A reminder that "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" isn't the shortest horror story ever written, it's actually "Specifies a tri-state Boolean value" written by the esteemed author Microsoft .NET Documentation.

Context: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.office.core.msotristate

Note that there are actually 5 values, not three. Also True is -1, and the value that equals 1 isn't supported.

MsoTriState Enum (Microsoft.Office.Core)

Specifies a tri-state Boolean value.

@mdiluz My gateway into AI was using Claude to try to figure out MS's XML configuration files for their now deprecated Azure B2C identity provider. Their documentation is really bad.

https://claude.ai/share/97c73874-6981-4ebc-b473-19f5bdddd1bd

MsoTriState enum in Microsoft.Office.Core

Shared via Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic

@astrashe @mdiluz i wonder if historians ever say things like "there isn't enough documentation of ancient mesopotamian property law, so i had AI make some up for me"
AI-driven enhancement of historical documents - International Journal on Digital Libraries

Historical documents from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages often suffer from degraded image quality due to aging, inadequate preservation, and environmental factors, presenting significant challenges for paleographical analysis. These documents contain crucial graphical symbols representing administrative, economic, and cultural information, which are time-consuming and error-prone to interpret manually. This research investigates image processing algorithms and deep learning models for enhancing these historical documents. Using image processing techniques, we improve symbol readability and visibility, while our deep learning approach aids in reconstructing degraded content and identifying patterns. This work contributes to improving the quality of historical document analysis, particularly for graphical symbol interpretation in paleographical studies.

SpringerLink

@cmsdengl @ratsnakegames

Oh, gods… 😵

@yenndc @cmsdengl AI-based image upscaling/denoising etc is not the same thing as just generating text/images wholesale, though

@ratsnakegames

True, but it's not a long way from using generative AI to do the upscaling — and from there we've kind of let the vampire into the house…

… With due apologies to vampires.

Personally, I sure hope it won't go there, but my expectations aren't high.

@yenndc
@ratsnakegames
As long as its non-destructive, historians in the future will be able to go, "Dipshits in the early 21st century got this completely wrong thanks to trusting bad tools."

@ratsnakegames @yenndc

It's the same slippery slope. Images today, words tomorrow

@cmsdengl @yenndc the distinction here is not "images/words", it's "extraction of information/generation of 'information'".

I still definitely have concerns about taking the output of upscalers etc at face value, but slippery slopes are a fallacy.