This is why the aitechbrodude will never understand opposition to AI. They don’t understand anything of substance.
Wow!
AI is like Uber for Cliffs Notes!Imagine how much time we could save if we got an AI summary of the Cliffs Notes.
I did one better!
Give me an elevator pitch of the top 10,000 works of literature and philosophy throughout history. Ima speed-run me into a sage this afternoon.
Humanity wrestles with meaning, morality, power, suffering, love, and the search for truth—across every age and culture, we tell stories and ask questions to understand ourselves, each other, and the world, forever torn between hope and despair, freedom and fate, reason and mystery.
I’m now a sage!
Old Yeller: a book about murdering dogs.
to kill a mockingbird: a book about justice properly administered in the american deep south.
Same thing with whatshisface that runs Microsoft.
There was an article recently about how he “enjoys podcasts”… by feeding the transcript of the podcast into the AI, letting it summarise it, and having a conversation with the AI about the podcast on his commute to work.
Comically missing the point that a podcast is a performative medium; the presenter(s) telling you the story is a part of the artform, which you’ve just lost. Turn off tech-bro brain, just for a minute, and actually engage in the product as it was intended.
It just boggles the mind, do they really think they’ve stumbled on some sort of secret the rest of us have been sleeping on?
I think thats the whole thing people love about AI, it was the same with the expensive pictures. Tech lads thinking they were early with the secret sauce no one had found. The boys just wanna feel like they are the smart ones for once.
Expensive pictures?
Apologies, I couldn’t think of the word but yes, NFTs.
Probably NFTs
Ah. Right. I forgot those were a thing once.
I remember studying a Broadway play for drama class in middle school, and the original plan was to go watch it alongside our studying of it. However, 9/11 had just happened, and the idea of going to New York City at that time scared enough parents that the fieldtrip was cancelled.
The teacher lamented that we weren’t going to get the full, proper experience of the play without seeing it performed live. Even reading it in a classroom was considered a low bar.
And now, here we are, expecting AI to summarize a script, a script which already fails to capture everything the play would’ve provided.
We’re making copies of copies, and nobody’s refilling the toner.
You can experience what every living thing has experienced by dying. Everything dies. May as well skip the journey and head to the end/summary?
Dude you hit the nail on the head. This should only be done with questionable books that don’t have the best plot, idea or premise to find out if it’s worth reading or not if you don’t want to ask people and wait for a response for several hours or days until they respond lol. :3
Why eat, when you can just get someone else to lick it and tell you what it tasted like?
No thanks. I’d rather feed a robot and have it vomit into my mouth.
pro tip: you can basically visit > 100 cities per day for free by using google street view.
VR does kind of scratch this itch a bit. I’ve done flyovers/360 tours of places I’ve lived and visited and its certainly more immersive than photos.
As a poor person in the US, I treat Geoguessr like a virtual street tour around random parts of the world. Actually traveling would be nice, but seeing real life on street view is fascinating in its own way.
Pro tip: you can basically… 100… free of charge… without consent… not committing a single crime… by visiting PornHub… Never mind.
This is kind of like me when I don’t really want to watch a movie or show but I want to know what is it about so I just watch a summarized commentary on YouTube for a fraction of the time
… only I’m aware I don’t really want to watch it in the first place
There’s so many movies I get recommended which are just awful. Reading the Wikipedia entry and plot is often all I need to understand if it’s worth it or not.
Imdb rating does it for me. Unless it’s something I want to watch regardless, I’m unlikely to bother with anything below a 7/10.
I always discover that one or two episodes in. It’s always that it’s a good idea executed poorly.
The fan wiki is great when you just want more of the idea but to skip the cruddy details.Yes, that’s the case. Good direction can turn the most banal story into something interesting, but that’s a rare trait, and on top of that shows and film are teamwork that also needs to answer to producers/investors/broadcasters interests and requirements. Keeping an idea fresh, with good pacing, and interesting taking all that into account is very hard.
Or you can just read the plot summary on Wikipedia which is going to be vastly more accurate because it was written by humans and not some shitty LLM.
Right? This keeps happening when people try to sell me on LLMs. We already had better solutions for some of this stuff.
I can also ask someone else to read a book for me, but I don’t get any enjoyment from that.
You won’t learn anything from mere summaries. But the better way to use AI, is to just get it to reference tons of material, then go do the research yourself.
I used to say this about social media when everyone was going off about Critical Race Theory and saying all these “gotchas” that were addressed in the book: Just read the book. Don’t listen to random people to tell you how to think, just read it and form an opinion. If the entire thought process could be summarized in a tweet, then author would’ve done that. It’s a book because you need that much information to understand it.
Not looking good for us all.
Finding sources is part of the research process btw.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and amid revolution and resurrection, two cities bore witness to sacrifice as Sydney Carton, seeking redemption, found “a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.”
I want off this rock
To be sort of fairish, I get the impression that anyone who would say that is the sort of person who could read a book cover to cover and manage to not get anything more than a rough outline of the plot out of it anyway.
Yes, but you see, now they can “read” the outline, and end up with just enough memory of it to reference the work in a condescendingly authoritative opinion about it.
I’m sort of looking forward to a techbro trying to condescendingly tell me that Crime and Punishment is about a man who goes to prison or The Stranger is about a guy who randomly kills another guy or One Hundred Years of Solitude is about a Mexican family.or Moby Dick is about a whale.
I was trying to look up a quote I thought was from parody CEO Hand Scorpio from the Simpsons, but it’s from Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec.
“Metaphors? I hate metaphors! That’s why my favorite book is Moby Dick; no froo froo symbolism, just a good simple tale about a man who hates an animal”.
Either way, it’s a great parody of artistic illiteracy of business bros, even without the A.I summary, they would have said the same shit. Most the time they’re reading non-fiction guru-self-help with a bro friendly veneer anyway.
As an entirely different tangent, I’m someone who is qualified in the arts and pretty bad at the sciences, but I’m always amazed how naturally people in the sciences pick up the art. I’m talking mathematicians and electrical engineers. I have no idea if it’s that they know how to learn from a background where it’s necessary, or if their brains have just developed connections in a transferable place. Maybe it’s even just a coincidence and just random correlation I’ve seen. Either way, I’d worry art was deceptively easy if not for the fact that armchair pseudo-intellectual business bros are absolutely awful at making and understanding it.
Regarding your tangent - I think that individual brains work in relatively fixed ways that are established early on - likely at least in part genetically, then refined mostly in infancy and early childhood. There’s a fairly wide range of things a brain can do, but even beyond likely genetic inclinations, there’s not enough available energy or time for individuals to develop all of them, or even generally most of them. And once established, I think they’re fairly fixed - the individual brain already has a number of set paths that it follows and specific regions that are most well-developed, and the body focuses on maintaining those rather than building new ones.
And a lot of the things that we recognize as distinct fields are actually comprised of multiple abilities.
So yeah - you end up with seeming oddities like mathematicians also generally having some artistic/creative ability and business majors generally not having any. The underlying abilities that make mathematics a rewarding field necessarily include abstract thinking, while those underlying business do not - business thinking is necessarily very concrete.
And it’s s perennial problem when people who are especially skilled in one particular type of thinking believe that that means they’re skilled in “thinking” in a broad sense, so able to meaningfully comment on things that are actually entirely outside of their skill set - like tech bros pontificating about art (or my personal biggest pet peeve - research scientists pontificating about philosophy).
you can also read the descriptions
OK, I’m taking it all back. This really works!
Country Work & Author Elevator Pitch Russia Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) A married woman’s passionate affair shatters her life and exposes the hypocrisy of high society[5]. Nigeria Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe) A proud Igbo leader’s world unravels as colonialism and tradition collide. France Les Misérables (Victor Hugo) An ex-convict’s quest for redemption transforms lives amid revolution and injustice. Japan The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu) A nobleman’s romantic adventures reveal the beauty and fragility of Heian court life. Colombia One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez) Generations of a family grapple with love, loss, and magical fate in a mythical town. United States To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) A young girl confronts racism and injustice in the Deep South through her father’s courage[5]. Germany Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) A scholar makes a deal with the devil, risking his soul for ultimate knowledge and pleasure. India The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy) Twins recall a childhood tragedy that forever alters their family in postcolonial Kerala. China Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin) A noble family’s rise and fall mirrors the fleeting beauty and sorrow of love and fortune. Italy The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri) A journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise reveals the soul’s path to redemption. I am now a great knower of literature from all around the world!
Who knew that 石头记 was so simple in the end?! Why did 曹雪芹 spend so much effort writing such a simple observation!?
The best part is that they don’t even need to be real books! Here’s one from DeepSeek: “The book ‘Lunar Employment for Undergraduates’ by Kurt Langer offers practical advice and strategies for finding employment after completing undergraduate studies in Southern Africa.”
Ugh seems like a bore to read. AI, please summarize and ELI5 using 2010 memes.
