As a disclaimer, I'm not actually anti-AI, but tons of slop is made with it. It's the same as those TTS Reddit reading videos from back in the day or any other shitty trend from the last 10 years.
I'm old enough to know to dismiss internet noise as vastly out of touch with the actual silent majority of internet users, so this moral panic over slop to me was just zoomers who grew up on reaction videos thinking that wasn't slop to the folks who came before, but I was on a train, looking around, I saw like 4/5 people I could see were on their phones, watching clearly AI-generated content, on TikTok or something similar based on the UI elements, one of them even had it on speaker for some reason.
All of them seemed around my age in the mid-20s.
Thing is, I don't really understand it, what's the appeal? I'm not asking about being on your phone, but specifically short-form videos about nothing specific.
When I looked it up, lots of talk about addiction and dopamine loops, but I can't relate to that, I assume this maybe has something to do with me having ADHD and the theory that my dopamine system doesn't really work "normally".
I tried watching TikTok before, but it definitely wasn't stimulating for me, I got bored pretty quick. If I was on a train and really bored looking out the window listening to music, I'd whip out a Wikipedia page or read the comments on Lemmy or look up a random question on my mind.
Why? Well in my experience - text is a lot easier to consume you can consume more information faster, hence to me - it's more stimulating. Works both ways too - It's just easier to express yourself quickly and clearly in text than by speaking. Even typing on my phone feels a helluva lot less taxing and more stimulating than speaking/listening.
It's not like I don't watch videos, I do have videos on in the background sometimes when I'm tidying up or whatever, where I prefer long-form stuff so it just fades into the background and stays consistent and non-distracting. If I watch a movie it's often something I kinda need to mentally work myself up for. I definitely wouldn't be able to pay attention to a video playing on my phone.
So my question is - what's so stimulating about this type of stuff in particular?
I want to hear about your experience so I can understand it better.
I'd like to understand it, because otherwise it feels like most people are weird aliens, driven by forces beyond my comprehension, and it's not nice :(
That would be valid if it was what you did. Except it wasn't. You assumed the hypothesis to be true and asked us why it's true. You should instead be asking whether or not it's true.
And you reckon asking why something is true isn't in effect the same as asking if something is true, but with an invitation for speculation, rather than pure anecdotes which I'd be limited to otherwise?
It is not the same thing. When you ask why X is true, you're not only asking the question. You're also making the claim that X is true. ~~Since~~ If the premise of the question is wrong, you're making everyone do extra work to figure out why your question isn't making sense to them and what question you actually need to have answered.
You can invite speculation without making false claims. You also haven't contributed anything other than anecdotes despite having made that claim.
Except this isn't how language works, "Why do all the Asians wear black jeans?" invites both questions, unless the former is explicitly stated as a fact. It is obvious that any such thing is an unfalsifiable observation.
People aren't robots. "you're making everyone do extra work" - not how people work, not how reasoning works. Viewing something through a framework of even incorrect assumptions can provide unique insight. That is inviting speculation.
On the other hand - you're continuously asserting my claim is false but have provided no proof of this.
You have only questioned the proof of my claim, which yes - is anecdotal only, pure observation, as I readily admitted, and was never intended as a fact.
I would suggest setting aside some time to cultivate your critical thinking skills.
Language serves to communicate. If most people who know nothing of the subject read your question and understand "X is true" from it, then that is what you're communicating. Of course, I have no way of actually providing evidence for this besides anecdotes since I don't have the means to actually run a study on it. But if you've had enough human interactions, you'll have seen a lot of these types of questions where people will genuinely try to answer them as if they're true, or point to such questions as evidence for something being true. You'll also often see this for personal attacks (e.g. "Why are you such a doofus?").
This is probably an area where LLMs can actually be useful since they hold a lot of information on something of an average of what most people think. Give it a sentence and ask how it might be interpreted by others.
Yes, and? Humans are meat bags. It costs a lot of energy for meat bags to think, and humans tend to be very energy efficient. If you can get away with doing less thinking, then most people will. This is something I'm constantly being made aware of because my particular brand of autism doesn't allow me to take advantage of this efficiency, which is what makes it so debilitating.
If you have some familiarity with information theory, it might be more convincing to think about it through that lens and consider how certain interpretations / assumptions lead to higher efficiency.
If I did, I did not mean to. I don't interact with enough neurotypical people to say whether it's true or not. I think you can just replace "since" with "if" in my previous comment to correct for this.