This makes me want to scream and pull out my hair.

"Reduce your vocabulary by 10-20% to prove you're a human."

Generative AI is making our language and communication poorer. It does this not just by outputting its own garbage but also because now we have AI making arbitrary determinations of what words and phrases we *humans* are or aren't allowed to use.

Tell you what: "devoid" was definitely a word I knew and used in elementary school.

Am I normal? Nah, not really.
Am I human? I'm pretty damn sure I am, yeah.

Imagine coming up with a machine that effectively gets to decide how humans are "supposed to" write and speak.

@artemis Duck that!

@artemis Isn't that the public school system?

@artemis

Reduction to a mean pollutes the source for everyone. The idiocracification of humanity continues apace.

@artemis This is the opposite of the curb cut effect. They're harming everyone by repressing autistic people.

@artemis so the AI checkers are devoid of value, got it

@artemis Shit like this is why I refuse to let my CV get eaten up by "#AI" from recruiting companies!

#NameThemBlameThem

@mckra1g @artemis Damn, those are some fancy words. You must be at least 50% AI.

@artemis I definitely recommend screaming. The hair pulling bit isn't the best experience.

@Natanox @mckra1g @artemis you can tell it's human because of the neologism. AI aren't able to create new words ATM.

@jbowen @artemis they're going to fall on their own anyway

@artemis

Seriously, I... I read the dictionary for _fun_ as a kid. I know that's not normal but I don't need robots bullying me for it.

Also, using a bot to determine if a bot wrote something is definitely a second layer of stupid.

"Well, the machine said it was written by a machine. Who else would know so well what a machine wrote than a machine? Hmm?"

The most reasonable response I can come up with to any of this is to burn it down. Just... Burn it down.

@401matthall @artemis I feel you on this one. I used to read the essays in the physical hard-bound copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica we had in the house.

@401matthall @artemis

Yes, “Hunger Games for robots” is stupid AF: https://www.superversive.co/blog/hunger-games-for-robots

@paninid

Some variation of this is my prediction for the planet. No humans left, or at least not ones that can understand any of the machinery that continues to beep and boop, just machines chattering back and forth at each other without context.

@artemis

@paninid

Incoming messages from your hairstylists automated scheduling system that communicates with your automated response system that checks with your automated scheduling system if you're available for an appointment on February 31st (because dates are hard) that checks if your heart rate monitoring system has reported a heartbeat in the last three days.

...

Burn it all down. It'd be better for everyone.

@artemis

@401matthall @paninid @artemis

> Incoming messages from your hairstylists automated scheduling system...

didn't Google demo this a while ago where their Siri equivalent was able to schedule appointments for you by calling and talking to them on your behalf? I don't know if it ever went public but it was definitely interesting

@401matthall

I would like to propose “a human who's not an idiot (present company definitely not excluded)” as an alternative answer.

@artemis

@401matthall @paninid @artemis It would be better off for everyone *except* a small group of obscenely rich people.

(and weird misanthropic cultists.)

@artemis It’s worst in the form of AI but I also hate it in the form of increasingly opinionated “grammar and style” checkers built into every email and doc editing software now. If I couch a phrase in any but the most blunt terms I get little squiggles telling me that I’m communicating wrong.

Computers should not be telling humans how they’re allowed to use language. Humans should not be building programs which crush out variance and expressivity in language.

@jnkrtech @artemis @NewtonMark it’ll whinge at you when you say something in 3 words that it thinks you could say in 2, but then AI-generated paragraphs are chock full of waffle, unnecessary repetition and flowery nonsense.

@jnkrtech @artemis @timrichards
Spare a thought for people who use languages other than US-English.
Even you specifically EN-AU or EN-GB or EN-ZA or EN-NZ, you still get chagrined for daring to spell it “Colour”.

@jnkrtech @artemis it’s just automated allistic (white supremacist, euro-centric etc) hierarchies

@jnkrtech @artemis a computer cannot be held responsible, therefore a computer must never make a stylistic decision

@jnkrtech @artemis Oh how I agree! Let us make mistakes, for that is what makes us human!

@jnkrtech
Linking grammar and spelling checkers was a miserable decision to have made.
@artemis

@artemis I think the LLM part is only the symptom of general degradation of human writing skills: people find LLM's useful because they are struggling with writing in the first place and "AI checkers" are tuned based on the inputs of these very people.