Mastodawn

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.

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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Drífa the Snynx

@pluralistic … and I am seeing it more and more in professional circles. “I’m starting a conversation!”, I’ve been told. No, you’re imposing on me, an actual expert on certain topics, the obligation of correcting the word salad you had generated and then vomited into the world. You’re then adding the puss-filled cherry to this shit sundae by suggesting that you deserve credit, rather than opprobrium, for this selfish act.