Pretty sure all these #AI guys have utterly misconstrued what art is. They think it's just information/data, but it's not: it's a process; it's a manifestation of interwoven conscious & unconscious thoughts that have ripened in a human mind, sometimes for decades. And the result is an interaction with another human mind, a dialogue. 1/2

These AI guys have mistaken a photo of a meal in a restaurant menu for the meal itself. They tell themselves it looks just like the real thing, so it must be the real thing, but in the end they'll starve to death. No protein, no carbs, no vitamins, no nutrients, nothing. 2/3

Imagine there's a once-in-a-lifetime walk that takes you through the greatest, most dramatic scenery in the world. You leave from Point A and walk your way back around to Point A.
The ChatGPT guy above might as well say: "Pro tip: You can go on that great walk by never leaving Point A" 3/3

@Richard_Littler yup. Those people have been around forever. This technology is just absolutely perfect for them. It’s all just for appearances for those people. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know the detail, as long as they can appear to have read it and appear to be intelligent, that’s it. Grifters and blaggers. The kind of people for whom their single best day of performance at a company will be the day you interview them, and for the rest of their time there they’ll produce nothing of substance.

Brilliant at pretending to be productive. In an odd way, kinda like generative AI…

@ret @Richard_Littler Exactly this! We've all had conversations with someone only to find out very quickly they misrepresented the depth of their knowledge/understanding. Those conversations are a waste of everyone's time.

@Richard_Littler It’s so bizzarre. You can read book summaries on Wikipedia if you want. Nobody does that though. Because, like doing the same thing but with ChatGPT, it makes no sense, you won’t learn anything by doing that.

@ninpnin @Richard_Littler

Well, I wouldn't say 'nobody'. I've lost hours of my life following a rabbit hole of storyline summaries of DC / Marvel comics so I understand the references to them in films / TV shows.

@Richard_Littler You can skip hundreds of LLM prompts by reading a single book.

Tweet by PackyM: "pro tip: You can basically read >100 books per day by asking chatgpt to summarize them for you"

What a moron. Does this bonehead really think that reading a summary (IA or not) is the same as reading a book?

@Richard_Littler “I took a course in speed reading, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and was able to go through ‘War and Peace’ in 20 minutes. It’s about Russia.”

@Richard_Littler This is a great way to put it.

"read 100 books by asking chatgpt to summarize it" feels exactly like "eat 100 high end dinners by asking chat gpt to generate pictures of upscale meals" or "travel to 100 dream destinations by asking chatgpt to generate travel pictures for you"

Is it what you want? To stop enjoying the journey?

@Richard_Littler I was having a convo with @fabio about how people have been trained to not find joy in the journey of doing things, and for those people, ChatGPT is the answer. They only seek a quick result for (stuff)

@Richard_Littler @fabio It's a very empty existence. They have no joy in studying, researching, writing, making art, making music, reading - all of those things that once were a source of joy are now considered a chore and waste of time, to be replaced by a shitty robot. "Saves time", they say. Do I want that, though? I was not *wasting* time writing - I was having fun.

Can we try enjoying ourselves again?

@Richard_Littler Even if they were just trying to absorb info, they can't do it like that. Having info summarized for you means you don't absorb it. That's why we spend so much time explaining, solving problems, taking notes...

They think they're inventing "general intelligence" when they don't understand how their own brain works even on a surface, basic level.

@Richard_Littler
And just wait until you see how I hired six people to go to the gym for me for three hours each, four times a week.

I'm spending 72 hours a week at the gym without even leaving my couch, and you're not going to believe the results!

@Richard_Littler

Back in Pogo -

"I found a picture of a chicken."

"Great, if we can just find a picture of some salt."

.... It was a hit before your mother was born, though she was born a long long time ago ...

@david_chisnall @ninpnin @Richard_Littler probably saved many hours net of actually watching many of the movies and shows though. Marginal success!

@Richard_Littler This feels like it echoes the arguments against Reader's Digest back-in-the-day.

@mark @Richard_Littler Even Readers' Digest left you solve colour and texture to enjoy.

@Richard_Littler my problem with it is these fucks are replacing all of our meals—and those of our kids—with pictures of meals, striving to get to a working model which makes a 3D print out of glue and cornstarch, hoping we don’t notice.

@Richard_Littler

AI advocates are uninterested in conversations *with* people.

They only want conversations *at* people.

The difference between dialogs & monologs:

Dialog is engaging. A monolog is boring.

David Bohm, the eminent quantum physicist and author of On Dialogue, writes, “In a dialogue … nobody is trying to win … There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail.”
https://sarahrozenthuler.com/how-to-move-from-monologue-to-dialogue/

@Richard_Littler

AI has a massive degree of fossil fuel investment.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-06/saudis-plan-100-billion-ai-powerhouse-to-rival-uae-s-tech-hub

https://jacobin.com/2025/02/trump-ai-saudi-investments-oversight

AI is not for enhancing the human experience, but for keeping petrostate despots rich & in control.

https://www.desmog.com/2025/04/22/ai-energy-demand-can-keep-fossil-fuels-alive-tech-backers-promise-worlds-two-biggest-oil-producers/

AI data centers are an effort to stop an urgently needed fossil fuel phase out.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

No one wants this product.

@Richard_Littler the map is not the territory.

@Richard_Littler how many advertisements would you have to endure to cover the energy for that.

@Richard_Littler makes me wonder if there is some neat coding that someone developed in order to not have to redo the chatgpt algorithm for every person asking the same question. Could save some serious energy.

@buherator 🤣

@Richard_Littler You keep using this word “read”. I do not think it means what you think it means.

My name is Iñigo Montoya. You killed my father. I have summarised killing you in 3 bullet points.

@Richard_Littler they’re like some strange modern sisyphus, each day they try and whisper the words of endless riches. Only by end of their daily token quota they are right back where they started.

@Richard_Littler I think this is what hurts me most about the whole thing. Like, an AI salesperson downplaying the value of art? Pretty clear incentives.

But the people who aren't selling AI? It's like, "there's nothing new under the sun" but instead of saying it to keep yourself humble or accept something imperfect, it's a complete cynical worldview.

The idea that all we're doing anyway is reconfiguring existing shapes and ideas—it's so bleak, and it breaks my heart.

@buherator @Richard_Littler 🤣 this is gold

@Richard_Littler What's the old saying?

The journey is the reward.

The journey is the the fucking reward!

Why study something, learn about it, maybe learn about yourself and the world around you when you can just cheat and have someone else provide the answers?