This is why the aitechbrodude will never understand opposition to AI. They don’t understand anything of substance.
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.
You don’t even have to go that far, just read the back cover.
pro tip: you can basically visit > 100 cities per day for free by using google street view.
Pro tip: you can basically… 100… free of charge… without consent… not committing a single crime… by visiting PornHub… Never mind.
bruh you cropped out the Tolstoy. it’s like leaving in the middle of a knock knock joke.
War and Peace is funny.
Almost a thousand? (idk i read it in high school) pages about how Great Man theory is bunk, the individual doesn’t matter, but we get drawn into the drama of individuals for the entire bulk of the thing.
Ivan Illych is the better of his work.
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?
Removed by mod
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.
This guy made a joke and a bunch of Twitter users took it seriously. Context.
This guy made a joke that reads identically to the kinds of things people have been saying without a hint of humour since the ignoble days of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books up to, yes, people saying almost exactly the same thing as he said here and people took him at face value. This is despite knowing that Poe’s Law is a thing.
How terrible.
Generally if people don’t “get” your joke, there’s one of two things likely happening:
- Your joke wasn’t funny.
- This was a Schrodinger’s Joke: serious until someone says something bad about it after which it becomes “Gosh, all y’all just can’t take a joke!”
Generally if people don’t “get” your joke, there’s one of two things likely happening:
Or option three, which happened here: someone attempted satire or dark humor and didn’t realize society had degenerated so much that people were genuinely, seriously, advocating for the satirical claim.
Imagine Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” - a suggestion that poor Irish people sell their children to be eaten for food, which would both reduce the burden on poor families and provide delicious sustenance for wealthy Englishmen. Now imagine a bunch of English people saying “this is a great idea, I’ve supported it for a long time now”. And then a bunch of Irish people attacking Jonathan Swift, believing he genuinely supported eating Irish children, because a bunch of English people actually supported it.
You might wonder how it could be possible, that people would confuse satirical attacks on exaggeratedly stupid and evil positions for actual support for those positions.
But then you might remember there are sitting members of Congress suggesting we literally feed immigrants to alligators to thunderous fucking applause.
And then you might remember satire is dead.
Or option three, which happened here: someone attempted satire or dark humor and didn’t realize society had degenerated so much that people were genuinely, seriously, advocating for the satirical claim.
Oh? This was his first time on Twitter then? If so, the error is forgivable.
No, wait. It isn’t. Reader’s Digest has been doing “condensed books” in its magazines since the 1930s. People have been pitching things like Coles Notes since 1948 and Cliffs Notes since 1958. And even in the world of tech there’s been Blinkist since 2013.
So expressing surprise to negative reactions to opining that LLMbeciles are “good” for summarizing complex novels given – checks notes – almost a century of people gleefully doing just that is either ignorance of staggering proportions or disingenuousness of even more staggering proportions.
This was pretty much a Schrodinger’s Joke.
You are the OP, you literally removed someone’s tweet from it’s original context (or reposted without fact checking) and presented it here with an entirely different, false context. The fact that it’s being misinterpreted is 100% on you for presenting it inaccurately, not the guy who’s words you misrepresented.
I actually upvoted this before deciding to fact check which took me no more than ten seconds.
Ho ho ho, you fell for my little trap by believing the words I wrote!
2 definitely does happen a lot with conservatives, but I think it’s a stretch to suggest it happened here. The evidence @kirk@startrek.website provided seems a little inconclusive to me (I’d really want to see a broader history of satirical comments and/or anti-AI-hype comments prior to this tweet to be the real proof, not an after-the-fact comment which could be taken either way), but on the face of it taking the first tweet seriously is a bit ridiculous. Had they used some self-help book or a piece of genre fiction (even excellent quality genre fiction) it might have become a bit more ambiguous (even then, the idea that someone would sincerely hold out the idea of AI summaries as being equivalent to actually reading a book is a fucking stretch), but using Tolstoy? Someone famous for the quality of his prose? Give me a break. Nobody believes that.
1 is obviously just subjective and meaningless. Personally, had I seen the original tweet without context, I think I would have found it funny as a parody of the AI-hyping techbros. You’re welcome to disagree, but only insofar as you disagree that you personally found it funny. You are not welcome to make a generic sweeping statement that “it was not funny”.
Read.
The.
Thread.
You claimed to have read the evidence.
Read it.
Closely.
A very large proportion of respondents took it straight. Apparently it was not funny to a lot of people.
So if a large number of people didn’t “get” your joke (presuming the joke isn’t something deeply technical like half the jokes, say, of XKCD), your joke just sucked. Or it wasn’t a joke until people reacted badly. One of the two.
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?
Probably NFTs
Ah. Right. I forgot those were a thing once.
Apologies, I couldn’t think of the word but yes, NFTs.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This has got to be sarcasm.
We are flirting with Poe’s Law, yes. But I have seen people express similar thoughts in dead earnestness dating as far back as Reader’s Digest condensed books, so for decades people have been looking for shortcuts to comprehension of art.
Just ignore what random people write on X. They write all kinds of stupid opinions there.
I can also ask someone else to read a book for me, but I don’t get any enjoyment from that.
