Love that buton with the funny arrows

However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”

Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”

The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.

And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.

And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.

but still, sometimes, things surprise me. and i was surprised today. because today an old man approached me at the park. and he said, you know, im a pediatrician.

which is already a weird start to a conversation, because i didnt know that. and maybe i should have just rolled with it, but instead i went

wait. i dont know that. why did you think i knew that?

which didn't even put him slightly off balance.

cuz you're bald, he said, so confidently that i didnt even question it until the conversation was over. now. i was - i was over there, sitting -

and he gestured across the park to a giant pile of soft dirt that had an almost cartoonishly exaggerated ass print on it which derailed me for the second time. right? because whoever sat on that dirt, clearly, had an ass like two coconuts being fired out of a spanish cannon. whereas this man had an ass that could probably only be detected with powerful scientific instruments. i told him this in more succint terms by simply saying that was clearly not his buttprint.

now at this point we'd gotten derailed twice, and as unflappable as he'd been the first time, he was starting to get a little defensive. so he said perhaps someone with a large butt sat down after i got up, and i said why are you lying about where you were sitting, and he said why would i do that? and i said if i knew, i wouldnt be asking, and he said fine, i was driving by - and i said why didn't you just say you were driving by?!?!?!?! and he said because i didn't want you to think i was the kind of crazy person that would just stop his car to tell a stranger in a park that he, as a pediatrician, could tell that your parents REALLY cared about tummy time!

then he left. angrily. he actually stomped back to his car. i dont know when i started laughing but i didnt stop until i got home. my voice is still all scratchy right now. ive been in a little bit of a writing funk but i had to get this down while i could still remember it so perfectly.

Anyway apparently Mr. Eclipse made 5000 years' worth of solar eclipse graphics, which you can find the simpler versions of here

Which they thought was very funny, even if I was slightly less amused, but I bided my time until they got tired of the joke and stopped specifically asking. Then I poured all the remaining zombie ass chili-garlic worm powder into a bag of party mix. The first guy to take a bite spluttered, and I laughed, and everyone said WHAT DID BABS DO, and I said THE WOOOORMS… YOU FORGOT TO ASK… OHMYGOD… and then I laughed so hard I actually cried. Derailed the start time almost an hour.

Thinking about more now... Biped... Bigamy... Binary... Bisexual...

So "Zeta" is like "Sex" or "Sei" or "Zes" as an arithmonym.

Some favorites from the notes (including one tag response to the above)