People are getting a little too paranoid if you ask me, and it’s always tempting for people to jump on the bandwagon in order to make themselves feel cool or aloof or in-the-know or whatever else. I don’t hang around anywhere except Lemmy so I have no idea if it’s as bad as it is here, but it seems like any time basically any picture of any stripe gets posted there are always one or two dinguses who reflexively parrot “it’s AI!!!” and claim they can magically tell, even though it demonstrably isn’t. For extra hilarity, this occasionally includes people howling about how literal decades old image macros that were circulating in the first couple of years of the century are “obviously” AI because apparently it’s their first friggin’ time using the internet or something.
For the record, I vehemently loathe AI slop and the current crop of generative “AI” products in general, I don’t use any of them, and I never will. But people really can get carried away over this, too.
The infuriating thing is, this complaint isn’t even new. People just have a trendy and new justification to latch onto, but it’s the same as it ever was. Many, possibly even most, of the people going so far as to take time out of their day to screech “TL;DR!” at you are really just admitting that their attention span has been so utterly fried by long term exposure to algorithm-driven corporate social media that they’re no longer capable of picking up whatever it is you’re laying down. That, and also tacitly revealing that because they personally can’t keep from fidgeting long enough to churn out two full paragraphs, that must mean no one else can, either.
I’ve been dropping doorstoppers on people since the days of dial-up. Back then the refrain was slightly different, but the complaint was still the same. By now my body of work, for lack of a better word, is clearly established. Hell, I cranked out so many words on the internet back in the day that Epinions sent me a hat in the mail completely unprompted for being a loquacious enough bastard to reach their list of top 100 contributors. Hands up everyone here who has actually worn out a keyboard? I suspect there are not many of us left.
At this stage in my life I take the opinion that anyone who can’t handle the volume of my writing is free to attempt an airborne indignity on an ambulatory baked confectionery product. I don’t have to show my homework to anyone.