Great essay, made a few things click into place for me. I've been hearing people complain about the tech industry's abandonment of quality for decades, but never quite mentally connected that to the funding model.

Another thought: a lot of the other phenomena discussed here seem to be happening in virtually every industry, as far as I can tell.

Thanks for sharing!

All of the flags that are just stripes. It's too easy to get them mixed up with similar-looking striped flags, especially if there are others with the same colors. Obviously people from that country will know which flag they're looking at, but people from other countries can easily get confused. It kind of detracts from the power of the flag if other people don't know what it represents or have to search it up every time they see it.

Flags should be immediately distinctive and memorable, IMO. Like, I love how Canada's flag has a Maple leaf. No one else has a maple leaf, so people can remember that one.

This is not quite an answer to your question, but: Wherever you're starting, it's really important to check whether the person behind the information source is qualified to speak authoritatively on the topic and whether they have financial incentives to promote something they're saying.

Ask questions like: Is there a specific human or HIGHLY respected organization (not a random business) putting their name behind the information? Is that human actually qualified in the field/subject they're talking about? ("They wrote a book on it" or "They have a PhD in an unspecified field" isn't good enough on its own.) Are they recommending a product or service that they sell? Those filters aren't enough on their own, but they will help you avoid a lot of nonsense.

You probably already knew this stuff, but I need to continually remind myself to check these things, and maybe this reminder will help you too.

That looks far better than the mainstream AI tools, but I don't think respecting opt-outs is quite enough. It would be so much better if it were built from solely opt-in training data. As far as I can tell, it's not attempting to tackle the hallucinations or environmental impact issues. Still, it would be a major change for the better if ChatGPT users switched to something like that.

You hit the nail on the head. They produce output that mimics the appearance of a thoughtful response, but isn't that at all. LLMs do not actually think and do not have any concept of truth.

This is probably why things like ClickUp naming their AI tool "Brain" annoys me so much. It's designed partially as a way for organizations to get aggregated access to the major LLMs. So yeah, my former coworkers are getting LLM output from "Clickup Brain." What a marketing scam.

I've been wondering how people's attitudes toward LLMs would shift if society collectively changed the language we used about them to be more accurate. Maybe there wouldn't be so many people claiming "AI is great for research" and whatnot. Even then, though, I doubt people would fully get past the human tendency to trust confident-sounding language.

Yes, Google's AI features are horrifying for so many reasons!

I can't fathom all of the hallucinated information spread by Google alone, often to people who weren't even trying to use AI but got an AI overview at the top of their results anyway. Google AI mode is just creating more BS that most people will never notice because they won't check the original source of the information.

Dang, I wish AI were just things like bird identification tools! That would be a much more wholesome world.

I might actually use and contribute to BirdNET. It looks like it helps with global biodiversity monitoring, which is awesome.

Thank you so much for this! If I get into video editing at some point, I'll totally use CorridorKey for green screen stuff. It actually does check all of my boxes and more. It's a very narrow/specific tool, and it's not something anyone could use to persuade a ChatGPT user to quit, but this gives me hope that other ethical AI tools are possible.

Oh, of course. Can't believe I didn't get that one right away. Thanks!

Hi, sorry for the late comment (just got on Lemmy!), but what's happening in November?

Dang, maybe it's time for me to consider re-converting to Catholicism

One thing that helps me is thinking of the smallest possible first step, then committing to doing that thing alone. For instance, if I'm having trouble getting myself to write something, I might tell myself to just make a few bullet points of things that need to be included or write a single unedited paragraph. If I'm having trouble studying something I want to study, I might tell myself to make/go through one flashcard. Usually I end up writing more than a few bullet points/that one paragraph and doing far more than one flashcard.