DROID, PLEASE.

I am gonna be a little self-aggrandising and post this on public rather than reply privately so that I don't lose this LOVELY MESSAGE you beautiful human being dropped in my inbox! Thank you so much my love, this absolutely made my week <3 I really enjoyed writing about the whales (I would never write anything bad about my spacewhales, how very dare); it's probably been one of my favourite short stories to write, albeit the one where I was blatantly fudging all of the science

Perihelion...I'll be honest, there was less meaning behind that name and more 'find a space-related word that sounds pretty and use it as a name' (perihelion being the point in an orbit where a planet or comet is closest to the sun) so I can only assume that the other writer did likewise :D

i feel like i don’t post enough/any of my mel doods so here’s some of my recent faves

Part 2 of Eridian Design Committee for the Biodome of Saviour Grace. Part 1 is here.

EWC by @justcakethanks

Eridian Design Committee for the Biodome of Saviour Grace.

EWC by @justcakethanks

Beautiful mental image thank you this is now free treasure

Of course it is not good that people are using AI unquestioningly and accepting whatever answers it gives them.

It is also very fucking bad that people are not double checking ragebait news headlines, are lamenting "trends" that are a single deranged twitter user on a rant, or are seeing something third-hand in a post that drastically misinterpreted the source material and using that as the foundation for their reactionary viewpoints.

As somebody who is critical of AI it is crazy-making to see so many people talking about how AI kills your critical thinking abilities while citing points from a tumblr post of a screenshot of a news article that overasserted a claim made in a paper they didn't read that circulated and picked up tens of thousands of notes from people being confidently wrong about water use and power consumption (based on numbers from 2021-2022) IN ADDITION to using language that the authors of the paper explicitly begged people not to use when discussing their research (which, of course, the rebloggers never saw because they read a reblog of a screenshot of a news article that overstated a claim, not the paper that made the claim).

For instance, in the paper that everyone loves to talk about when they say that AI is making people stupider (the cognitive offloading one), nobody ever brings up the fact that the group that used their brain only for the first few instances of the task had higher overall performance than the AI-using group and the search engine using group and then had higher performance over their own previous metrics when using AI in an optional instance at the end of the study.

- Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot Diaries, on ADHD and autism