OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
41m ago
That still fits my experience with them - I have spent some time mucking about with them, and every time I ask an LLM about something I know, it will frequently be confidently, even hilariously wrong. It is not aware of any difference between truth and falsehood and will freely mix them together. I want to avoid some kind of AI Gell-Mann Amnesia. When I ask it questions I know the answer to, it consistently prioritises producing something that looks like a confident, helpful, well-written answer, in total agnosticism as to whether or not that answer is true. It surely does the same thing with questions I don't know the answer to. The only sensible course of action is to assign zero credence to anything an LLM says. What it says might be true. Or it might not be. The LLM's word is worth nothing.
OliveTapenade
46m ago
Asking a bot would defeat the whole point of the exercise.
For several reasons.
For what it's worth, working in a non-technical, non-coding-related field, my experience has been that some higher-ups are interested in the idea of AI and occasionally push a half-baked idea, which lower-level employees dutifully try for about two hours, conclude that it's useless, and then keep on doing things the old-fashioned way. I have yet to find any actual use-case for AI and continue to see it as a solution in search of a problem.
Maybe it's useful in some very specific, very narrow fields. Maybe coding is one of them. I'm not a coder so I don't know. But what my professional experience thus far tells me is that LLMs are good for producing large amounts of grammatically correct but turgid and unreadable bilge, and pretty much nothing else. If what you want is to mass-produce mediocre writing, well, that's what AI can do for you. If you want pretty much anything else, you're out of luck.
In a sense I think it's the ultimate 'wordcel' technology. It does symbol manipulation. It's good at translating one language into another, and apparently that it includes translating natural language instructions into computer code. But I remain skeptical as to its utility for much beyond that. It might be nice one day for someone to sit down and run through an explanation of how the heck this is supposed to get from language production and manipulation to, well, anything else.
OliveTapenade
13hr ago
If you'll pardon some paranoia on my part... the post you link, attributed to Matt Shumer, really reads like AI slop to me. It does not read to me like a human wrote that. Given that the post is about Shumer outsourcing his work to bots, is it plausible that he also outsourced his post to a bot? Or that he had a bot edit and 'improve' his writing? Or that a bot wrote it and he edited it? Or, perhaps most frighteningly of all, that he's just worked with bots for so long that this is how he has learned to write, and now he imitates them?
Whatever the case, I just don't trust anything written in that mode. Did he write it? Is there any original human thought in it? I don't know. Under these circumstances, I am disinclined to trust.
He does say that he used AI to write it, which I guess proves my instincts right. The post is indeed awful writing, and if that's the standard of the AI that he thinks is going to replace all our work... well, even if he's right, it will be a tremendous disaster for written expression if nothing else.
OliveTapenade
13hr ago
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Certainly, and the base rate being what it is, the odds that any given trans-identifying person is violent are so low that you should not assume the worst. In general you should try to treat people as individuals.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I'm skeptical of drawing strong causal conclusions around mass shootings if only because the number of mass shootings is so low. If we just look at Wikipedia's list, in the 1990s there are seven after Port Arthur, and twelve before. Counting Port Arthur itself, that's twenty, for a total of two per year. I think that's too low to draw any sensible inferences. If we go past that, Wikipedia lists fourteen shootings in all of the 1980s, versus six in the 2000s, and ten in the 2010s.
14-20-6-10 is overall a decline, but one that I find perfectly plausible in terms of the overall decline deaths by firearms (both homicides and suicides) over the period. Overall I tend to agree with RAND's conclusion - the evidence that the NFA reduced firearm deaths is weak at best.
For what it's worth I don't think NFA-style reforms in the US would accomplish very much, and I'd tend to support Australia moderately loosening up our firearms laws. I don't feel very strongly about firearms and I'd be happy to trade it away as part of a compromise on some other issue, but I think we could safely do it, and in principle I'm in favour of people being able to own things that they want, unless there is some pressing reason why they shouldn't. I'm more exercised about speech, personally, where I do think our record is unimpressive, and I look at the American First Amendment with mild envy.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Yes, I tend to think it's a combination of 1) shooters being almost entirely male, and thus more likely to be trans women than cis women or trans men, and 2) both shooters and trans people having strong positive correlations with mental illness.
You can debate the reasons for trans correlation with mental illness, say that it's all because of bigotry against gender-non-conforming people if you like, but the observation itself seems to remain true. Shooters tend to be biologically male people with some sort of mental disorder, and trans women are biologically male people who frequently have some sort of (other than being trans) mental disorder.
It isn't an epidemic or anything. But if trans women are slightly more likely, statistically, to be shooters than other demographics, it wouldn't surprise me.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
As an Australian (I cringed writing that phrase, but I suppose it's necessary), I am consistently annoyed both by local firearms discourse and by the way foreigners try to weaponise it. The 1996 buyback as far as I can tell made little difference - firearm deaths were a straight line trending downwards prior to Port Arthur, and continued their descent afterwards, with no visible change. There's just no particularly strong evidence that the policy change did anything.
I've come to interpret most tightening of laws after a tragedy as being symbolic. The buyback after Port Arthur probably didn't have much effect, but it was expressive. The point was for the government to communicate, "We care, and we are taking this seriously." The reforms currently being proposed after Bondi are the same. Both additional firearm restrictions and additional speech restrictions have the same effect: they are very unlikely to actually reduce gun violence or anti-semitic feeling, but they signal, "We, the government, care about this, and are taking action."
The only people who lose out of these trade-offs are, well, the public. People whose rights to own what they want or speak what they want are shaved back another millimetre.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
That was what I saw at first. It appeared as breaking news on the ABC website. I was a little surprised for it to be Canada rather than America, as is far more common, and then a later update identified the shooter as a 'woman'. I admit I wondered if it was a trans woman if only because it's so unusual for women to be involved in mass shootings. Is there any confirmation on that either way?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Maybe it's different in countries with much richer traditions of winter or snow sports, but from my perspective, at least, the Winter Olympics were never culturally relevant. There is usually a cursory attempt to pretend they matter, but we all know that the real Olympics are the summer games.
Again, might be different in countries that have snow, but here, you will have a very hard time finding people who care, and it has always been that way to my recollection.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Without wanting to get too biographical, I've received suggestions like that before as well.
Fortunately a principle that's been helpful for me is to never make major decisions while in a state of despair, depression, or self-loathing. I remember advice I received once from a friend who'd been in the military - as much as possible, make decisions from a position of strength, not weakness.
One last heuristic I use when taking advice from another people is to ask myself, "Does this person want me to be strong?" There's a bit of unpacking to do there around what 'strong' means, but the point of the question is to look at whether this person is generally trying to move me in the direction of being collected, confident, at peace, empowered, etc., or whether they're trying to move me in the direction of being anxious, neurotic, dependent on others, etc.
It's not necessarily a red flag if someone encourages me to face a dark feeling, since vulnerability is something we all need to face sometimes. But the direction matters, and if someone is trying to make that vulnerability pathological, that is probably a sign that they're not going to make me stronger or happier.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I did say it was a joke. If nothing else, I've never kicked a hole in a wall - I'm more likely to find somewhere quiet and put my head in my hands. Like most jokes, I think it exaggerates a real point for effect, that trans people often still have some of the 'scripting' of their birth sex.
Sometimes they do overcompensate by trying too hard to adopt the 'culture' of their preferred sex? Anecdotally I think I see this more with trans women, but for all I know there are trans men who try really hard to lean into a macho concept of masculinity.
I agree with the observation that trans people tend to be lonely, at least judging from those that I've known. It seems plausible to me that people who are already lonely for non-gender-related reasons are likely to be more willing to consider radical changes to their lives. If you're lonely and sad by default, you may feel you have less to lose and be more willing to consider transitioning, and there's the possibility of the kind of love-bombing coffee_enjoyer describes.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Yes, I notice this with both trans women and trans men. In the normal course of development, you're socialised into your own sex and you learn a whole array of tools for how to be an adult man or an adult women. Trans people, even if they pass very well as their preferred gender, usually don't have all those tools. It's one of the reasons why they often look a bit uncanny-valley-esque, or can make natal members of that sex uncomfortable.
In the case of the person in that video, I think part of the issue is not knowing how men make friends, or how we express close, deep friendship. We don't do it the same way women do. There's a seemingly-endless genre of observational humour about how men and women have different languages for this sort of thing, and while the jokes are silly, they get at something real. Trans women have the reverse issue - they don't know the script for how to behave in female spaces. Thus that joke about how if a trans man is devastated, he hides and cries in the bathroom, and if a trans woman is devastated, she kicks a hole in the wall.
Anyway, resilience is definitely part of it. As a young man you learn things from your father, other older male relatives, role models, and so on, and one of them is how to suck it up when times are tough. When you've been a man your entire life, you probably don't realise how many things like that you do know. And the same for women in reverse.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
My understanding was that women attempt suicide more often than men, but men are vastly more likely to succeed, since they tend to prefer deadlier or more direct methods.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Aha, yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about below. It's easy to romanticise the other sex and believe that it's so much easier for them, but everything seems easier from a distance. You don't understand how hard it is until you've actually lived it.
Whether women or men in general experience greater happiness or life satisfaction is difficult to measure. Most surface polls show women reporting greater satisfaction, but that link suggests that women tend to use a higher scale than men and may actually be less satisfied. I don't want to make a general statement about which sex is, on average, happier, at least, not without a lot more research, but I would at least say that there probably isn't a vast difference.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Sorry, that's been backed up for a while. I apologise if I came off as trying to tear down a novel you love.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
The point about age is a good one - if you ask me to picture 'a man' or 'a woman' in the abstract, I picture a fit, attractive person in their 20s or 30s. Culturally I think we do tend to idealise 20-something women, even more than we do 20-something men. I can thus imagine the woman there being an appealing thing to become.
But ask someone, "Would you rather be a 50 year old man or a 50 year old woman?" and I'd bet the woman starts to do a lot worse. What about if it's age 60? More than that? Culturally I think we have a model for middle-aged or elder men still being charismatic, authoritative, and even attractive, whereas that is not the case for older women at all.
For what it's worth, I'm in the camp that, if I had a two-way button, would try it both ways around and see what felt better for me overall. If I had a one-way button, I would give it a lot more thought and I think would not ultimately choose to press it.
So, that out of the way...
Firstly, I suspect this does depend a lot on your bubble and your particular subculture. I'd guess the rate would be much higher among heavily-online or nerdy people, partly because being extremely online often detaches people from their body a bit more, partly because very thoughtful or intellectually-inclined people are more interested in hypotheticals or other ways their lives might be, and partly because nerds are often a bit bullied or have low self-esteem, which contributes to wanting to change themselves. I could imagine 25% of the kinds of people who play online games being interested in the button; I suspect that normies would be much less interested.
Secondly, this is inevitably a question that involves a lot of idealisation or romanticisation. It's a "the other man's grass is always greener" situation. You will imagine yourself as a fit and attractive member of the opposite sex, and you will probably overestimate all the ways in which being the opposite sex might be appealing, and underestimate all the ways in which it would be frustrating or difficult.
You mention MMOs, for instance, but in MMOs the choice is purely cosmetic. I play MMOs and have both male and female PCs, and the thing is, in an MMO they are entirely interchangeable. NPCs treat male and female PCs identically. Male and female PCs have the exact same physical capabilities. This is not like real life, obviously! If I had the magic genderswap button and pressed it, just on the biological level I would become shorter, weaker, and in general less physically capable. Well, that doesn't sound appealing. Then there's the cultural and social level. A huge number of things are acceptable for me as a man that would not be as a woman. Men's dress is both more simple and significantly more comfortable than women's dress. Men are almost never socially obligated to use cosmetics. Men don't have a menstrual cycle or suffer any of the inconveniences that implies. Just living and existing as a man, day to day, is cheaper and more comfortable than living as a woman. And then in terms of how other people treat you! People treat men and women differently; maybe people treat women with more courtesy in some contexts, but people are also more patronising toward women, or women are more likely to victims of various kinds of minor harassment. The MMO comparison isn't much like men or women in real life.
You see this sometimes from real trans people, right? I know I've read accounts from trans men saying that they didn't realise what it's like when people see you as a man and treat you as a man. Behaviours that were socially licensed for women aren't licensed for men, or at least, not in the same way (e.g. the ways you can display emotion). In general people care less about men; you have to assert yourself more, and I've seen trans men shocked and made uncomfortable by that.
In a world where the one-way button exists, I'd guess that a bunch of people would press it, both ways, and then stories from button-users would spread and social norms around it would quickly develop. In the hypothetical, we're guessing about what it would be like, but once qualitative data from real button-pressers is available, we'd be able to go into it with a lot more detail. Once real accounts of button-pressing exist, a lot of its allure would probably fade, as it becomes clear that it does not fix much of anything.
Not so much in Mycroft's head as irrelevant? The whole story is in Mycroft's head, and we have no way of sorting what's 'true' in the context of the imaginary world from what isn't. Mycroft tells us a lot of things, most of which are to some extent completely implausible, and often it's the non-magical parts that are the most implausible. Is it plausible that, say, a midget clone of Achilles pilots a giant robot magicked into existence from a kid's reading of some guy's awful Iliad fanfic in order to deflect a couple of nuclear missiles away from Mars? Well, no. But then, is it plausible that the whole world is run by a conspiracy of half a dozen people who all go to the same weirdly-specific brothel where people dress up in 18th century outfits, as part of some lady's attempt to control the world by addicting its leaders to a fetish for gender roles? If anything that part is less plausible! Who's more plausible, Bridger or JEDD? Bridger is the one to whom Mycroft attributes explicit magic powers, whereas JEDD is just an extremely mentally ill person, but nonetheless JEDD is the one I find harder to swallow. I can believe that a magic kid with the ability to rewrite reality exists, but I cannot believe that every world leader, much less the public, are willing to give ultimate power to a person so autistic that he does not understand object permanence.
But it doesn't matter because, well, Terra Ignota's world makes no sense. I think you have to take the whole thing as a glimpse into Mycroft's mind. Nothing here is plausible except insofar as it makes sense to Mycroft. And Mycroft is a lunatic.
(There is that part from 9A's perspective, but 9A's narrative voice is extremely similar to Mycroft's, shares all of Mycroft's values, and eventually 9A is turned into a Mycroft clone via Bridger-magic, so for all I know 9A doesn't exist and Mycroft is just taking the piss. It might just be that Palmer struggles to write more than one narrative voice, but there was one chapter from Martin Guildbreaker's perspective which was nicely differentiated, at least?)
My frustration with the books, really, is that Palmer tends to bring up big questions that she is either unwilling or unable to address. Is it about novel political systems? Well, she sort of sketches out the outline of one, but the system she sketches out makes no sense and she makes no attempt to answer even obvious questions about it. This goes for legal questions (hang on, how does crime work between people of different hives?), cultural questions (somehow Brillist mind-reading remains an exclusive Brillist secret, even though you can change hive at will, there are millions and millions of Brillists, and the skill requires no technology or assistance of any kind? no one has stolen this technique yet?), or economic questions (there's that chapter with the yakuza human traffickers; wait, why is human trafficking a thing in a world without borders? how is crime even possible in a world where everyone wears tracker implants anyway?). The idea of opt-in legal systems and non-geographic nations is interesting, but once you start asking questions about how it actually works, there are too many questions that Palmer just glosses over.
There's a certain type of science fiction author who comes up with an odd idea and then spends all their time trying to break that idea. Isaac Asimov is probably the most famous example of this type. He produces an elegant system and then repeatedly puts that system under stress. He pedantically looks for every place the idea might fail and then sees what happens when it does. Ada Palmer is the very opposite of this type of author. She throws out big ideas, does not bother investigating them at all, and then jumps to the next big idea. The result, at least for me, is a book that has the appearance of depth but not the reality.
One example, for instance, might be her interest in gender. She has a lot in Terra Ignota about the concept of gender and its cultural power. Gender and religion are both, in Terra Ignota, concepts that nobody is willing to talk about in public (gender is just crass; religion is actually banned), and yet the shadows of those concepts hang over the text. Gender and religion both matter even though nobody can admit to them mattering. This is interesting, except that the shoe never drops. By the end of the fourth book, the place the books get to on gender is, "huh, gender is interesting, let's have a committee to keep the conversation going". Really, that's the conclusion? The spectre of religion comes up repeatedly, but it never goes anywhere.
This is most obvious to me when it comes to the books' central conflict. By the end of Perhaps the Stars, the war is about two issues. (Three if you count "should we make JEDD unaccountable dictator of the world", but apparently everybody is in favour of that. It's bonkers.) The first issue is O. S., and the question I've often seen asked along the lines of, "Would you destroy this world to save a better one?" Does the end of preserving Terra Ignota's current political order justify a very small number of political assassinations? JEDD promises to reorganise the world's politics so as to make O. S. unnecessary, but refuses to explain how he's going to do that, or what his new constitution would be. The second issue is the trunk war - should the future of humanity be brain uploading or space travel?
But neither of those issues are actually addressed in any depth. JEDD does take over the world, but his new constitution is to just make some minor tweaks on the existing system, none of which seem like they obviate the need for O. S. How does making the Cousins into a strat, merging Mitsubishi and the EU into a super-hive, capping the number of Mason senators, and adding representatives from the Reservations to the senate address that issue? That seems just as unstable as the prior system. It seems strange that after a thousand pages and a global war over the issue of O. S., nobody actually answers the O. S. question. How does this world remove the need for O. S. again?
And the trunk war is simply bizarre. There doesn't seem to be any reason why the Brillist and Utopian paths are incompatible - heck, Faust himself says that there is plenty of time for space travel after digital immortality is achieved. This 'conflict' is two different research projects with different priorities; the only actual clash is that both parties think the other is being somewhat wasteful in the face of their grand dream. The Brillists believe there is a pressing global imperative to abolish death, and the Utopians believe... er... they never get to this part. But they think that going to space is very important. Maybe there's a contrived conflict because both groups want to study Bridger's relics, but... what, we're going to have a world war because NASA and MIRI couldn't figure out how to share? It makes the conflict seem bizarrely petty.
At any rate, the fundamental problem there is that no one ever makes the case for Utopia. Here I'm just recapping Balioc, but I think it bears mentioning again. All the narrators are passionately on the Utopian side, and portray the Utopian dream as beautiful and heroic, and the Brillist dream as contemptible and narrow-minded, but no one ever reflects on why Utopia's dream is so important. It just axiomatically is.
I guess the problem I have is that Terra Ignota is, fundamentally, a bunch of things that Ada Palmer thinks is cool, all free-associated together. It never really coheres into a world or even really into a story.
There are a lot of things in the series that are difficult to swallow, but make sense once you realise that it's not trying to be a realistic work of political fiction. Something that struck me was that Terra Ignota is a world of utter sincerity. There are no liars or cynics; no world leaders who just opportunistically cheat. The closest you can find to that is Perry-Kraye, and even he's deeply embroiled in romantic melodrama. The Mason hive is an absolute dictatorship constrained only by the leader's determination to hold true to an oath that nobody but himself has ever read, and apparently this works! But every single character is like that. No one is corrupt. Everybody deeply believes in this or that philosophy. Mitsubishi are a bunch of calculating corporate imperialists, and yet when JEDD questions them, every member of the board is able to wax rhapsodic about the spiritual value of land. The blacklaws come together and make this lovely idealistic city called Hobbestown, rather than being the sorts of poorly-educated low-impulse-control people you might expect to live outside the law. Moral suasion is an incredibly powerful force in Terra Ignota - this ties into all the incredibly ropey gender stuff about the power of women and seduction and Marie Antoinette. It's just a world without cynics; a world without pragmatists.
I suppose I'm just ranting incoherently at this point.
My point is that I think Terra Ignota is an interesting look into Ada Palmer's brain, conveyed by way of Mycroft's brain.
I don't find it particularly sensible as a story or as a world, though.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I have mixed feelings about Terra Ignota, because there's a lot of it that's good and interesting, and a lot that's garbage, and a lot that's somewhere in the middle.
In this case I think one of its flaws is that you can't really describe it without being incredibly misleading. You have to describe the setting, and the setting gives the impression that this is a story about what happens in a world where you can choose your nation, or choose what set of laws to live under, or what a world without borders is like but people socially define themselves by household and elective community, or what war looks like in a world that doesn't have geographic nations, or re-learning war in a world that has had no weapons or violent conflicts for a lifetime, or, etc., etc.
And Terra Ignota is not actually about any of that. Sure, it's in a world where there are no nations and instead people join elective 'hives', which define the laws of their society, but the books clearly do not care about that, and have precisely zero interest in interrogating how that system could possibly work. Sure, the story involves the hives going to war and then flailing about in confusion because none of them know what war is (I particularly loved a bit where people dress up in military uniforms and assemble in groups and march up and down in front of each other, and then just kind of look at each other awkwardly and disperse, unsure of what they're supposed to do next), but none of that is relevant to what Terra Ignota is about.
Terra Ignota is a story told by an extremely unreliable narrator, who is at least partly insane, who has a bizarre fetish for 18th century France. The story is about Mycroft, and once you understand that Mycroft is firstly batshit and secondly a LARPing pseudo-intellectual, you notice that the events of the story don't matter that much, and in fact don't even make sense. This is a psychodrama.
I don't know if I learned anything from Terra Ignota, other than "Ada Palmer be weird, yo". But Ada Palmer is definitely weird, yo.
Oh, and Utopia sucks. As far as I can tell responses to Terra Ignota are bifurcated along several axes, and one of the big ones is whether Utopia is the coolest thing ever and a beautiful dream you want to pledge your life towards (somehow Scott is one of these), or whether Utopia is a bunch of incredibly cringeworthy nerds who need to be given swirlies (this is the camp I'm in). There are people who seem to think Terra Ignota is a beautiful small-u utopia, revealed to us by brilliant and inspiring prose, and I do not understand these people at all.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
To be fair, this is, what, three examples? I want to at least venture another hypothesis, which is that America is a very large country and there's always going to be, in most demographics, some small percentage of people who are crazy. As populations have increased, the absolute number of crazies has also increased, but the amount of space in the media spotlight has stayed the same. (In fact it may have shrunk, due to media consolidation, and the increasing nationalisation of politics.) This makes competition for attention more intense. In times of elevated public interest in this or that issue, the number of crazies trying to get attention by exploiting that issue will be high, and the existence of YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, etc., allows for rapid dissemination of memes, as well as a kind of survival of the fittest optimising for the most shareable.
So it may be that nothing in particular is wrong with women in their 50s, but that nonetheless the spectacle of entitled older women yelling at poor service workers is very memetically successful. There could be plenty of reasons for that - I suggest that the power differential is a big one, with older middle-class people with money holding power over younger and poorer frontline workers - but I suspect you can colour in those blanks yourself.
It may be worth, after all, the reminder that both white women and over-50s are demographics Trump won all three times. The specific intersection of women over 50 just barely favoured Harris, 50-49 in 2024, and if you restricted that to white women over 50, you'd get a win for Trump. So white women in their 50s are not, by national standards, a particularly Democratic demographic. What's going on with 50 year old women right now? Plausibly the answer is - nothing special.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Simple, straightforward, and correct.
My least favourite version of this is the "this isn't political" gambit. "This isn't politics, it's people's lives!" As if people's lives aren't the fundamental subject matter of politics! It is, in general, a transparent attempt to remove one's own positions from the arena of reasonable debate.
Your politics are politics. My politics are basic human decency. So it always goes.
Gay marriage is probably a good example of this - what was a matter for reasonable public debate and contestation became, as soon as it was implemented, something beyond mere 'politics', which is presumed to be universally accepted and will never be debated again. Speaking from Australia, our plebiscite on the subject was 60-40 in favour of SSM, and as a result, SSM is apparently locked in, even though two out of five people oppose it. By contrast, the Voice referendum was 60-40 against. Is that result as definitive? It doesn't seem like it. The losing side of that referendum seem to have vowed to continue the fight. Well, why not also the anti-SSM people? They would seem to have exactly the same justification for continuing the fight. The republic referendum was 55-45 against; the republican movement does not seem to have given up and gone home.
If the result is the result you want, you declare that result to now be sacred and removed from the realm of politics. If it's not the result you want, oh well, get 'em next time.
It is completely absurd. It's all politics. It is all up for debate. That is the point of democracy.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Add me to the chorus of people who don't like the name. I think the aesthetic the article is describing is real, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with either diners or goths.
I agree that what it's describing isn't a subculture, though possibly I'm using the word a bit restrictively and thinking of a subculture as something that implies a community or a scene. It's not necessarily 'the mainstream' because I think that implies a kind of universality, but I think it is a mainstreaming of a certain kind of low-effort, passive engagement with online culture.
What confuses me is just how this hooks anybody. I can barely stand to read it for more than a paragraph or two. Setting aside all other disagreements about AI, it's horrible just on the aesthetic level. These machines simply cannot write.
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