Reformed Content Marketeri don't know what i'm doing on here. shouting at the world, i guess? giving the middle finger to chatgpt and llms in general, as if ai companies (or companies in general) cared about my thoughts as anything other than as an exploitable resource for training their hallucination machines?
i am the old man waving his fist at the sky, if the old man wasn't actually an old man and the sky wasn't actually in the physical world. it's now been years since the first time my ex-employer forced me to use an llm against my better judgment, and i am still filled with rage about this technology and the people who made it.
who cares if we ruin people's information sources with ai hallucinations as long as we can make money? who cares how the tech was built or how it works now? most of the world doesn't seem to worry much about the things i think are ruining us, or at least none of the people in charge do. it seems like greed always wins out over every other consideration.
maybe the mastodon community cares, though. some of the trending posts give me hope that this community is relatively sane, and some people here are saying what they really think. it feels like i've stumbled onto a corner of the internet that wants to resist some/all of the horrors of llms, wants to build tech in a more humane way, wants to advocate for a better world. mastodon is small next to the big social media platforms, but it's real, and there seems to be a thriving community here.
my account notifications tell me i somehow gained a follower already. (hi, follower! i don't know if you followed me by mistake, but anyway, wishing you well.) i don't know if significant numbers of people are ever going to see my posts here, especially since there's no big marketing community on mastodon and i'm not planning to connect with people i know irl.
but i don't know if reaching significant numbers of people is my goal anyway. odd thing for someone who's spent years working in marketing to say, i know. but i am a human first and foremost.
does posting on social media anonymously mean you unconsciously want to be seen? or does it mean you really don't? i don't know. i'm not sure i care if my posts mostly go unnoticed. i do know that i want to see communities that share my values, or at least to know that they exist. i know that i feel a sense of release expressing what i really think here, a bit more than what i get when i journal about things. some part of me wants my thoughts out in the world, apparently.
i know that it's a relief when i find out that someone else thinks the things i think about llms. i know it's really nice to read words by other real people talking about things i think need to be talked about. maybe this account will be that for some other anonymous person browsing mastodon
part of the reason i'm here anonymously is that i don't know if i can post about my disgust for today's llms under my own name. not without scaring away potential employers who have bought into the hype, as it seems 99.99% of them have. i'd be willing to bet there are a lot of other people who hate llms but are holding back from saying so online for the same reason.
i'd like an llm-free job, but those are rare-to-nonexistent in the lines of work i'm qualified for, especially those that pay at least subsistence wages. i'm working toward changing careers, but there will be at least small doses of llms even in my new career. i'm told that even plumbers sometimes use llms these days. (yikes, wtf is an llm going to tell them to do to my pipes?)
maybe i'm just a chicken for not speaking up about llms under my own name, but also i need to earn a living. i admire the journalists and other people on mastodon who are doing what i'm afraid to do. maybe one day i'll have the courage to join them. but i'm not that financially secure, and ubi doesn't seem to be coming for me anytime soon. i need work. i don't feel like i can afford to say anything too controversial about the tools that virtually every company is using now unless i'm anonymous.
ai is a fucking religion. it seems you cannot say anything too negative about it on linkedin or in work-related spaces. if you criticize it at all, you'd better immediately qualify your complaint with some bootlicking statement about how you're "still like ai for x purpose" or "use ai every day" or whatever. sometimes i really wonder how many people buy into roko's basilisk.
i don't think i can scream in public, so i'm just going to post my unfiltered thoughts about ai here. i'll also post my random thoughts about marketing bs that are a little too rude for linkedin. i'll look at ideas people are proposing for making the internet and other things better. and i'll probably comment on plenty of posts that aren't related to any of this at all, because i'm a human with other interests and i like seeing other, more positive things on social media too.
right now, i just need to say what i think.