As a writer and reader, I hate LLMs.

I hate the way they were built. I hate that my past writing has been used for LLM training. I hate that specific people I know have used LLMs to try to replicate something I personally had been doing, and they didn’t give a damn if the result was shitty. I hate that I can’t use some of my favorite punctuation and phrasing patterns anymore without people thinking my writing is AI-generated, because surprise, that’s what happens when AI is trained on text written by people like me. I hate that I can’t fully prevent anything I share publicly from being used for AI training, although I’m damn well going to try. (Hey nonconsensual AI crawlers, enjoy trapping yourselves in Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth honeypot after I publish my next blogging project.) I don’t want my writing to contribute to this BS.

I hate that the writing communities where I first shared my writing as a teenager are (a) now populated with a fair amount of obvious AI slop and (b) scraped for AI training. I hate that self-publishing spaces are inundated with AI slop. I hate that websites that previously paid writers are now paying less, or not at all, or using the writers’ work to train/build AI. I hate the way my search results are filled with articles “written” with AI instead of humans. I hate that I can’t trust that information is accurate from sources I might have trusted in the past, just because I don’t know who was using AI for “research” with less caution than I would want.

I hate the way people reply to me with AI slop text and don’t even check it over it first in work-related situations. I hate many, many other things about how it’s impacted my career that I won’t get into here.

I hate the way so many people no longer respect the art form I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I hate knowing how little people care about good information, creativity, or any consideration other than speed of “production.”

I hate that I can’t even avoid AI by disconnecting from the internet. I hate that I can no longer trust that books were written by a human, depending on where I get them. I hate the way certain apps constantly remind me of all this BS, because they just had to make a really prominent AI button instead of a normal or (better yet) removable button. I hate that my friend’s goddamn washing machine has an AI setting, even though it has nothing to do with LLMs, because the world can never stop reminding you about AI.

Believe it or not, I too was once somewhat excited about AI. I thought AI would free me from the boring tasks so I could spend more time lovingly creating and appreciating art. Silly me.

Huh, interesting. I might try it and just lurk for a while. Thank you so much for sharing!

We can abbreviate it to K-Dub! Or maybe kʷə for those either have an expanded keyboard or are willing to copy-paste or find the superscript tool in whatever app they’re using or whatever. Kind of like how people shorten the country’s full name to America or the USA or the U.S.

(edited)

Even the young people are nostalgic for a time when new technology was actually cool rather than mostly being a way to more effectively use everyone’s data against them.

There’s also that 30-year cycle phenomenon where things from 3 decades ago become trendy again, like how 80s stuff got more popular again in the 2010s.

Hi, thanks for this comment! I’m not a very technical person and am still trying to sort through what all of this is. If I’m understanding correctly, the tildeverse is a bunch of connected communities for people who are interested in exploring Linux and other unix-based operating systems, using servers built on those systems, right? I might try Linux in the future, but I probably won’t switch over until my hardware is no longer compatible with new versions of MacOS. At the moment, the tildeverse looks a little over my head. Maybe I’ll come back to this idea later!

Yeah, I really don’t want to contribute to the ongoing loss of accessibility. People with disabilities have enough crap to deal with. They don’t need random extra barriers on websites they’d like to read. Otherwise, I’d probably use that font.

I hate Cloudflare as an internet user, but maybe that’s the best option right now. The AI Labyrinth looks pretty cool! That’s basically the only use of generative AI I’m ok with right now. Does it cause any accessibility issues for humans using screen readers or other assistive tech?

How would Unreal Engine or Godot work for that purpose? I haven’t heard that idea before!

As for putting the text in an image, my understanding is that scrapers can automatically use OCR.

Unfortunately, that analysis work is done by humans in poorer countries who get paid under $2/hr to sort through horrific content all day. The content might still get scraped, but the problematic parts would probably be de-weighted or left out. All you’d accomplish with that tactic is maybe contributing to an exploited Kenyan worker’s PTSD.

This is what “analysis done on content” looks like: https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

Yes. There have been plenty of cases of people prompting an LLM to write “in the style of” of a specific author. There are also AI-generated books being sold on Amazon under real authors’ names, AI-generated books flooding self-publishing spaces, and plenty of other issues. Sometimes that stuff gets taken down, but most of it continues and makes it harder for real writers to gain visibility. On the technical side of things, if you want to run a “successful” blog with useful information these days, good luck. Google doesn’t send nearly as many people to actual websites today, mostly because of AI overviews, and a lot of AI-powered SEO content is outranking the human writing in SERPs. Sites like Medium are also mostly AI slop now. Human writers are getting crowded out.

Much worse, a lot of real writers have been falsely accused of using AI. This is more of an issue if you blog or write articles, but it’s happened in fiction too. People will run your work through “AI detectors” even though none of them are that reliable. I’ve run into this issue before with my past writing (some things I wrote were “detected” as 20-60% AI-generated). AI is trained off of human writing patterns, so inevitably, people who have had their work over-represented in training data end up having AI-like writing patterns when really it’s the AI that sounds like them.

I hate what AI has done to writing communities, too. People accuse writers of using AI on social media all the time. The site where I posted fiction as a teen has a lot of unlabeled AI-generated stories these days, and it’s known that a lot of older stories were scraped, so things are looking worse for the next generation of writers.

I’ve also felt a huge decline in respect for writers of all kinds since 2022. A lot of people don’t read that closely and genuinely believe a chatbot’s output is equivalent, or at least good enough. And some of the people who do read closely are more suspicious. Like I said, there are plenty of false accusations of AI use going around. It’s just a much more antagonistic environment to write in.

And those are just some of my issues with AI. I really, really hate being forced to contribute to the technology causing all this bullshit.

Yeah, I was looking around at different posts, and that’s the conclusion I came to as well 😔 The closest thing to a functioning equivalent doesn’t appear to work much like Pinterest at all, at least not the way I’ve used it. I just want to add pretty/interesting images to boards for inspiration

Slightly off topic, but is there a Fediverse equivalent of Pinterest? I’m feeling the urge to make some boards. I want all the aesthetics please

OK, so Lemmy (or at least this corner of it) skews pretty hard toward atheism. That doesn’t match a typical IRL sample of people. OP, I think you should try to find some online spaces dedicated to different religions and see what people there have to say.

As for me, I was also non-religious at 25. A close friend, on the other hand, decided to join a church singles group, mostly for the community. I think a lot of people get into a religion for the community aspect. Some religious institutions have special groups for new/questioning people or young adults, and virtually all of them have volunteering groups of some sort.

You can also read books about different religions and see if anything resonates with you. I’ve done a little of this. It didn’t really lead my anywhere, but I’ve met people who got started that way.

You could also explore a particular religion for the heritage aspect. If your grandma was Catholic or your family came from a historically Buddhist part of the world, you could explore that. You might not end up believing in any of it, but at least you’ll know a little more about your heritage.

edit: also, make sure you get perspectives from people who are actually part of the religion when you’re exploring. I was raised Catholic, and it was ridiculous how many silly things the Protestants thought about us. A lot of the criticisms were outdated or straight up inaccurate, which was funny because there were plenty of current things to criticize (hello, scandals in the news?) I’m not trying to scare you away from Catholicism, most priests are normal non-abusers and it works for some people.

I’m puzzled that you think this is a uniquely American phenomenon. But to answer the rest of the question:

Most of these people are probably spending time on their causes that they’d otherwise spend working. Their need/desire for money didn’t suddenly go away.

1. Politicians need campaign money

2. Important figures in tech pretty much always want as much money as possible, whatever else they claim; that’s part of why they do what they do

3. A lot of feminists and social advocates probably need the money for their living expenses

Also, this plays into the norms of book publishing. People sometimes value things they pay for more. I tend to assume free books that aren’t classics are worse books, because in my experience, they often are. Traditional publishers usually won’t allow the book to be free (because they’re not charities, even if the book is about a cause), and self-published works have extremely variable quality.

I don’t agree. Yes, under our current rules, posting things in public means people can do things you might not like with your work. And technically you agreed to Instagram’s BS when you made an account. But for all practical purposes, the rules changed after the fact for most people.

Someone who made their Facebook account in 2009 couldn’t reasonably have guessed that their posts might be used to train misinformation machines that would be forced into everything in 2026. Most people could have conceived of strangers looking at their photos and maybe even photoshopping them, but could never have conceived of gen AI in its current form until it arrived. Bloggers could have conceived of people plagiarizing them or taking their words out of context, but not of having their own past work used to feed tools designed to replace most of their future work opportunities while also spreading hallucinations. And some people might have made very different choices if they’d known, myself included. No one gave informed consent for all that data to be used for LLM training, because no one could have imagined what they were consenting to. Even now that we can, we’re being held hostage in a sense. You can’t meaningfully opt out of AI scraping without giving up participation in society, not when leaked private data and copyrighted works end up being used for AI training too.

As for looking for alternatives, it’s true that you can leave Instagram and use a different search engine. But there are limits. Most people are stuck with whatever software their job or school forces on them, even if they use alternatives in their personal lives. I can’t just tell my boss I’ll no longer be using Google collaboration tools or Microsoft products. I can recommend alternatives, but I don’t have the power to make the entire organization switch, especially when said boss actually likes AI. And almost every other office job in my country will likely require using the same software.

You’re right that we should never have seen big tech as a benevolent public square. You’re right that from a legal perspective, this person has no grounds for complaining about Instagram. But from a human perspective, they do. I think it’s quite reasonable to be upset that anyone who ever posted anything publicly for other humans to appreciate has been effectively forced to contribute to gen AI training. I think it’s reasonable to be frustrated that many of the common collaboration tools most of us are forced to use (for now, at least) have had AI stuffed into them. In a better society, we’d be able to share things publicly with other humans while opting out of tech we find harmful.

OMG, I’m going to have so much fun at the job interview

When you want to be friends with new people

Dang, I was fully expecting all the answers to be like “how would anyone know,” but there actually is a way to research this. Thanks for sharing!

External deadlines really help with motivation. See if you can find a hobby group or writing-related Discord or something like that, something where people create goals for everyone to work toward and keep each other accountable. Like, we’re all sharing a short story by August 17th, or we’re all going to bring something new we’ve written to our next meeting.

As for starting, I feel like I had a ton of different starts as a kid. There were school projects, things I tried with friends, and lots of instances of me trying to make my own versions of things I liked, some of which were written artifacts. I guess I always started with whatever I wanted to write, whether that was a small project or a small part of a large one.

I think you shouldn’t worry about whether your writing project is the right thing to start with. Someone might tell you to start with flash fiction instead of a novel, but that’s no good if you don’t enjoy flash fiction, and flash fiction has its own challenges that might pose more difficulty than writing a scene of a novel. It’s OK if your writing is crap (it probably will be for a long time). It’s OK if it takes forever to get words out. It’s OK if you get stuck. Just write something.

OK, so I replied to a couple threads, but I’ll put my direct answer here. You have to frame it in terms of something they ALREADY care about, not try get them to care about decentralization.

I’m a non-technical Fedi user. I didn’t give a damn about decentralization or FOSS when I first joined. I only vaguely understood what those things even meant. (I do understand and care now, but that came later after I kept seeing people talk about them in Fedi spaces.)

I joined Lemmy because I cared about getting away from the big tech billionaires, basically. I’m sick of AI and don’t want to use Reddit as long as it’s partially owned by Sam Altman. I wasn’t thinking in terms of joining the Fediverse, I was thinking in terms of “Reddit alternative that doesn’t directly support Sam Altman/OpenAI.” The “choose an instance” thing was a barrier, but that faded after I found out I could change it later and decided to just default to the most popular instance for now.

Your non-technical friends probably don’t care about decentralization (yet), but they might care about:

-Fuck AI companies and the big tech billionaires

-Avoiding psychologically manipulative algorithms that make social media addiction more likely

-More human interactions, fewer ads and bots.

etc.

This part is harder, but you’d need to find communities on here they’d be interested in. I joined when I was thinking about deGoogling, and the thriving tech communities on here appealed to me for that reason even though I wasn’t a techie. This might be easier with a different part of the Fediverse, depending on the person’s interests. Lots of creative people of all stripes are on Mastodon, for instance.