73 points
*

Not only is the summary kinda light or missing the deeper points, the LLM did not “break down” the plot by “reading” the provided PDF. House of Leaves is impossible to fucking parse correctly as a PDF, the text is all over the place, visually placed in very complex ways, you have a whole labyrinth chapter where you have to follow footnotes across multiple pages with the text being difficult to find and follow, anything “reading” the PDF in the regular order of characters would have no fucking clue.

As always, there is no intelligence or any breaking down, the only reason the LLM is able to provide the summary is because it was trained on a dataset that included summaries and reviews of House of Leaves, and it simply detected the PDF was House of Leaves.

The LLM is, YET AGAIN, just regurgitating things that are already written elsewhere, nothing is created, it’s all obfuscation of labour.

permalink
report
reply
46 points

This is what irks me the most about “AI” is that it operates on already created data we as humans have made, there is no actual creation occuring with these LLMs just taking up materials done beforehand by people and touting the conclusion as it’s own. Fucking stagnancy incarnate.

permalink
report
parent
reply

LLMs automate the experience of talking to a tech bro

permalink
report
parent
reply
30 points
*

Like talking to something that wears a human suit with the cold piercing eyes of a reptile

permalink
report
parent
reply
26 points
*

yea, it’s data transformation but there is zero intelligence, context or anything “new”.

The tool itself is fine when used clearly and purposefully, and those kinds of tools have been used for a long time in various fields, the problem I have with the current hype trends of ““AI”” is that literally nothing fundamentally new was made. People aren’t being informed on how these things really work and what they do, there’s a lot of dangerous practices and psychological manipulation, and above all these new large models are enormous labor-obfuscating machines. I don’t give a shit about private property, IP laws, etc (because I know that’s a common response), the problem is that these things are another layer of illusions, an enormous curtain hiding entire industries of data-scraping and theft, of countless people and hours of manual tagging, filtering, training, moderating and mechanical turks, in purely profit-seeking and reckless ways. And not only is all this labor not valued, people aren’t even aware it exists, people never have to interact directly with anyone along that production chain. Entire industries becoming ghosts, non-existent, and even more unable to organize and struggle for what they create.

Beyond that, class consciousness is ever harder to teach and agitate for in these domains, because shit like this is purposefully built to hide and disguise exploited labor (often from the labour force of the colonized and victims of imperialism) and privatization.

It’s not the stealing that’s the problem it’s the sneaky, rapid disruption and destruction of existing productions and jobs that it entails, and the privatization of colossal amounts of public data and user-generated data that nobody ever intended to be privatized and extracted for profits. It was always happening in the background of course, but i don’t think people realize the impact this will have, to me it’s like a closure of the internet-commons. Colossal explotation of Free Labour, the expansion of exploitation in every sphere of “content production” that was previously unreachable.

Drives me fucking insane.

permalink
report
parent
reply
20 points

So much art and literature both public and private was used to make these types of LLMs and yet no one truly talks about the consequence of stealing that labor and undervaluing it. So many tech bros love to shit on the arts because a robot can make something that is an amalgam of many artists and call it “art” but forget or willfully ignore the labor needed to create that data beforehand, again it’s labor exploitation just as you mentioned. Also yeah as used as data scrappers and aggregators these types of machines are amazing and something that should be used, it’s just that there needs to be actual human beings making sure the collected data is cleaned and properly organized or else it’s just vomiting out useless shit. The humans that do this type of cleaning work are so well hidden or outsourced to other countries that no one wants to acknowledge that there is no way to truly remove the need for human labor and inputs or else the “magic” of AIs would fizzle out and the current boom would turn to a bust cycle similar to when crypto was so fresh in everyone’s mind.

permalink
report
parent
reply
62 points

You can’t just ask an LLM “who the murderer was” to see if it understood the text, you have to ask which of the author’s kinks were being worked out through the story

permalink
report
reply

The empty space between this motherfucker’s ears is the real life five and a half minute hallway

These fuckers really think that summarizing a novel’s plot is the same as “breaking it down”. Absolutely zero media literacy. To make it worse, they are proud of their illiteracy, even smug about it; “there you go, a breakdown of the novel. Easy. GPT does it all. QED.”

permalink
report
reply
29 points

Really makes you see the sucking void at the center of our civilization when people go “Yes I will happily reduce understanding art to an engineering problem”

permalink
report
parent
reply

“Yes I will happily reduce understanding art to an engineering problem”

STEMcels tend to find living humans with consciousness to be inconvenient for their mechanistic worldview and seek to design them out of existence

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Cool, we have our own Blindsight aliens right in our midst.

permalink
report
parent
reply
34 points

The literalist essays touted on YouTube as “breakdowns” are nothing more than fucking summaries and were a key symptom that literacy was always dead to the majority of tech bros and other STEM supremacist mfers in the west.

permalink
report
reply
30 points

The fact that so much analysis of media is all about the “lore” as well. No one talking about what a series made them feel, or made them think, it’s solely about “OMG is this character SECRETLY Sans Undertale??!?!?!?!”

permalink
report
parent
reply
22 points

The newest trend of doing movie plots summed up with computerized voices makes my skin crawl, the curtains are blue because they are blue there is nothing else going on now omg watch this vid that offers nothing of value.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Yeah, I know what you mean, I have no idea how anyone could watch those. They get huge views for some reason, and for practically no effort, but I have no idea what the appeal is. You could just look up the wikipedia summary of the movie for the exact same effect.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Reminds me of those “brief retrospective” style videos that are 2-8 hours of basically regurgitating the plot of a game and quests verbatim, no analysis or retrospective at all

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

The same people that consumes that slop and will also stare you down wihtout irony and say there is nothing political about Metal Gear Solid or that games like Spec Ops The Line are not anti-war pieces.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Literally everything user-facing uses Unicode today, how can you fuck up and get an output with \u??

permalink
report
reply