BF2S Forums BF3s Book Club

"How to be a sociopath"

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

starting to see slop, slop-informed, or at least slop-coded stuff crop up more frequently in ebooks. it's probably not too early to mourn the loss of unpolluted content. again, of course, can't even escape the stuff when i shut everything down and go out. like imagine a giant dogshit meteor impacting the same location that wiped out the dinosaurs. that's ai today.

privately, i cheer when i hear about ai doing something like erasing an entire company's database.



hopefully, various slop-free curation sees spikes in users and interest.

the only thing holding back the slop-apocalypse in publishing is that the AI models are too expensive for the threadbare publishing industry.

and you can thank bolshy artists and idealistic young editors for pushing back on all the flagrant copyright theft and unethical conduct by the major AI companies.

for now, AI is officially disallowed in the writing of academic research. as well it might. but the c-suite and project managers angling for their next annual bonus would love nothing more than to insert AI into every fucking step of the publication process.

We need something new to delineate it, like italic but not italic.

Come to think of it, wasn't everything italic before it went square? We need a new square text.

Not long before there's so much slop its impossible to know what is and what isn't

"It was the worst of times, and it was the worst of times" yeah that sounds like the original, pretty sure.

uziq wrote:

so long as there's a discriminating book-reading public who don't want to sift through solar masses of auto-generated, meaningless, solipsistic, invent-an-adventure-story-just-for-you slop.

But what about the rest of us? Wilbur Smith is dead now, we need AI.

bad news is that now Claude can do CAD as well as aspects of visual design. will the same dynamic hold in your industry? who is going to pay for bespoke hand-CAD'ed widgets?

Did you know that most engineers don't actually do CAD?
Engineering is still mostly going OK.
https://www.australiawide.com.au/blog/e … april-2026

And there are many areas of engineering which are quite nebulous, such as walking onto a production line and getting the people and things running, and walking onto a job site and not having a spanner dropped on you.

trump fired the entire national science board. meanwhile ai techbros are beating their chests about the magic of their technology. it makes me feel physically ill.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

it makes me feel physically ill.

Try uploading your symptoms to Grok.

Big difference between creating an exploded view of something which has been engineered than actually engineering something.
Literally a 30s task for a CAD jockey.

Creative writing graduates are not going to be replacing engineers, pretty sure.

Yeah I'm sure it will get there in the end, "design an aeroplane like Concorde only faster and more efficient" "write a book better then Dickens"
But we know its not perfect or even desirable.

Language models and tools to precis prose are one thing, I know people who write them manually.
Teaching AI to read and write engineering drawings and create complex products is a big next step.

Still not tempted by the $50/hr linkedin ads to teach AI to be an engineer.

uziq wrote:

yeah, nobody is saying it's that good. but i doubt 70% of your daily tasks at work are 'design the concorde' level difficult.

the thing is, i'm a big AI skeptic, but i think people who are stuck on this 'language tools to precis prose' thing are relying on a caricature that's 5 years out of date. LLMs can do maths. they can propose novel solutions. they can engineer novel viruses from scratch. that complexity is much nearer to engineering than boiling down a PDF into a summary.

I have been saying that these tools are more powerful than people gave them credit for years back.

The other things around AI like cost, energy, privacy, etc. are all real concerns. But the tools are very useful and it has greatly helped me in a few different fields.

For example...planning real life events like a political fundraiser. It can help you plan and execute these things a lot easier than it was in the past. The LLMs don't just give you checklist of what to do. They can prep you for the event and warn you of potential issues way before you start putting the plan into motion.

It actually makes soft skills like being able to talk to a crowd or listen intently to a stakeholder a lot more valuable than it was before.

But I do believe the AI industry needs a crash. AI in your toaster needs to go. AI integrated into office software needs to be encouraged.

i've acknowledged its capabilities but held to the line that it's wholly undesirable to have people paying $200,000 for college educations that they crib 99% from an LLM's 'research' mode. it's bad when book reviewers for the NYT rely on chat-GPT to summarise and draft a book review. it's bad when computer programmers stop bothering learning how to code and put out apps full of glaring security flaws and privacy holes because they relied on AI at their job interview and vibe-code most of their releases. etc etc.

it also has a unique ability to one-shot a certain personality type (i won't say type of 'intellectual'). tech-bros and striver-minded folks genuinely seem to believe that AI is somehow incarnated with a soul. garry tan from YC was posting on twitter recently that he got an LLM to read and summarise his notebooks from his time as a stanford undergrad. surprise surprise, the app told him that he was undeniably brilliant, solved marx, bested adorno and horkheimer, and made a leading contribution to philosophy ... in his age 19 lecture notes. the sycophancy and cognitive bias posed by this technology are immense. i don't want egotistical leaders relying on an AI bot for their already flawed and problematic decision-making processes. i don't want couples consulting the openAI oracle for relationship advice. this shit is a lethal quagmire for stupid people.

Last edited by uziq (2026-05-01 14:15:06)

i'm more concerned about the neuroses of extremely powerful tech oligarchs.