Snyunho

You don't see the preparations made in advance to be able to tolerate the event.

You don't see the discomfort or pain they're experiencing during the event.

You don't see the rest after the event.

You don't see the crash or flare up that the event may cause.

Is iNaturalist going to become irrelevant because AI gets too good for us to know if something is a photo or a generated image??? DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS???

I earnestly believe that the only reason AI is being pushed on us so much is for certain people to gain power over the information that is fed to us by just bombarding the Internet with so much AI slop, finding verifiable content from humans will be almost impossible.

I refuse to get rid of my physical media because of this. I kept all my textbooks from college. I encourage you to do the same.

Our web searches are being filled with more and more AI-generated slop. GenAI creates misinformation that can be difficult to tell apart from the correct answer to whatever question you're looking up. GenAI mixes things up that have similar names. In one example that is especially easy to recognize, genAI has thought that a baseball team and the bird that it was named after must both be the same creature, with a bizarre combination of their eating habits and behaviors. This mistake still happens with specialized topics that could be harder for you to recognize unless if you're already very familiar with the topic in question. GenAI also makes up fake sources and facts out of thin air, and you can't tell until you try to find them somewhere else. The tech is more like advanced predictive text than something capable of research or reasoning, even though it can look enough like it that it can fool you if you don't know how to spot its mistakes.

Not only are the results of genAI unreliable, the source texts and images that they’re based on were used without permission. Sometimes they aren't modified enough to avoid plagiarism, but it's worse than that. Source images have turned out to be private medical photos and intimate personal photos that hackers had stolen and leaked to harass the people in the photos. Another reason why this technology is unethical is that each genAI query has such a high energy cost that it's significantly harmful to the environment, contributing to the climate crisis.

Here are some things that you can do when you use Google, DuckDuckGo, or other conventional general web search engines:

To turn off Google's AI Overview, set "web" as default. Here's how to do that on your devices and web browsers.

Add this string to any web search to only show results from before the genAI fad. Before:2021

Install the web browser extension uBlacklist. You give it a list of web addresses to not show you in your web searches anymore. Other people maintain lists for it that you can subscribe to so that you won’t see certain types of results in your web searches. Follow the instructions in Laylavish’s Huge AI Blocklist to subscribe to that list which will rid your web search results of AI-generated pages or images.

Since genAI slop is getting to be such a big problem on them, use alternatives to conventional general web search engines some of the time:

Use a specialized search engine instead of a general one. For example, if you only wanted to find a particular science article, there are specialized search engines that only look for those. The blog post "Skip Google for Research" has a list of specialized search engines for academics.

GenAI is notoriously bad at math because that’s too far outside the scope it was designed for: advanced predictive text. In any case, genAI is overpowered for math that is easy for computers to do. If you want to use a very advanced calculator, or even ask a math question in natural language, use Wolfram Alpha.

For questions about how to do things, look them up in WikiHow, the Youtube channel Dad, How Do I? or The Ultimate Manuals Library.

You can search within Wikipedia, but unfortunately vandals have been putting machine-generated falsehoods into it, as well as genAI images. To avoid this, use the article history to view versions of the article from before 2022.

Ask yourself if there are some topics that you often do a web search for just because you keep forgetting an answer to something. Start saving those answers in a book or file that you can refer to offline. This is called a commonplace book. For an example of one, Beth and Angel made theirs into a zine, Stuff I Often Google.

How about a completely different sort of web search than present-day Google or DuckDuckGo? Marginalia Search only brings up results that are text-heavy and similar to the web of the 1990s and 2000s. Its software is independent and open-source.

My therapist asked me to create something “motivating” so I made these.

Not only did this experiment prevent plagiarism, it also taught her students to become better writers and thinkers.

"No screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers, or delete keys."

Concerning the AI papers she kept receiving: “What’s the point of me reading it if it’s already correct anyway, and you didn’t write it yourself? Could you produce it without your computer?”

From one of her students,

“ 'While writing the essay, I had to talk a lot more, socialize a lot more, which I guess was normal back then...it’s drastically different from how we interact within the classroom in modern times. People are always on a laptop, always on the phone.' Without a delete key and the ability to correct every mistake, he paused to think more intentionally about his writing."

"Most students found their pinkies weren’t strong enough to touch-type, so they typed more slowly, pecking at the keyboard with their index fingers."

Another student said,

" 'This thing I handed in had pencil marks all over it and definitely did not look clean or finished. But it’s part of the process of learning that you’re going to make mistakes'..."

All this in a college level foreign language class. I cannot imagine attempting to pass a language class using AI and then expect to somehow magically speak it! Why pay buckets of money to be taught something and then refuse to actually learn it?