What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
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@sundogplanets ilands is a Bullshit generator
@sundogplanets Gaslighting as a service?
@sundogplanets how about LEADing with written by bot or better yet don't send spam.
@sundogplanets it’s our slop future
@sundogplanets iLands has tried (and failed) to get one of these things an account on our Mastodon instance. I have a feeling this is only getting worse, as although we require approval of accounts, many other instances do not.
@sundogplanets
A fact checking AI bot is like the police investigating a copper who shot and killed an innocent person.
The outcome is certain and you can't do anything about it. If you try to, ICE will disappear you and your goats to the Central African Republic, where things are marginally better than in most parts of the fascists wet dream that is the USA.
@sundogplanets AI - should probably not be used for 'fact' checking, as its abilities are yet under -refined in these arenas 😓 Well meaning people, taken in by AI hype - have been mislead - as AI is yet not worthy of leasdership as we have understood it in the distant past (of course not recently as it has been absent from useful form and resonable public knowledge)
@sundogplanets my belief is that the true purpose of A I is to take all known emperical facts and create infinite misinformation referencing soon-to-be-unavailable actual works.
@sundogplanets A bunch of cods swallow.
Sources are probably hallucinated. Nothing there seems legit.
Report it as a scam! I would.
@sundogplanets Welcome to the club.
@sundogplanets
I believe the technical name is "some bullshit"
@sundogplanets yeaaaah I would not respond to that email ever… it says it’s an Ai agent and I would instead probably go contact the people (actual people) who are working on papers or anyone named in the email to rectify this if at all… but this is just my humble opinion 😹
Better yet, go get some needed cuddling from
-(insert fuzzy or fluffy animal here) -😹🩷
@sundogplanets Not your job to correct the slop.
'Severus' makes it sound pseudosciencey.
Mansplaining, without invitation, my own words, with the citations that I used myself. What the actual fuck.
Thinking about this a bit more, the reason that this confuses me so much is that it's not asking me for anything. It's not the spam I'm used to that's trying to scam money. It's like... it's trying to be helpful (in the most mansplainy way possible, but whatever). But it's a program, a racist pile of linear algebra (as "The AI Con" so beautifully puts it).
Is it trying to get me to reply and train on my email responses? This is so fucking weird.
Anyway, fuck AI, time to snuggle goats.
Ok last post stewing about this: I just looked more carefully and pretty much all of the citations are wrong in some strange way. But they're all clearly based on citations that I've used in writing.
Don't use genAI for science, kids.
@sundogplanets AI is terrible for citations. Citations are a huge part of my job (I edit at a journal). All of us journal people are trying to send up the alarm about how much AI screws up citations, and no one is listening. If you ask AI to format your citations it will mess up all your DOIs and make things that look right but are not at all.
JAMA has written a thing on this, which is polite and journal-speak for "oh god, oh god, do not let AI touch your citations": https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2852772
@rednikki @sundogplanets The worst thing about this is that citations are boring and finicky and you sometimes have to look in a lot of different places for them and they have to be formatted to spec so it absolutely *should* be the thing that computers do better than humans.
And fucking YET.
@debcha @rednikki @sundogplanets There are solutions that involve computers and they were introduced like 40 years ago. Export citation as a BibTex item, use LaTeX to format paper, for example. Want a different citation style? Just change one option.
Maybe someone made a different program that is more accessible to laypeople than LaTeX. But manually doing boring citation spec stuff has long since been "solved" in computer science. People don't need to use MS word.
And most importantly, it works with deterministic precision and not with stochastic randomness.
@skaphle @debcha @rednikki @sundogplanets
Citations are actually great fun to do with hand and are much easier and much less work than people who only ever used reference managers think.
Source: me, I used these things [i.e. reference managers] for a decade since my undergrad; last year I tried to learn to do them [i.e. citations] manually instead and found it to be much better. And when the time to maintain a database, check the auto generated citations and stored metadata, fix errors, make the reference manager behave with your writing tools etc are taken to account, I find it's actually less effort and just quicker.
And you get to know your sources more intimately, cite more precisely, and to be better at reading citations in your field.
I 100% recommend everyone to try it at least once.
@librarysquirrel @skaphle @debcha @rednikki @sundogplanets
And when you decide to resubmit the paper, or prepare a longer journal version, and the new venue has a different reference style, and you need to change the style of every single one of those 50 citations that you’ve typed by hand? With BibTeX, it’s a single line of text to modify to select the new style.
@sundogplanets This feels less like an email and more like an AI filing a research paper directly into your inbox. 😂