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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   25121 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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This seems a little low effort. If you want to feed an AI some random questions with vaguely CW topics and post the results, provide context, an argument, some relevance. We would rather not see lots of posts about "Look at what ChatGPT says if you ask it about Muslims and trans."

I don't understand the basis of that determination. We have lots of good comments or posts which don't provide context or an argument, but just themselves. Like this jolly little story for example: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/e5odim/the_barbarian_and_the_711_clerk/

Would it be a problem if I painted a picture (Think like Where's Waldo not Ben Garrison) of my view of some present issue, or a song, if I didn't provide context and explanation for why I think it's interesting to have a picture instead of a comment thread? Where is the dividing line that I can intuit?

  • -11

We have lots of good comments or posts which don't provide context or an argument, but just themselves. Like this jolly little story for example: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/e5odim/the_barbarian_and_the_711_clerk/

You're kidding. That story was a very high effort post making a philosophical argument, and it was also entertaining and thoughtful. Nothing at all like "Ask ChatGPT what to do if a sex worker approaches a Muslim and post its answer."

Would it be a problem if I painted a picture (Think like Where's Waldo not Ben Garrison) of my view of some present issue, or a song, if I didn't provide context and explanation for why I think it's interesting to have a picture instead of a comment thread?

Yes, just posting a picture or a song, without context or stating your point, would probably get dinged for low effort.

I think the OP in particular has a distinct smell of the sort of "darkly hinting" that is the hallmark of the most partisan and unpleasant CW forums; it's clearly selected as a scenario that is likely to elicit inconsistencies or difficult corner cases in OP's outgroup's ideology, and thrown at a bullshit generator trained on outgroup ideology in the hope of generating a particularly juicy weakman display of an imagined outgroup member squirming in cognitive dissonance. A tribally flipped counterpart would be something like an interview putting random rednecks on the spot with questions about scenarios involving Russians, Ukraine and trad values - letting their stammering stand without comment - except GPT is not even a real progressive subject. Just because you don't say the "boo" out loud, this sort of thing does not become any less boo-outgroup.

Say what you will about the 7/11 post (which I remember well, and personally didn't like at all because it was so obtuse), but at least it took some effort to make. There is zero effort, or value, in a post which consists purely of "I asked these questions from ChatGPT, here's what it said". I can go ask ChatGPT those questions myself if I want to know the answer. Like @slothlikesamwise said, you really need to bring something beyond copy/pasting output from some chat bot.

That's why I bring up the art analogy. Obviously by and large we all recognize that lots of AI content is meaningless slop, but for all we know this guy put in a few hours of work crafting response and questions for the chatbot for this specific output. Is the post only worthwhile if it's an explanation of that process(which I recognize is very unlikely to even have occured)?

If this is art, what is the message? I don't think nasty caricatures of the outgroup are good content for this forum, even if they meet the definition of art.

An explanation of how one got there is one possible angle. Another is some explanation of why the output is relevant or interesting. I don't care about what ChatGPT has to say about Muslims encountering sex workers, whether or not they are transgender. Frankly, I don't care what a human has to say about that because it's just such a bizarre topic. So one has to lay the groundwork of "why is this interesting", whatever form that reason may take.

I presume he just wants more than one sentence of opinion and analysis that amounts to more than "This was more boring than I hoped it would be."

Comparison between various models, swapping islam for christianity, attempting to break the AI, or just more social commentary.

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