Knitting bullshit

eduction

Extremely long winded. I think this person is trying to throw stones at someone else’s work, but their own is so elliptical I lost the will to find out.

globular-toast

Why does this site want to access apps and services on my local network? On topic, I do wonder how "the market" is going to sort this out. At this moment I'm leaning towards just banning this shit, but maybe there is a better way?

dsign

TL;DR: there are brainrot farms with help from AI. But I saw this one coming three or four years ago. Actually, I've been listening to AI-generated brainrot music. I prefer it to some human-generated brainrot music (there's "I Hate Boys" from Christina Aguilera. Sorry if you are a fan). Brainrot serves a specific social purpose: relieving stress, incoherently winning elections. It's a kind of drug that dulls the dangerous part of the brain while leaving the he-is-a-good-tool and she-is-blonde brain hemispheres in working order. In fact, I do believe that if there were to be an uprising in a couple of decades against AI, and the human side were to rise victorious, the aftermath's social order would be studiously anti-AI and anti-science, but they would make a carve-out for AI brainrot (yes, I published a short fiction story with that premise, because I'm brainrot-vers).

quibono

Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?

frereubu

I wonder if (or, more accurately hope that) this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. I am more and more convinced that if the devil existed he'd take care of the bigger stuff, but have an army of little devils that encourage people to do things like make unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting, relentlessly chipping away at the messy joys of living.

praptak

I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion. I'm specifically thinking of a print magazine that was designed to make you feel like you are a smart reader of science articles, without any useful information about the actual science or technology.

whilenot-dev

Interestingly, Inception AI seem to have pivoted from content slop for "gardening, [...] knitting, cooking" - or "things we can afford to be wrong" - to "AI Immigration Drafting Software for Law Firms": https://www.inceptionai.co/ I'm somewhat curious how that'll work out. Hint: I'm not. EDIT: My bad, wrong company, it's "Inception Point AI": https://www.inceptionpoint.ai/

augment_me

I like the blog but the premise of the blog is an engineering/epistemological perspective on the craft. The writer clearly cares more about the process, technique and history more than the feeling and validation. It could be, that a big part of the the future of hobby's and entertainment in this way is the feeling and validation over the actual performance. Or it can be that a massive amount of people find their value in this content.

afandian

It's scandalous that no-one has yet posted Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon "Bullknitters". https://www.instagram.com/p/C2OQtokvzCa/ (or google image search)

tmountain

For someone complaining about slop, I found this unreadable.

Michelangelo11

> one of the most pernicious things about this particular kind of bullshit is the way it casts any form of critical scrutiny as a terrible failure of sensibility. What a great line. And you'll probably notice this technique being used by very skilled bullshitters and master manipulators: any request for rigor or scrutiny is met by something like genteel condescension. You're treated as if you've committed a breach of etiquette, and that's one of the reasons the technique is powerful -- you're likely to feel embarrassed and, following that, to back off.

roxolotl

Wow I’d never have expected Kate Davies to show up on Hacker News. I think it’s important to understand her background a bit when she talks about knitting as a matter of life and death. She was a scholar of 18th century literature before she suffered a stroke young[0]. She focused on knitting as a means of recovery and never looked back. She built a business and a community and attributes a lot of her physical and mental health to knitting. So while this post hopefully hits a chord for anyone in a creative field she embodies a particular type of person for whom slop is a genuine risk to their being. Not their job; their whole personhood. In a world where slop has chased out the humanity of things and the bullshit machines fill all content what are the chances someone like her could build a second life better than her first? 0: https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2015/01/28/five-years-on-part-...

MITSardine

Great article, thanks for sharing. I didn't know (but should have assumed) AI-generated podcasts existed. That's depressing. I imagined if mankind had the ideal machine, that could automate anything, we would get rid of dull office work and back breaking physical labor, but not the things that are actually enjoyable: sharing with each other, entertaining each other, making art. I imagined a lively world of live performance and creation, since all subsistence work had been taken care of. Instead we might end up in the world of fifteen million merits. It seems people don't mind letting their minds be hacked by machines that can create the form of what they find enjoyable, if not the substance. But I guess there's always been slop and the public for it. To imagine actual people wasting their limited time on Earth listening to these GPT logorrhea podcasts is truly depressing. The unchemical soma. What are we even supposed to spend our days doing in this bright future of the AI champions'? Stop automating away the things that give people purpose, tackle real problems instead.

tlb

I like how the pictures got more and more sloporific through the essay. It doesn't mention an important group being harmed: the creators who make high-quality, sincere podcasts about knitting. Their genuine content gets buried under a mountain of slop. In theory, recommendation algorithms ought to surface the best stuff, but that doesn't seem to align with incentives. Sad.

card_zero

I feel like the alt captions for the images, although diligent and thorough, don't really capture the most important aspects.

telesilla

I can absolutely recommend the book On Bullshit, it's a tiny read and makes an excellent gift. Kate's article summarizes it very well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit This reddit comment puts it perfectly: "What’s it about? Frankfurt tries (successfully) to define bullshit (rather academically). In short, a bullshit artist is solely focused on persuasion and making an impression, not caring about truth. Paradoxically, bullshit can be true. What makes it bullshit is how it is created - shoddily, hastily and without regard for fine work. A gifted liar does their thing carefully so that the truth cannot be found out. A bullshit artist just flings it out, overwhelming skepticism with sheer volume, until something sticks with the audience." https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1pidpb2/on_bullshit_... An 1980s take on something that has taken over our 2020s digital airwaves, indeed.

trgn

it's really disheartening that so much youtube content is now AI generated.

ipsento606

Increasingly, my reaction to AI-generated content of basically all types is simply a deep, resonant sadness. The growth of AI feels a little like losing a limb - there is an initial shock of sadness, an initial dose of loss, an initial sense of what has been taken away. But then for months and years afterwards, the daily occurrence of some other little humdrum experience, and only at the moment of the encounter does one think, "Ah yes, this too is forever changed." Like sounding the depths of a dark well, where every day you lower the rope a little further, but every day there is nothing to feel but a pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.

dzink

The economist in me immediately asks: Where is the financial incentive to do this? Just the same way the programmer would ask what the stack is. Some possibilities: 1) Money laundering - large content farm someone can argue makes xyz in revenue to hide an alternate source of revenue. 2) Ad fraud - leading up podcast charts or SEO results to attract clicks to sell ads. Bot farms could also be making clicks to pretend sell ads as well. 3) Attempt to dominate the niche for sale of knitting products. Or to pretend to dominate it so they can sell their the business later at a larger multiple. 4) Test the waters of a much bigger engine for doing 1-3 above in an innocuous hidden subject, before they do it with elections or some other more profitable field. Regulatory waters as well - seeing what they can get away with. Feel free to brainstorm more incentives for making something like this.

alphawhisky

Their dialogue on "substituting truth and validity with a register of emotional validation" is pretty prevalent across the entirety of US culture right now. The first thing that comes to mind for me are Christian groups that do a lot of celebrating during services or events with absolutely no goodwill, volunteering, or donating at all. They're real good at making you feel righteous, but awful at actualizing it. Hate the hollowing out of traditions that used to make communities and people great.