Jolene Meghan

my grandma is dying. she has lung cancer in both lungs. two weeks ago, my mom and i traveled ten hours to come be with and care for her in her final days because she doesn't have any additional help, and my extended family is absent and, quite frankly, horrible. between travel expenses, food, getting to and from the hospital (she's now discharged, thank god) and other necessities that have cropped up, i'm tapped out. i'm all out of money. i've spent $1200+ dollars, i've almost maxed out my credit card. i don't have anything else. and the last $300 in my checking account was swallowed up by walmart even though i didn't get 🙃 my fucking groceries. 🙃

anyway. my grams has a long list of needs that aren't covered by insurance. ice chip maker. hospital table. groceries, cleaning supplies. list goes on.

if you're able to help, my details are below. if you're not, a simple reblog or even a virtual hug would be greatly appreciated. thanks, love you. -j

pp: sunnstars

c$ap: $sunn5tars

the top one is the recent one, i just wanted a little collection of "parents can support their trans kids and no one went on fire or died"

and one for siblings:

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.

a close up to just... light shining through those waves, makes me feel faint with exhilaration every time