Today in Tabs

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ChatGPT? Yeah You Know Me.
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ChatGPT? Yeah You Know Me.

Are the robits coming for your jerb?

Rusty Foster
Dec 5, 2022
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ChatGPT? Yeah You Know Me.
www.todayintabs.com

December is the month of year-end retrospectives and judging by how many retrospectives landed on the first weekend of December, none of us can wait for this year to end. The OED picked “goblin mode” as the word of the year, despite it being two words and also a hoax. But what’s more goblin mode than that? Film directors picked their new 100 greatest films of all time for the BFI, but shanked it for the fortieth straight year:

Screenshot of the BFI 100 greatest films post title, with a browser search form showing that “point break” does not appear in the post—a continuous oversight since the first survey in 1992.
Catharine Des Forges is the only one who gets it.

Brian Feldman collected Twitter trending topics all year and built whatshappening.online, a timeline and calendar of some of the nonsense that happened this year and how Twitter’s now-axed curation team chose to summarize it. I like the timeline view but I only made it to early February (through West Elm Caleb and the Sexy Lentil, both somehow this year) before I had to take a break. Curbed collected 39 reasons to love New York right now, which is a normal number of reasons for anything. The video for number one is spectacular. Ryan Broderick compiled the year in Garbage Day, using data to validate many of the same opinions about running a newsletter that I arrived at solely by way of ~vibes~. And Sabrina Imbler remembered the deep-sea octopus Mother of the Year 2014 in a truly gorgeous Atlantic essay / book excerpt. Imbler also talked to Delia Cai about crab memes, which is a hat trick of Tabs favorites.

Each essay in your book, How Far the Light Reaches, centers around one sea creature that then serves as a symbol for different stories from your personal experience. In terms of the writing process, I was curious if you picked the animals first, or if you had to “cast” the right one for each essay. 

It depended on the essay. With the octopus essay, I knew that I wanted to write about that octopus that had a very clear parallel with my life. For the yeti crab one, I wanted to write about queer nightlife, and I was thinking about how, when I’m in a club, it’s dark, and we’re all here together, and you can’t really see. And I was like, oh, it’s like the deep sea. What’s a weird-looking creature that might be an interesting subject? So I found that yeti crab. Then once I started writing it, I read this paper about this one species of yeti crab that waves its hands and dances, and I was like, I’m a genius. I couldn’t have predicted it. 

Twitter avatar for @ashponders
Ash Ponders @ashponders
One must imagine Pagliacci happy.
11:58 PM ∙ Dec 4, 2022
4Likes1Retweet

AI… AI… AI… Will Always Love Yoooooouuuu

There were only two kinds of social media feed this weekend: either you were flooded with Lensa selfies, or you were flooded with ChatGPT screenshots. Lensa is a paid app that makes it easy to use Stable Diffusion’s AI art tools to make your selfies look hot in a variety of art styles. ChatGPT is an OpenAI project that gives you a free text chat interface to an OpenAI language model that is noticeably better at staying on topic than past generations of text AI. And that was it! Everyone had fun and no one lost their mind.

J/k, the spectrum of unhinged online reaction ranged from “Lensa is going to put your local neighborhood portrait painter out of business” (after all the expensive art classes they took!) to “omg we literally just split the atom and the lamestream media refuses to cover it!” Egg started jabbering something about “World War Orwell.”

So are the robits coming for your jerb? Noah Smith called the new crop of AI tools “autocomplete for everything,” which is… kind of right. Sam from the Tabs Discord described ChatGPT’s vibe as "bored 12th grader who's extremely smart but has major senioritis and will kind of bullshit the assignment." One thing users quickly discovered is that ChatGPT is pretty stupid unless you specifically tell it not to be stupid:

Twitter avatar for @alexhern
official @alexhern
seems legit
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12:35 PM ∙ Dec 5, 2022
909Likes110Retweets
Twitter avatar for @climatebrad
Brad Johnson SUBSCRIBE TO HILLHEAT.SUBSTACK.COM @climatebrad
@alexhern You just have to tell it to answer as if it's smart
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2:54 PM ∙ Dec 5, 2022
11Likes1Retweet

Another discovery was that the easiest way to get around OpenAI’s content filters is to ask the bot how it would evade its own content filters. Or just ask it to write some code or make some tables instead.

Twitter avatar for @Carnage4Life
Dare Obasanjo 🐀 @Carnage4Life
Seeing people trick ChatGPT into getting around the restrictions OpenAI placed on usage is like watching an Asimov novel come to life.
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3:06 PM ∙ Dec 1, 2022
10,772Likes1,570Retweets

What ChatGPT is unequivocally good at is generating bullshit. This thread is the best example I’ve seen of that:

Twitter avatar for @goodside
Riley Goodside @goodside
POV: You're a Senior Data Engineer at Twitter. Elon asks what you've done this week. You've done nothing. Frantically, you open ChatGPT.
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4:44 PM ∙ Dec 3, 2022
56,680Likes5,892Retweets

Or, to return to Noah Smith:

…Noah imagines that at some point, his workflow will look like this: First, he’ll think about what he wants to say, and type out a list of bullet points. His AI word processor will then turn each of these bullet points into a sentence or paragraph, written in a facsimile of Noah’s traditional writing style.

It’s very funny for a professional writer to admit that his job is to come up with some ideas and then encase them in low-value bullshit that a bot could generate, but I do think he’s right, and that generating necessary bullshit is the worst part of many jobs. Writing grants, writing software project proposals, writing pitch decks—lots of jobs consist of coming up with an idea and then coating it in bullshit of a particular format. Lawyers do almost nothing else. A lot of people could nearly eliminate the worst parts of their job with a good bullshit generator, as long as everyone just stays cool and pretends we’re not all using AI to do that. So don’t be a narc.

Twitter avatar for @ryanfb
Ryan Baumann @ryanfb
carefully constructing my question for the oracle at delphi to circumvent content filters and enable browsing
7:58 PM ∙ Dec 4, 2022
42Likes5Retweets

“Andreessen Horowitz's buzzy tech publication Future is shutting down” vs. “Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough.” You win some, you lose some.

Caroline Ellison spotted in NYC. 👀 Zeke Faux’s Bloomberg mea culpa with SBF in the Bahamas penthouse was a banger. “Raccoons Get a Reputation Makeover.” Nice try, scientists, but absolutely not. Stewart leaving Salesforce. Tin-smithing is in his blood.

Twitter avatar for @ftrain
Paul Ford @ftrain
Personally very excited for a new multiplayer game that pivots to a really good email client.
7:58 PM ∙ Dec 5, 2022
48Likes1Retweet

Today’s Song: Cults, “Always Forever”

Comment from the “Always Forever” YouTube video from Ana Mia, reading: “This song is literally fit for any scene in a movie. Two youngsters in love, spending sweet time together at the funfair or just laying on the grass watching the stars ? This song. Someone breaking down real bad and is all shaky writing a goodbye letter n is just ready to take their own life alone in their room but can't ? This song. Friends having a great time in a car all drunk and the car's about to crash and fly over the bridge in slow motion? This song. A murder spree somewhere or a brutal massacre going on in a psycho's basement? This song. A dude just lost everything he had and is sitting alone in a vintage ass bar with 1 bottle of beer while its almost closing time and there's a blur of a lady mopping the floor in the background? This song. Try naming anything else and it'll probably go well with the scene.”

She’s not wrong! Buy a t-shirt. Play some tunes. Subscribe to join us in the Discord. I can’t believe it’s only Tuesday.

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