In this post, I wrote about the sad experience of having a friend use AI to wish me a happy birthday. https://robertkingett.com/posts/6627/ #AI #Blog #Blogging #Blogs @techtakes @fuck_ai
Happy birthday !
I swear this guy is using AI to compose his responses to me on FetLife. Sometimes his intelligence, grammar, and typing just drop off a CLIFF. At first I thought it was just phone vs. keyboard, but the grammatical mistakes he is making aren’t the sort that you make because you’re on a phone, they’re the sort you make if you don’t even know English. It’s like he’s Cyrano de Bergeracing me.
valuable datapoint (in the scope of llms being used for scams and shit) but perhaps not quite the right post to reply to about that, tbh
I don’t see why not. It is a similar experience being the target of AI in the hands of a casual user, in a very personal domain, and invites further exploration of the emotional effects of that kind of interaction. The article was about emotions, not about technology. Now explain to me why my reply doesn’t belong.
They could be running it through language translation (as well)
was one of the things I thought of too but fet (and also dating/meeting apps) has a longstanding problem of people catfishing. on balance, suspect this form is the more likely case
As someone too cowardly to explore their kinks. I lack context. Now you have provided data to reinforce my reticence.
it’s … not endemic, in the sense of “you’ll hit it every 3 profiles” (because fet community + platform seems to do a reasonably good job of handling it from reports etc), but you can see why it’s the type of thing that creeps and predators go for
igwym re exploration. comfort, safety, trust, consent - all key. never do anything you don’t want to :)
It’s shocking that FetLife is managing to hold together as long as it has, as well as it has. Like everything it’s in decline, but it’s still a nice little slice of the golden age of the WWW. It may have a catphishing problem, but what it does not have is a Russian bot problem. It’s the only functional social network I’m on other than the Fediverse itself.
@weirdwriter @techtakes @fuck_ai “it’s just easier”
I prefer a quick ‘happy birthday, I’m thinking of you and wish you the world’ than 3 pages of AI vomit.why are so many posters falling over themselves to Dr Phil it up when OP didn’t ask for advice, fucking hell…
Thread police
fuckoff
one of our regulars gently telling you this is a weird thread for you to bring up fetlife is all the justification you needed to spam the whole thread with this shit? fuck off
the “I don’t see why not” was just … yeah
talk about not quite fucking getting it.
@froztbyte My theory is that they feel better giving advice rather than examining their feelings.
Happy belated birthday!
@weirdwriter @steve @techtakes @fuck_ai ‘LLMs give us ventriloquism in reverse. The mechanical dummy speaks through your mouth.’
https://www.roughtype.com/?p=9271Ugh, good read yet sad content. The irony of complimenting your writing by using the antithesis of word choice and structure to express emotions. If she was looking to make it easier, then she saw your birthday message as a chore. Some friend.
Happy birthday! ♥
@inb4_FoundTheVegan Thank you! The truly sad thing is, because I know LLM’s so well, I even think I know the exact prompt she used. There was another person that said, well, she didn’t make it a generic thing. She put in her prompt that you were a writer. It doesn’t make it thoughtful. Thank you though for Yoyr happy Bday wish! I also came across this after someone sent it after reading mine. Very similar https://mrgan.com/ai-email-from-a-friend/
Sometimes you need to be blunt, and just tell the other person how you feel. You don’t need to always understand your friend’s emotions and motivations thoroughly, and you’re allowed to disagree on things.
I’d tell this Karren:
“a happy birthday message, to me, is that you cared to put effort into something special for me. Even if the result is terrible”
It gets the point across, even if it can be difficult to say. That’s just how life is sometimes.
Putting this out there for the world to agree with you on how you dislike what she did? That doesn’t sound kind, nice or a thing a good friend would do. In fact it’s how some little kids fight in front of their parents.
She’ll probably call you back after what you did here
This made my heart hurt bud. I hope it didn’t overshadow the rest of your day!
@o7___o7 Thank you! The audio email from my Dominican friend where he was telling me happy birthday made it all the more epic! There was another person that said, well, don’t be surprised if she writes about you writing about her using AI because that was uncalled for, but I just had such a visceral reaction, I was just like, I need to write about this because I am afraid this is going to get common in Casual settings and not just corporate kind of settings either. Thank you so much for your comment however! It made my night!
appreciate ya!
Happy birthday!
And sorry for your sad experience. Annoying how AI is degrading our supposedly genuine interactions (both by people using it like this, and people interpreting a honest message like AI (I do feel a bit sorry for all the people working in low level customer support who in addition to all the normal bullshit now have to deal with AI accusations for example)).
@weirdwriter @techtakes @fuck_ai Happy belated birthday! This post struck a nerve with me because in this case, AI took away one of the last bits of humanity left in our digital communication: a personal message from a real human.
Time and effort are valuable commodities. When your friend offloaded that to an AI, it took away from the value of the message. Maybe they spent time crafting the perfect prompt, but saying “it’s easier” negates that idea.
Thank you! Also, someone else thought the audio friend that sent an audio song to me of happy birthday was also an LLM/AI and that was the actual human one! Yikes! But agreed! Thing is, because I know LLM’s super well, I can tell what prompt she used and that just makes me sad because the prompt was something like write a happy birthday email to my writer friend. @mahryekuh @techtakes @fuck_ai
@weirdwriter @techtakes @fuck_ai You can make LLM songs but undoubtedly you would have noticed that; that gift sounds lovely, by the way.
Hopefully you and your “AI friend” can work this out together.
On the one hand I get why people would use LLMs to write their messages (finding the right words is hard). On the other hand, man is this dystopian. At some point you might as well just send the prompt directly, it has the same amount of information.
I wanted to see a tired typo in her email from a hard days work. I wanted her to mix up my age. I wanted to see the imperfections in the tired as fuck email because the fact she still wrote to me, even though she was tired and would’ve wrote down my incorrect age, the fact that she thought about me enough to craft something personal would have made everything worth it. @MBM
I’m pro-AI, but not pro-AI in the sense of, “turn these bullet-points into a verbose email,” and not pro-AI for personal communication like this. I hope this kind of stuff doesn’t become common. It’s like going in the opposite direction of “SMS language” (which I view favorably).
Buh bye now.
what, pray tell, was the point of your comment? on this thread? did you have one?
Sorry, I didn’t realize you were the thread police. I’ll remove my reply immediately.
They indicated that they were wondering how pro-AI people would feel:
I really sat there wondering how do pro AI people feel when they get an email/SMS like that.
“I’m for it, y’know? but not like that, and not like that either. but I’m for it, sure, sure”
I feel so informed, thanks for sharing your thoughtful position, so glad you took the time
No problem. Glad you appreciated it. Namaste.
did you come like this off the factory line, or did you have to work at it?
@froztbyte @31337 lol
It was a text message from one of my racialized friends.
I don’t understand what this is supposed to mean
The author felt the need to tell everyone their friend was not white and “Spanish or Dominican or whatever.” But according to them, the A.I. birthday wishes is the sad part of this story.
imagine if you read the post instead of coming in here with a weird fucking accusation
I think you should leave.
@MrJameGumb Oh sorry! I was refering to the notion that society created race.
Ok… How was that in any way relevant to a story about a different friend sending you an AI birthday greeting?
Also your essay seems to suggest that you don’t think people should express anything within the context of race, fair enough I suppose, but then you seem to take every opportunity to mention that your cool friend is Dominican… It’s very confusing
yep, you can fuck off with this bad faith shit too
I am also, in good faith, confused.
alright
“Spanish or Dominican or whatever.”
nothing like this or that can be paraphrased to this appears in the article
Ok… How was that in any way relevant to a story about a different friend sending you an AI birthday greeting?
robert is describing how he, as a Blind author, experienced both his best birthday message and his worst one. he illustrated why he thought his Dominican friend’s message was beautiful and contrasted it with his other friend’s utterly thoughtless AI-generated message, which that friend sent even though they knew Robert’s views on AI
none of this is particularly objectionable unless you’re a big AI fan or you dislike interracial affection and you’re reaching for a problem to have with, as I mentioned, a Blind author affectionately describing his friend’s voice
@self Bingo! You got it! Thank you! For others, the contrast between the messages. My Dominican friend sent me a caring message that was lovely and heartfelt. The other one was careless and sent me a generated thing that I never even expressed interest in in the first place. I was contrasting the feelings of receiving those two kinds of messages
just by reading this comment thread as-is, and searching up one single word, should be all you need to become less confused
Looked it up, and,
Racialization or ethnicization is a sociological concept used to describe the intent and processes by which ethnic or racial identities are systematically constructed within a society.
OK. And the author said he was referring to the fact that society created race. Sure, fine.
I’m no less confused as to why one would refer to their friend as “racialized.” This friend is a person whose race has been created by society? But then that’s true of everyone. What makes the Dominican friend racialized if Karen is not? If they both are, why refer to one as racialized and not the other?
your good faith evaporated almost as fast as my patience. fuck along now
I’d compare your intelligence to a bag of rocks, but that would require you to know what a comparison is.
Happy Birthday dude. This blog post capures the modern online experience uncannily well
