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.
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.
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.
2 definitely does happen a lot with conservatives, but I think it’s a stretch to suggest it happened here. The evidence @[email protected] 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”.
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.
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:
Leave it, Babe. ‘E’s not worth it!
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.
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 @[email protected] 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.