Not only is the summary kinda light or missing the deeper points, the LLM did not “break down” the plot by “reading” the provided PDF. House of Leaves is impossible to fucking parse correctly as a PDF, the text is all over the place, visually placed in very complex ways, you have a whole labyrinth chapter where you have to follow footnotes across multiple pages with the text being difficult to find and follow, anything “reading” the PDF in the regular order of characters would have no fucking clue.
As always, there is no intelligence or any breaking down, the only reason the LLM is able to provide the summary is because it was trained on a dataset that included summaries and reviews of House of Leaves, and it simply detected the PDF was House of Leaves.
The LLM is, YET AGAIN, just regurgitating things that are already written elsewhere, nothing is created, it’s all obfuscation of labour.
This is what irks me the most about “AI” is that it operates on already created data we as humans have made, there is no actual creation occuring with these LLMs just taking up materials done beforehand by people and touting the conclusion as it’s own. Fucking stagnancy incarnate.
LLMs automate the experience of talking to a tech bro
Like talking to something that wears a human suit with the cold piercing eyes of a reptile
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yea, it’s data transformation but there is zero intelligence, context or anything “new”.
The tool itself is fine when used clearly and purposefully, and those kinds of tools have been used for a long time in various fields, the problem I have with the current hype trends of ““AI”” is that literally nothing fundamentally new was made. People aren’t being informed on how these things really work and what they do, there’s a lot of dangerous practices and psychological manipulation, and above all these new large models are enormous labor-obfuscating machines. I don’t give a shit about private property, IP laws, etc (because I know that’s a common response), the problem is that these things are another layer of illusions, an enormous curtain hiding entire industries of data-scraping and theft, of countless people and hours of manual tagging, filtering, training, moderating and mechanical turks, in purely profit-seeking and reckless ways. And not only is all this labor not valued, people aren’t even aware it exists, people never have to interact directly with anyone along that production chain. Entire industries becoming ghosts, non-existent, and even more unable to organize and struggle for what they create.
Beyond that, class consciousness is ever harder to teach and agitate for in these domains, because shit like this is purposefully built to hide and disguise exploited labor (often from the labour force of the colonized and victims of imperialism) and privatization.
It’s not the stealing that’s the problem it’s the sneaky, rapid disruption and destruction of existing productions and jobs that it entails, and the privatization of colossal amounts of public data and user-generated data that nobody ever intended to be privatized and extracted for profits. It was always happening in the background of course, but i don’t think people realize the impact this will have, to me it’s like a closure of the internet-commons. Colossal explotation of Free Labour, the expansion of exploitation in every sphere of “content production” that was previously unreachable.
Drives me fucking insane.
So much art and literature both public and private was used to make these types of LLMs and yet no one truly talks about the consequence of stealing that labor and undervaluing it. So many tech bros love to shit on the arts because a robot can make something that is an amalgam of many artists and call it “art” but forget or willfully ignore the labor needed to create that data beforehand, again it’s labor exploitation just as you mentioned. Also yeah as used as data scrappers and aggregators these types of machines are amazing and something that should be used, it’s just that there needs to be actual human beings making sure the collected data is cleaned and properly organized or else it’s just vomiting out useless shit. The humans that do this type of cleaning work are so well hidden or outsourced to other countries that no one wants to acknowledge that there is no way to truly remove the need for human labor and inputs or else the “magic” of AIs would fizzle out and the current boom would turn to a bust cycle similar to when crypto was so fresh in everyone’s mind.
You can’t just ask an LLM “who the murderer was” to see if it understood the text, you have to ask which of the author’s kinks were being worked out through the story
The empty space between this motherfucker’s ears is the real life five and a half minute hallway
These fuckers really think that summarizing a novel’s plot is the same as “breaking it down”. Absolutely zero media literacy. To make it worse, they are proud of their illiteracy, even smug about it; “there you go, a breakdown of the novel. Easy. GPT does it all. QED.”
Really makes you see the sucking void at the center of our civilization when people go “Yes I will happily reduce understanding art to an engineering problem”
“Yes I will happily reduce understanding
artto an engineering problem”STEMcels tend to find living humans with consciousness to be inconvenient for their mechanistic worldview and seek to design them out of existence
Cool, we have our own Blindsight aliens right in our midst.
The literalist essays touted on YouTube as “breakdowns” are nothing more than fucking summaries and were a key symptom that literacy was always dead to the majority of tech bros and other STEM supremacist mfers in the west.
The fact that so much analysis of media is all about the “lore” as well. No one talking about what a series made them feel, or made them think, it’s solely about “OMG is this character SECRETLY Sans Undertale??!?!?!?!”
The newest trend of doing movie plots summed up with computerized voices makes my skin crawl, the curtains are blue because they are blue there is nothing else going on now omg watch this vid that offers nothing of value.
Yeah, I know what you mean, I have no idea how anyone could watch those. They get huge views for some reason, and for practically no effort, but I have no idea what the appeal is. You could just look up the wikipedia summary of the movie for the exact same effect.
Honestly I don’t want this to be a boomer ass take but my bet would be it’s easier for people to consume than looking up the plot and then reading it, a lot of media consumption is just geared towards a vague understanding of the plot of a film given how over abundant media is. Imagine telling the newest gen of kids that yeah there’s the extended cuts of the LOTR trilogy which is a cumulative 7-8 or so hours of film you have to sit through, I don’t think current attention spans could take it.
Kids can sit down and watch 7-8 hours of streaming content though. I don’t think it’s neccessarily that kid’s attention spans are completely broken, rather that they have so many things constantly vying for their attention that they dismiss content more easily because they’ve always known an abundance of media. A starving person won’t turn away any sort of food, but someone who has never been hungry can refuse to eat something for the shallowest of reasons. Or something.
I’d say that’s true, but also that many including myself put streaming vids and other such content in the background to create a secondary noise while we multitask on something else with brief moments of engagement. Also gotta say short form content that gets the message across far quicker than long form essays as well (Tiktok for instance has been pretty great at creating lots of short form leftist content to help inform). Still there’s just a part of me that wonders whether some of the blame can be laid at the feet of new media formats and distributes wanting quicker higher engagement content, and how this isn’t fostering healthy attention spans.
Reminds me of those “brief retrospective” style videos that are 2-8 hours of basically regurgitating the plot of a game and quests verbatim, no analysis or retrospective at all
The same people that consumes that slop and will also stare you down wihtout irony and say there is nothing political about Metal Gear Solid or that games like Spec Ops The Line are not anti-war pieces.
29·5 months agoLiterally everything user-facing uses Unicode today, how can you fuck up and get an output with \u??
It made no mention of the
Minotaur;0/10 shit LLM don’t try againHot take: I reread House of Leaves two years ago, haven’t read it since college. Weirdly found myself not enjoying it as much. Some cool ideas yeah but honestly felt like it thought it was smarter than it was. Perhaps that’s cuz “meta” fiction is way more common now so it feels a bit trite, I suppose back then it was more fresh. Also some of the characters felt shallow and I didn’t always buy their motivations.
But that’s just my opinion I guess
This kind of stuff was always my issue with most of the genre of ‘post-modern’ or ‘meta-fiction’. It doesn’t seem to have a real respect for traditional fiction itself as a complex medium to explore the human condition, the author being so detached that they can only think to use the medium to describe the human condition within fiction. Essentially creating a novel to do the job of the critic and theorist.
While interesting, it has always struck me as not actually that inventive, as this kind of metacriticism has been part and parcel of writing forever, even Aeacylus would include characters that were essentially cheap shots and criticisms of the state of plays and city life.
That doesn’t mean the portrayal of the medium of something like House of Leaves isn’t interesting, just that it probably isn’t as deep as it has pretense towards being.
Didn’t thr author intend the book to make fun of long winded academic texts? Don’t think you need to explore human nature to determine that’s annoying for everyone except the biggest nerds
I was in high school when it came out and loaned it to my English teacher. His assessment was pretty similar and I wasn’t happy at the time, but in retrospect, Mr. Hughes had it right.
I thought the whole Johnny being incapable of walking two feet without a beautiful woman offering him sex was going to be revealed as a bit of unreliable narrator. But no, I guess sleep deprived starving tattoo assistants losing their grip on sanity are just hot as fuck.
But no, I guess sleep deprived starving tattoo assistants losing their grip on sanity are just hot as fuck.
As a former member of the Philly punk scene, this isn’t inaccurate based on my experience.
was that not the implication? i mean, certainly some of it probably happened, but i did just assume that johhny (drunk madman) was not having the greatest times regardless of whatever he might say.
i figured that the sickening, unnerving, body-horror esq way that the woman with the Pekinese was described was closer to what was actually going on. i figured all these girls were somewhere between absolutely average and just having the worst times of their lives, like johnny, but we were getting his tilted/exagerated perspective - only one of these encounters was actually confirmed to have happened (as much as anything is ever confirmed in this book lol).
love that we’re pinning the future of the entire economy on this tech
just love that for us
We’d have to pay human beings (ew!) and build things (ew!) if we wanted to go back to making things again 🙄
First, borrow some screws from your aunt for the galvanized square steel. Cover it with eco-friendly wood veneer so it will last for 10,000 years
The entire book is basically a proto-LLM output.
Cluedo killed Colonel Mustard in the Ballroom with a Library meat clever. Thank you for the Gold, kind Stranger.
ChatGPT, who was the Scranton Strangler?
I’m still convinced it was Creed.
