If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Everyone knows (or should know) that as fascinating as your dreams are to you, they are eye-glazingly dull to everyone else. Perhaps you have a friend or two who will tolerate you recounting your dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever presume that other people want to hear about your dreams.
The same is true of your conversations with chatbots. Even if you find these conversations interesting, you should never assume that anyone else will be entertained by them. In the absence of an explicit reassurance to the contrary, you should presume that recounting your AI chatbot sessions to your friends is an imposition on the friendship, and forwarding the transcripts of those sessions doubly so (perhaps triply so, given the verbosity of chatbot responses).
I will stipulate that there might be friend groups out there where pastebombs of AI chat transcripts are welcome, but even if you work in such a milieu, you should never, ever assume that a stranger wants to see or hear about your AI "conversations." Tagging a chatbot into a social media conversation with a stranger and typing, "Hey Grokā”, what do you think of that?" is like masturbating in front of a stranger.
ā” Ugh
It's rude. It's an imposition. It's gross.
There's an even worse circle of hell than the one you create when you nonconsensually add a chatbot to a dialog: the hell that comes from reading something a stranger wrote, and then asking a chatbot to generate "commentary" on it and emailing it to that stranger.
Even the AI companies pitching their products claim that they need human oversight because they are prone to errors (including the errors that the companies dress up by calling them "hallucinations"). If you've read something you disagree with but don't understand well enough to rebut, and you ask an AI to generate a rebuttal for you, you still don't understand it well enough to rebut it.
You haven't generated a rebuttal: you have generated a blob of plausible sentences that may or may not constitute a valid critique of the work you're upset with ā but until a human being who understands the issue goes through the AI output line by line and verifies it, it's just stochastic word-salad.
Once again: the act of prompting a sentence generator to create a rebuttal-shaped series of sentences does not impart understanding to the prompter. In the dialog between someone who's written something and someone who disagrees with it, but doesn't understand it well enough to rebut it, the only person qualified to evaluate the chatbot's output is the original author ā that is, the stranger you've just emailed a chat transcript to.
Emailing a stranger a blob of unverified AI output is not a form of dialogue ā it's an attempt to coerce a stranger into unpaid labor on your behalf. Strangers are not your "human in the loop" whose expensive time is on offer to painstakingly work through the plausible sentences a chatbot made for you for free.
Remember: even the AI companies will tell you that the work of overseeing an AI's output is valuable labor. The fact that you can costlessly (to you) generate infinite volumes of verbose, plausible-seeming topical sentences in no way implies that the people who actually think about things and then write them down have the time to mark your chatbot's homework.
That is a fatal flaw in the idea that we will increase our productivity by asking chatbots to summarize things we don't understand: by definition, if we don't understand a subject, then we won't be qualified to evaluate the summary, either.
There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws. That's not to say that we shouldn't aspire to participate in discourse about areas that seem interesting or momentous ā but asking a chatbot to contribute on your behalf does not impart insight to you, and it is a gross imposition on people who have taken the time to understand and participate using their own minds and experience.
Hey guys, loving the wealth of bucktommy fic happening in so many ways right now as we cope! Can we, as a fandom, agree to remember our fandom etiquette, though, and tag kinks appropriately? Even if itās something that you think has become pretty common, you never know, and a quick āmpregā or ābreeding kinkā or ātw: choking" or "spit kink" or "daddy kink" or what have you is not only the polite and correct way to do things, it helps your fellow fans engage safely with fanworks! We all forget sometimes, but this is actually really important. I'm going to try to be more conscientous myself, but if you ever see me forget to tag something, even if it doesn't bother you personally but you think it should be tagged, please let me know! And please be open to being reminded yourself!
I don't know who on the Internet needs to hear this, but if you are brand-new to a topic, you are not in a position to "well actually" people on that topic. If there is some obvious-to-you fact that nobody else is bringing up, that is likely because they did in fact factor that into their point, in a way you're not going to see because you are uninformed on this topic. Or because it's irrelevant, again for reasons you'd know if you were a bit more informed.
This was inspired by the ostensibly-left/liberal people downplaying the Trump admin's role in why the Washington National Opera is leaving the Kennedy Center who clearly know nothing about opera and have never paid attention to anything involving it until now, but honestly, the examples are infinite. My music history poll from a couple months ago (edit: post was queued) had so many examples of these, people acting like I "hadn't considered" things I had in fact considered and were key to why I wrote the poll the way I did, some I even mentioned explicitly in the original post. I get that it is hard to know what you don't know (and I've slipped up a few times myself as a result of that), but it just seems obvious that if you're new to a topic, you know you won't have much to contribute! And also if someone has some kind of objective credential that signifies that they know way more than you do on this topic, you'll get more out of listening to them rather than talking over them. Just....seems pretty basic, 101-level etiquette, and yet so much of the Internet fails at this.
Hey guys when the TADC finale comes out can we all just be normal about it?
Because itās gonna be sad, itās gonna be devastating, and weāre all gonna be miserable about it but in a good way, and we should reserve our strongest feelings for our untagged Tumblr posts and not harass others for their feelings
When the finale comes out:
Do NOT spoil anything for ANYONE and if you do I will eat your ankles. Not everyone can get a ticket in theaters, so you will wait the two week grace period like a good lil fan and hyperfixate into your notebook or drawing tablet. TAG YOUR SPOILERS IF YOU MAKE POSTS
Do NOT harass anyone whether they liked the finale or not. If you DIDNāT like it then donāt start a fight with those who DID and vice versa. Appreciation of art and media is subjective and your opinions are always arbitrary no matter who you are, so itās never worth fighting about
Do not, under ANY circumstances, try to talk to Gooseworx or the crew who worked on the show if youāre going to be a jerk about it. Only send them praise. Even if the finale sucks and you hate it, and you wanna tell everyone that you hated it and why you hated it to justify your hatred, donāt do it to the people who worked so hard to make it! Itās beautiful to them and they worked really hard, and are you really going to stomp all over their sand castle? They made it for you! So act like a good kid whose parents keep putting veggies on their plate and say āthank you, I appreciate you and all you do for meā and then donāt eat the veggies
Relearn your Netiquette. Loosely unrelated to TADC but yāall need to relearn how to be nice on the net. Youāre not babies anymore, nor are you 40yo shut-ins who partake in sports gambling and red bull addiction. Youāre a fandom, and itās a fandomās responsibility to have the outsiders find interest and love in your media, not hatred and resentment. Remember to take a deep breath and consider yourself when conversing with others
I personally am going to be VERY normal about the finale, no matter what happens. And if I am not feeling normal, I will do my best to act that way. I am going to save posts to my drafts and schedule them for the day after the public release on YouTube. I am going to tag my spoilers when reblogging other peopleās posts. I am going to cheer about the animation quality and give my congratulations to Gooseworx for releasing her biggest series in worldwide theaters from the comfort of my own diary. I am going to be excited and full of brain worms, but mature about how I feed those worms for the two week grace period
Sometimes I wish Siren & Lockboy was more well known, but at the same time, Iām kinda glad that it and us-itās fanbase-are still relatively underground because it means the fandom as a whole is less toxic than say TADC.It IMMEDIATELY went mainstream, and now look at whatās happening, unfortunately.Hell, that principal seems to apply to any piece of media whoās fandom grows too big and fast for fandom netiquette to keep up, or whoās fandoms are just so massive, netiquette is somewhat impossible.Hopefully for us, if and when the fan base grows larger, it isnāt going to be a toxic hellscape because thereās already standards and expectations for behavior set in place.
When informing others about ICE raids on social media, spread information, not panic.
Spread information, not panic. We protect one another by sharing useful and actionable information, not rumors. A.L.E.R.T.A., for a specific request for any aid!
Activity - What is happening?
Location - Where *exactly* is this happening? Include street, state, country.
Equipment - Are there weapons, vehicles, etc. involved?
Response requested - What response is being requested? E.g. observation, de-escalation, survivor support, medical aid, bystander intervention, etc.
Time & date - What is the exact time and date?
Appearance - Who? How many? What are they wearing?
Example
Jan 26th 2025 1:12pm (Time & date)
There are four APD officers (Appearance)
harassing a Black teen (Activity)
on the corner of Haywood & Virginia in West Ash (Location)
3 squad cars on the scene (Equipment)
Requesting aid to observe and record (Request aid)
If you interact with someoneās post in a way they will see directly, you are making a request for their time and attention. Whether you personally think it ācountsā or not is irrelevant.
That includes:
inbox messages and DMs (obviously)
reblogs with commentary (OP and the person you reblogged from both see it)
tags (yes, they see those too now. I donāt like it either, but here we are)
replies (go straight to OP, and also to whoever you may be replying through)
None of these are neutral actions. They are all you walking up to someone and going āhey, engage with me.ā
And hereās the part people keep trying to dodge:
If you make that request in a way thatās rude, presumptuous, passive-aggressive, or wrapped in even one layer of irony so you donāt have to own it, you donāt get to expect a warm or careful response. You also donāt get to act shocked when the response matches the tone you brought in.
This goes double for anons and strangers. If I donāt know you, Iām not going to fill in the blanks with the most generous possible interpretation, especially if youāve given me nothing to work with but attitude.
Youāre asking for someoneās time. Act like it.
