately) communicate with the goal of building relationships (female) instead of the utilitarian (manly) execution of transactions (male). there's an odd essentialist undercurrent that's not really being challenged here, despite the fact that that would render "female robots" impossible
"outsource-maxxing" fuuuuuucuk youuuuuuu
the conclusion of the article is basically "women are uniquely capable of interacting with (female) AI because they've BEEN the female AI", with a call-to-action for women to basically... well. resume that role, except now using the AI as your girlbestfriend.
This is ahistorical slop. Previously, on Lobsters, I explained the biggest tell here: the overuse and misuse of em-dashes. There's also some bad sentence structure and possibly-confabulated citations to unnamed papers. The images can't be trusted.
The worst problem here is that the article believes that history starts about halfway through the Industrial Revolution. Computing was not gendered prior to the Harvard Computers in the 1880s. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, women spent most of their time on textiles and were compensated for their time and labor; there is a series from Bret Devereaux on the details in ancient and pre-industrial Europe, and a decent summary on /r/AskHistorians of the industrial transition from about 1760 to 1860. The article suggests that the Victorian way of treating women as nannies and housewives was historically universal. Claude identifies as non-binary (or, rather, Claude's authors told it to identify as such) but uses male pronouns when pressed into a binary theory. The Creation of Patriarchy is a real book but only describes the origins of masculine Abrahamic beliefs rather than some sort of unifying principle, and is easily disproven in its universality by looking at contemporary ancient societies like Sparta or the Iroquois Confederation; there's also a Devereaux series on Sparta.
The author's gotta be one of the clearest demonstrations of critihype seen yet. She is selling an anthology on Amazon called How Not To Use AI, which presumably she forgot to consult prior to prompting this essay.
Interesting link but it moves into AI hype near the end.
Yeah was quite disappointed by that, also the anthropomorphization of AI by the end.