tumblr users’ obsession with self-reporting (especially as a weird form of penance) needs to be studied
you don’t need to tell the world you still like Harry Potter because it’s your comfort movie or because your dad read it to you when you were little or something like that in response to a post about the harm continued monetary support of Harry Potter causes. you don’t need to tell tumblr all the myriad of reasons you don’t like rap under a post about how rap is often misrepresented as ultra-violent or overtly sexual and misogynistic because of racism. No one on tumblr has to know anything about you. no one has to know you still read your old Harry Potter books or that the only rap artist you like is Eminem. No one is going to say “oh of course you’re the One True Good Person with a Good Reason!” when you say that rap is difficult to listen to because of your auditory processing disorder or you’re only a part of the Marauders fandom. Just keep your shit to yourself and don’t embarrass yourself under other peoples’ posts.
funniest possible reply and its not even on purpose
reblog if you're an actual person IRL who gets genuinely upset if you catch someone using ChatGPT and view it as a serious moral failing
As an 80s kid, adults were worried calculators would make people unable to do arithmetic. Are we doing the same thing? Here's a few ways this is different.
Calculators did not think for you. You still needed to know basic math to formulate the problem.
Calculators did not lie to you. If you got the wrong answer it's because you gave it bad inputs. Garbage in, garbage out. Not because it made something up. That would be a broken calculator. People can and are being hurt and dying because ChatGPT will confidently feed you bullshit.
Calculators would give you the same answer for the same inputs. LLMs cannot because their answers are based on probability and randomness. Sure, you can run an LLM locally and control all the random seeds to get repeatable results as long as you keep everything exactly the same, same workflow and same versions and same parameters, but most people don't do that.
Calculators weren't spying on you. Can you imagine? Nobody would use that calculator.
Calculators did not promote a secret corporate agenda or worldview. No rich executive was tweaking the calculator's answers to appease their shareholders or advertisers or because the answer was "too woke". That would be a broken calculator.
Calculators did not pretend to be your friend and confidant. There were friendly talking calculators for kids, but you knew what you were buying. Nobody claimed it was a person, that would be creepy.
Calculators always worked. Provided you've got batteries. You didn't have to worry about having an internet connection or the site being down. Sure, you can run LLMs locally, but most people don't.
We owned our calculators. Nobody was going to change it out from under us. It would not suddenly start behaving differently because of an update. It would not get enshittified. It would not get arbitraility shut down. Calculators would continue to behave the same way until it broke.
We understood exactly how calculators work. Even the people who work on LLMs can't fully explain how they make decisions.
Does that make it a moral failing to use ChatGPT? "Moral failings" are super problematic. I prefer to simply check if I'm just being an old fart. I don't think I am.
I can confidently say this: ChatGPT, or any LLM, should not be a load bearing part of your life. If you meet someone who is dependent on ChatGPT or Grok or whatever, keep some distance.
Shaggy Rogers is a young adult human man that eats dog treats and his friends don't even care. They act like it's normal. Not only do they know he loves eating dog treats, but they know he'll do scary dangerous shit just to eat dog treats, and they use that to their advantage. "Oh you don't wanna get asbestos poisoning in the scary abandoned building? What if we fed you a dog treat?" And he says yes and he does it and eats it and they act like that's a normal thing for a human guy to do. But then again, he also eats 10 feet tall sandwiches in one bite, so maybe he's not even human. Still fucked up that they manipulate him like that though. But whatever. Forget I said anything.
