Tired Old Queer Man

He/They | 18+ | Age 21+

[depsidase]

[jaebird88]

[sovietnam]

[map9810-blog]

[pangur-and-grim]

I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything

[spirkkock]

my friend just had an art show and they were communicating with the gallerist over email. They could clearly tell that the gallerist was using AI to respond to their emails, but just rolled their eyes and moved on.

and then on the day of the show, my friend asks, "where is the camera I requested?"

gallerist: "you didn't request a camera"

my friend: "I did, and you confirmed that you would have one here."

gallerist: "that isn't true."

and then she proceeded to pull up the email thread, and my friend could see that every single email they had sent had been summarized by AI, and that the gallerist had then had AI write a response to them based on the AI summary, and that the AI had detected that they needed a camera, and confirmed on behalf of the gallerist that they would bring a camera, but because the gallerist had offloaded the work of actually reading and responding, she simply hadn't actually made any note of it herself, therefore didn't bring it, nor did she even know one was needed.

so my friend had done all of this communication about their needs and expectations to be able to make the show possible, and the person whose job it was to read that information and get it done had simply.... not read the information and not done it. because AI.

[transandrogyny--turtlebug]

I still think pregnancy and childbirth should be degendered. we stopped talking about that and I need us to pick it back up pls

[fagdyke-fckry]

People in the notes arguing that this is about individual comfort and misgendering are missing a major piece of the puzzle, which is that programs made for mothers and pregnant women often by definition exclude anyone whose gender marker is not F on every form they’ve ever filled out.

Insurance agencies use M markers to deny coverage for pregnancy related healthcare. Doctors offices hang up on pregnant people trying to schedule pre- and post-natal appointments for themselves because their voices or their names aren’t feminine enough. And if they manage to make the appointment, they can get harassed out of the waiting rooms or face medical malpractice behind closed doors.

Charities and benefits made for pregnant or new mothers don’t accept pregnant/new fathers or non-gendered parents. The WIC fund is called women, infants, and children.

If we degender pregnancy and childbirth (and periods while we’re at it) we open up support for every trans and intersex person who needs it. We normalize pregnant people of other genders and sexes, leaving less room for harassment and malpractice and more accountability for those who decide to be assholes anyway.

It’s not a-fucking-bout comfort. It’s about safety and survival. This can literally be the difference between life and death for some people.

[rq1nzorr]

"nonbinary people are hyperoppressed women who call themselves nonbinary to distance themselves from their oppression'" and "nonbinary people are hyperprivileged nonqueer people who are trying to appropriate queerness" is some "the enemy is both weak and strong" shit

[pangur-and-grim]

I swear to GOD I’m not vagueing my situation, but I made a post recently about books I was planning to read this year, and I find it very….. interesting that multiple people came into my inbox afterward to tell me that all the queer authors in the bunch had sinned. like maybe they had, I dunno. it wouldn’t stop me reading (I love Interview with the Vampire, I have Thoughts about Anne Rice, etc). but it is interesting that none of the non-queer authors merited this whisper campaign, despite some of them honestly deserving it. not saying anything outright here, just making an observation. listening and learning. you know

[pangur-and-grim]

[cali]

soundscape of young green martian playing with pvc pipes

[dralphabet]

[serial-unaliver-deactivated2024]

it's kind of crazy climate change has occurred at such a remarkable pace that I and everyone else around my age can remember a completely different climate in our childhoods. I truly watched winter gradually disappear in my life.

[room429]

"You're too young to remember this, but there used to be so many insects outside that you would have to clean them off the windshield after a long car ride" is the kind of sentence that would have been in a cheesy scifi short story earlier in my life, perhaps submitted to a literary magazine and accepted to show support for its environmentalist message - now it's something I've said in earnest.

[redhairandpronouns]

yall are so fucking weird about gnc people. a woman wears a suit and she's "conforming to the patriarchy". a man wears a skirt and he's Secretly A Trans Egg. have you considered It's Fabric

[captain-price-returns]

[cyberpunkpavlichenko]

Generative AI and the artist discussion is such a distraction from AI’s military and police applications or its role in automating hiring discrimination.

[visenyaism]

Honestly fuck AI for making me have to go on and on defending the dignity of toil like I’m some kind of protestant

[literary-sparks]

“Why don’t you use ai” idk man beyond the obvious environmental and “this machine causes psychosis and encourages people to kill themselves” thing I think asking the equivalent of a solid D student who is also a pathological liar if they can answer my question/do the work for me seems pretty fucking stupid

[the-professional-despiser]

but that's enough about tumblr users, let's focus on the impacts of ai

[enki2]

[thebdelliumlady]

For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.

Here's a link to an article about the study from the Stanford Report: link.

[chapscher]

Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.

Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).

[tartrazeen]

From the study's hypothesis section (which still refers to actual research):

High-profile incidents have linked sycophancy to psychological harms such as delusions, self-harm, and suicide. Beyond these cases, research in social and moral psychology suggests that unwarranted affirmation can produce subtler but still consequential effects: reinforcing maladaptive beliefs, reducing responsibility-taking, and discouraging behavioral repair after wrongdoing.

So the Yes Manning is still having an impact even when it's not flashy.

In our human experiments, even a single interaction with sycophantic AI reduced participants’ willingness to take responsibility and repair interpersonal conflicts, while increasing their own conviction that they were right. Yet despite distorting judgment, sycophantic models were trusted and preferred.

Although affirmation may feel supportive, sycophancy can undermine users’ capacity for self-correction and responsible decision-making. Yet because it is preferred by users and drives engagement, there has been little incentive for sycophancy to diminish.

I'm not gonna blame the crackhead for wanting crack. We all love being right. But it just goes to show that the companies making these see that as a valid market, and they're going to do everything they're allowed to do to push that demand up.

[chipsncookies]

Happy Jirachi day and thank you for giving us this legendary gif