Mastodawn

I think i may need a break from mastodon.

it is not an exaggeration to say that the majority of my feed is now just various anti-AI posts.

the people pushing AI aren't here. they are not on your Mastodon instance. When you post about how terrible and ignorant and stupid they are they do not see it, and it's not like that sort of thing persuades anyone even if they did.

I want to keep up with the cool stuff you are all making and doing. But I realize I am not entitled to just pick and choose from the things you find important enough to share, so I am not sure what else to do when I find that reading my feed no longer improves my mental health.

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William D. Jones Mar 13

@gloriouscow Yea, maybe I should cool it. Anti AI posts get me acknowledgment and dopamine hit.

I want to gush more about Horse Girl Game, but no one else seems to want to play it. My other projects are stalled while I do CI maintenance (and I'm procrastinating on that too).

Tbh, I'm not doing too well, and I don't think a lot of my peers are either. And my living situation is _good_.

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gloriouscow Mar 13

@cr1901

The one thing that probably has the most influence on our beliefs about people are our personal relationships with people different from us, and realizing that they are still people at the end of the day. I don't know why it seems to be a particular quirk of the human soul that we often need a personal example before we can feel empathy, but that seems to just be how it is.

I know people that use Claude or other tools, and that is costing me a lot of mental energy and quite a bit of cognitive dissonance. I know some of these these people are talented, passionate, intelligent people who got into coding for the same reasons we all did. We can believe they are ethically challenged, perhaps. but we are all flawed, messy creatures who make daily ethical compromises in some way.

I'm really honestly surprised that more people here don't personally know anyone that they hold in any regard whatsoever that use an LLM because it seems like I'm the only one struggling with trying to understand why people I know and respect can look at the ethical costs and shrug. (meanwhile vegans are like "lol, first time?")

I know what I'm seeing is the result of a lot of frustration and hopelessness. I don't personally know what to do about it, either. But I'm just worried that we never will as long as we abandon nuance in favor of a perpetual fediverse circlejerk.

I've pretty much disowned my family for their beliefs. I am not ready to give up a good chunk of my friends as well. I can't. I can't just sit here angry at the world, utterly alone.

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Fionnáin

@gloriouscow @cr1901 I hear you, and thanks for posting this. I am also jaded from this.

I know people who use these tools, and am finding the flattened argument against them hard to sit with. In particular, two friends who are severely dyslexic have found some solace in chatGPT as an aide. They are aware of the problems, but are also aware of their systematic exclusion based on ability. This is not as black and white as people tend to make it on here.