Internet Comment Etiquette: "Relationships with AI"
... hadn't thought about Glenn Beck in a decade, that last interview was pretty wtf.
Not sure what the etiquette is for how long they should be dead before you talk to the AI-geist on youtube, but George Washington somehow feels weirder than Kirk did; idk.
https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/the-computer-science-fetish/
The fetishism of the computer scientist therefore refers less to specific expertise than to whatever we imagine a credentialed expert can bestow: an external voice that says, "ask, and you shall receive.” The computer scientist becomes a mirror where those who work with the social, practical impacts of the tech hope to see our understanding affirmed. The people who offer that validation — who position themselves against the discourse of critique, who seem unbothered and detached, even ridiculing the same critical lingo that exhausts you — are not doing it out of sober objectivity or insight.
Sometimes they just don't respect you. Sometimes they're just annoyed by calls for accountability. And sometimes, they do it because they've fused with an interacting swarm of chatbots and transcended their human identity.
https://www.todayintabs.com/p/who-goes-ai
taking shots at the gray lady:
You might think Mr. R not so different, superficially, from Ms. L. He’s also a long-tenured technology columnist at a respected mainstream publication. And yet he has eagerly, even gleefully, turned flack for the machines. He has delegated much of his professional life to them as well, and seems proud of it:
Most recently, [Mr. R] tells me, he created a team of Claude agents to help edit his book, led by a “Master Editor” agent. Other sub-agents are in charge of things like fact-checking, making sure the book matches his writing style, and offering positive and negative feedback.
And why not? Mr. R is not known or valued for his elegance of expression. He has, at best, a “writing style,” and not one that can’t easily be duplicated by a large language model. Checking facts? Assessing his work’s strengths and weaknesses? More bathwater to be tossed out of this increasingly baby-less tub. So what explains Mr. R, who “expects AI models to get better than him at everything eventually?” Why does he go AI when Ms. L never would?
Mr. R’s secret is that his work is not primarily artistic or informative—it is functional. He serves a purpose for the industry he covers. Mr. R’s job is to absorb the tech industry’s self-mythologizing, and then believe in it even harder than the industry itself does. He serves as a kind of plausibility ratchet. His byline and employer legitimize a level of credulousness that would otherwise be laughable, and thereby allow tech PR to seem relatively restrained. Mr. R has no problem going AI because he himself has been a small cog in a big ugly machine for a long time.
::: spoiler spoiler It's Kevin Roose :::
