Today my husband asked me what I thought about using an AI to pick stocks because that's what his friends at work are talking about and he wanted to know "what the computer people are saying on your hacker network" (that is what he calls Mastodon)
I showed him all the talk about the bubble.
"OMG they all HATE it."
"I'm certain the stock picks would sound reasonable and look nice, but maybe some of the tickers might not exist."
The bubble has opened my eyes to a couple of things.
1. Most people do not want to have to research evidence or understand bias. To me, these are absolutely essential steps in any understanding or decision. To "them" (overgeneralising and simplifying wildly), it's too much like school. Even golden-period web search was more intimidating to them than verbose AI-digested listicles. The latter win out because they use language patterns they trust.
2. I thought the mansplaining-as-a-service description of LLM chatbots was a pretty accurate and devastating reason to avoid them. Many people seem all too happy to be mansplained at. They are in fact pretty comfortable in a patriarchal authority structure with speakers that seem confident and pattern stereotypical leader behaviours. (See also why we are all in such a mess with politicians.)
@dhobern I love the phrase "mansplaining-as-a-service"!!
And wow. That's a revelation to me too, but I suppose it explains a lot of things 😳
myrmepropagandist
Donald Hobern
Hippo 🍉