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by eduction4 hours ago |
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upvoteby coffeefirst31 minutes ago|
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Maybe. But at least she gave a shit enough to actually write something you didn’t like.

The sloplings don’t even bother.

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upvoteby Igrom3 hours ago|
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Not taking away the right to your opinion, but I couldn't disagree more; I found it an excellent sociological article. One, it takes the formal concept of "bullshit" and applies it to knitting in a very methodical and strict manner. I found it novel and convincing, and the examples were great; not contrived or forced at all. IMO it was much better than many academic books or articles; an immediate share.

Two, the turns of logic are clearly laid out, in a conversational way, which would make it easy to stick a wrench in and form a polemic if you found any of her arguments or logical implications specious. That said, that does make the article quite long. But then, it is anything other than "elliptical", which I think you used as "runs in circles and repeats itself often", while it actually means "omits parts and thus is difficult to understand" (like the ellipsis sign: …).

Also: what the heck is wrong with that podcast farm founder. I hope they have a bad year.

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upvoteby antonvs3 hours ago|
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You only had to reach the second paragraph to find the example of an 8-person company that uses AI to generate “about 3000 podcast episodes per week, hosted by AI personalities.”
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upvoteby phoronixrly3 hours ago|
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Yeah, well good thing that LLMs are good at summarizing articles, unlike generating believable knitting images.
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upvoteby ivankelly3 hours ago|
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I was a couple of images in before I sussed it. Bullshit images, but pleasing enough to look at. Without the images, it would have either been a big wall of text, which would have put me off reading, though I did give up about 25% of the way through after sussing the images and thus the incoherence in the argument. The images bring something to the article. They were cheap/quick to generate. The increase the potential payoff (more reader) without significantly increasing the cost. Without the images, the payoff(readers) would likely have been lower, below the cost of actually writing the article. Same goes for a history of knitting podcast or that video. Production costs would not be worth it for a very niche viewership.
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upvoteby frereubu2 hours ago|
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Reading that made me feel like you wanted to be contrarian from the get-go and dismiss the article with the least effort possible. The whole point of the images is that they're low-effort AI slop, it's part of what she's trying to point to when someone is generating unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting.
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upvoteby ivankelly1 hours ago|
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I came in indifferent but it doesn’t take much to make me give up on an article linked on hacker news. I use it as bubblegum while waiting for a compile/prompt, intent ally for stuff that can be dropped easily. I saw her disclaimer at the end. My point was that the slop images make a more appealing article than if they were absent
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upvoteby josh_s2 hours ago|
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The AI images were deliberate and part of the narrative. Ie, you can generate slop with zero effort.

from TFA: "All of the images in this post were generated by an ai in response to the simple two-word prompt “lovely knitting”

Edit: ps: Kate Davies is an actual creator who has been creating knitting patterns for years.

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upvoteby ivankelly1 hours ago|
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Yes, I saw. By giving up I meant I skimmed to the end. The images improve the article
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upvoteby Slow_Dog2 hours ago|
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So you're saying you can spot AI generated bullshit, but not spot a deliberate and hilarious contrivance that the author uses to reinforce their point?
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