Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
AI slop in Springer books:
https://mastodon.social/@JMarkOckerbloom/114217609254949527
Originally noted here: https://hci.social/@peterpur/114216631051719911
I should add that I have a book published with Springer. So, yeah, my work is being directly devalued here. Fun fun fun.
There arenāt really many other options besides Springer and self-publishing for a book like that, right? Iāve gotten some field-specific article compilations from CRC Press, but I guess thatās just an imprint of Routledge.
What happened was that I had a handful of articles that I couldnāt find an āofficialā home for because they were heavy on the kind of pedagogical writing that journals donāt like. Then an acqusitions editor at Springer e-mailed me to ask if Iād do a monograph for them about my research area. (I think they have a big list of who won grants for what and just ask everybody.) I suggested turning my existing articles into textbook chapters, and they agreed. The book is revised versions of the items I already had put on the arXiv, plus some new material I wrote because it was lockdown season and I had nothing else to do. Springer was, I think, the most likely publisher for a niche monograph like that. One of the smaller university presses might also have gone for it.
i have coauthorship on a book released by Wiley - they definitely feed all of their articles to llms, and itās a matter of time until llm output gets there too
On the other hand, your book gains value by being published in 2021, i.e. before ChatGPT. Is there already a nice term for āthis was published before the slop flood gates openedā? There should be.
(I was recently looking for a cookbook, and intentionally avoided books published in the last few years because of this. I figured that the genre is a too easy target for AI slop. But that not even Springer is safe anymore is indeed very disappointing.)
Can we make ālow-background mediaā a thing?
Good one!
āPre-slopnamiā works well enough, I feel.
EDIT: On an unrelated note, I suspect hand-writing your original manuscript (or using a typewriter) will also help increase the value, simply through strongly suggesting ChatGPT was not involved with making it.
The revenge of That One Teacher who always rode you for having terrible handwriting.
Canāt wait until someone tries to Samizdat their AI slop to get around this kind of test.
AI bros are exceedingly lazy fucks by nature, so this kind of shit should be pretty rare. Combined with their near-complete lack of taste, and the risk that such an attempt succeeds drops pretty low.
(Sidenote: Didnāt know about Samizdat until now, thanks for the new rabbit hole to go down)