Mastodawn

Cory Doctorow Mar 2

Everyone knows (or should that as fascinating as your dreams are to *you*, they're eye-glazingly dull to others. Perhaps you have a friend who will tolerate you recounting dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever *presume* that other people want to hear about your dreams.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#robowanking

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Cory Doctorow Mar 2

The same is true of your conversations with chatbots. Even if you find these conversations interesting, you should never assume that anyone else will be entertained by them. In the absence of an explicit reassurance to the contrary, you should presume that recounting your AI chatbot sessions to your friends is an imposition on the friendship, and forwarding the transcripts of those sessions doubly so (perhaps triply so, given the verbosity of chatbot responses).

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Cory Doctorow Mar 2

I will stipulate that there might be friend groups out there where pastebombs of AI chat transcripts are welcome, but even if you work in such a milieu, you should *never, ever* assume that a stranger wants to see or hear about your AI "conversations." Tagging a chatbot into a social media conversation with a stranger and typing, "Hey Grok‡, what do you think of that?" is like masturbating in front of a stranger.

‡ Ugh

It's rude. It's an imposition. It's gross.

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Cory Doctorow Mar 2

There's an even *worse* circle of hell than the one you create when you nonconsensually add a chatbot to a dialog: the hell that comes from reading something a stranger wrote, and then asking a chatbot to generate "commentary" on it and emailing it to that stranger.

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Even the AI companies pitching their products claim that they need human oversight because they are prone to errors (including the errors that the companies dress up by calling them "hallucinations"). If you've read something you disagree with but don't understand well enough to rebut, and you ask an AI to generate a rebuttal for you, *you still don't understand it well enough to rebut it*.

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Cory Doctorow Mar 2

You haven't generated a rebuttal: you have generated a blob of plausible sentences that may or may not constitute a valid critique of the work you're upset with - but until a human being *who understands the issue* goes through the AI output line by line and verifies it, it's just stochastic word-salad.

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Cory Doctorow Mar 2

Once again: the act of prompting a sentence generator to create a rebuttal-shaped series of sentences *does not impart understanding to the prompter.* In the dialog between someone who's written something and someone who disagrees with it, but doesn't understand it well enough to rebut it, *the only person* qualified to evaluate the chatbot's output is the original author - that is, the stranger you've just emailed a chat transcript to.

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Cory Doctorow Mar 2

Emailing a stranger a blob of unverified AI output is not a form of dialogue - it's an attempt to coerce a stranger into unpaid labor on your behalf. Strangers are not your "human in the loop" whose expensive time is on offer to painstakingly work through the plausible sentences a chatbot made for you for free.

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Cory Doctorow Mar 2

Remember: even the AI companies will tell you that the work of overseeing an AI's output is valuable labor. The fact that you can costlessly (to you) generate infinite volumes of verbose, plausible-seeming topical sentences in no way implies that the people who actually think about things and then write them down have the time to mark your chatbot's homework.

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Cory Doctorow Mar 2

That is a fatal flaw in the idea that we will increase our productivity by asking chatbots to summarize things we don't understand: by definition, if we don't understand a subject, then we won't be qualified to evaluate the summary, either.

There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws.

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Cory Doctorow Mar 2

That's not to say that we shouldn't aspire to participate in discourse about areas that seem interesting or momentous - but asking a chatbot to contribute on your behalf does not impart insight to you, and it is a gross imposition on people who *have* taken the time to understand and participate using their own minds and experience.

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Cory Doctorow Mar 2

Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

eof/

File:HAL9000.svg - Wikimedia Commons

Rob McKenna Mar 2

@pluralistic education and art are processes, not merely products. You get educated by engaging in the process not by having outputs to be measured (which you can buy or have a chatbot make).

If you read the solutions at the end of a maths book and copy them into an answer sheet you haven't learned anything.

@pluralistic Well said.

Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary Mar 2

@pluralistic
...This leaves me curious as to whether someone did this to you. >_>;

Cory Doctorow Mar 2

@pteryx Daily.

Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary Mar 2

@pluralistic
Oh geez. Awful that you have to not only go through that, but so *much* of that.

Plantwizard Mar 2

@pluralistic @pteryx I'm just dumbfounded people have the nerve to do this to you. Just gobsmacked.

Jürgen Hubert Mar 2

It's the latest iteration of "Watch this two-hour video, which will counter all your arguments!"

Flooding the zone with time-wasting bullshit, rather than actual engagement with the discussion.

Cory Doctorow Mar 2

@juergen_hubert This is exactly right.

Nicole Parsons Mar 3

@pluralistic @juergen_hubert

Chatbots & AI are information pollution, funded by the same people polluting the commons; air, land, and water.

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-energy-industry-ai-fossil-fuels-pittsburgh-summit/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/03/just-an-unbelievable-amount-of-pollution-how-big-a-threat-is-ai-to-the-climate

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2026-02-17/ai-powered-campaign-may-have-killed-key-vote-on-air-quality

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/15/trump-ai-oil-energy-summit

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rscottraynovich/2025/12/04/amazon-turned-on-the-ai-firehose-can-it-win-back-investors/

https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/ai-turns-the-firehose-into-a-funnel/

https://michiganadvance.com/2024/10/25/firehose-of-election-conspiracy-theories-floods-final-days-of-the-campaign/

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/21/ais-growing-thirst-for-water-is-becoming-a-public-health-risk

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/04/pfas-pollution-data-centers-ai

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/data-center-water-pollution-amazon-oregon-1235466613/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/contaminated-the-carpet-industrys-toxic-legacy/

https://apnews.com/article/pfas-wells-contamination-forever-chemicals-water-b132294aca85d569926dbf47c0d02355

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260226042449.htm

Trump and the Energy Industry Are Eager to Power AI With Fossil Fuels

At a Pittsburgh summit, the Trump administration, energy executives, and tech barons joined as one to promote AI as the future of fossil fuels.

WIRED