Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Kiana Khansmith
⁂
ojovivo
Discoholic 🪩
Cosimo Galluzzi
Keni
JVL
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
tannertan36
almost home
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
One Nice Bug Per Day
Game of Thrones Daily
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Three Goblin Art
roma★
we're not kids anymore.
if i look back, i am lost
Jules of Nature
seen from Russia
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@walking-between-the-stars
“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
#tapping the reblog button with utmost care because i’m handling a historical artifact (via @malarkiness)
holy shit OP is not only still active but is still making absolutely banger posts in this exact style 11 years later
A 2025 update
and out of the darkness - you you you you you
generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???
There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.
Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.
"This tool replaces thinking," is a technology problem we (humans) have faced before. It's a snark that I've seen pro-AI contenders take as well: I bet these same people would have complained about calculators! And books!
Well. They did, at the time.
We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.
And the thing is:
They weren't wrong.
The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.
There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.
Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)
The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.
So.
Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?
Well, two things are different.
1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis.
This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time.
2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.
Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.
Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.
Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.
---
I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."
This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.
Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.
So I'll just close with this warning, instead:
Generative AI is a tool that cannot be trusted. Do not use it to replace thought.
Write it badly or it'll never be written
Write it badly or it'll never be written
Write it badly or it'll never be written
Write it badly or it'll never be written
Write it badly or it'll never be written
Please keep interacting with this post because when I come to tumblr to procrastinate, this shows up again in my notifications and guilts me into writing again
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
Might I add:
The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed
The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child
The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship
The adventures of a space roomba
Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)
I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head
hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):
The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)
The Monster of Sentan
The Witch’s Cat
Raise Both Children
Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)
Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)
My Arch Nemesis Cynthia
Pirates and Mermaid
Eindred and the Witch
The Demon King
The Cornerwitch
Grandmother Beetroot
Apocalypse Daycare Worker
Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon
New Year Saga
A Story About Changelings
Ranger in the King’s Forest
The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit
Goblin Men (Canines)
I am in love with you /p
Adding Faceblind Prince Charming and Cinderella
21. The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship
22. The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed
adding the Doctors Without Borders one
I LOVE tumblr storytime, so here’s a bunch more your weekend reading. Enjoy!
24. The Queen with Three Cursed Children
25. Tiny Dragon with one coin hoard
26. Haunted house
27. Shark hero was about to go rogue
28. Grandma lives in the woods comic
29. A Different Aftermath comic
30. Battery (microstory but I love it so much)
31. It’s A Date comic
32. Supervillian kidnaps rival’s kid and they want to stay
33. Narrative Town
34. I have been hired to clean the wizard tower comic
35. Robot Apocalypse
36. The Statues That Do Not Weather
37. Kushiel
38. Tooth Fairy
39. Alien abduction
40. Felonious wish-granting
41. When humans met actual space orcs
42. Space cousins
WAIT REBLOG THIS VERSION INSTEAD
Reblog this picture of me holding a Family Size box of Honey Nut Cheerios? I’d really appreciate it.
How can I say no to such a great photo and such a polite request?
Well said.
I’ve had this meme on my Tumblr page for years. Literally, years. Recently, I noticed that they removed it for “Violating Tumblr’s Community Guidelines.” Really?! Where? How? I know that ceiling is terrifying, but, seriously…
I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?
Have been playing 'date everything' and these two have such a hard grip on me that I might explode 😔⚡️🩷
The Fallen Kings
Elendil and Gil-galad
End of the Second Age. Sauron knew every microexpression on Celebrimbor’s face—and that’s when the paintings began. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Few ever accessed the dark tower, but those who did whispered of a mysterious elf carved over and over along the pillars and shadowed halls of Barad-dûr. They wondered—not aloud—who he was and what it meant. "Are all my thoughts of you, sweet raptured light? It ends here tonight."
See one of my favorite Rivendell headcanons is that even though it's a wonderful, peaceful sanctuary, pretty much everyone there could be incredibly dangerous if they wanted to be. Like, let's think about who lives in that valley.
Elrond Peredhel, resident healer and eldritch crime against nature, self-explanatory
Glorfindel, slayer of balrogs, self-explanatory
Erestor, probably Feanorian, definitely dangerous
Old Feanorian diehards, all of whom are probably looking for an excuse to commit morally justified violence
Old Gondolindrim/Iathrim, who, despite what they might tell you, are exactly as dangerous as the Feanorians
Garthaglir the Library Orc, who absolutely remembers how to use the giant battleaxe he keeps behind his desk
A strange, shadowy figure roaming the valley who I'm *sure* isn't Maglor Feanorian, but who is nonetheless a terrifying singer
Elladan and Elrohir, who have spent the last several centuries becoming nightmare fuel for Sauron's forces
Arwen, eldritch, bites
Bilbo Baggins, not to be underestimated, can defeat a grown man with nothing more than his scathingly polite commentary
Dunedain visitors, vaguely feral, highly trained
Aragorn, very feral, highly trained
Lindir, not actually dangerous, but if you upset him you are going to have problems with everyone else on this list
I actually really like the idea that a lot of the people who live in Rivendell are inherently kind of dangerous, because it means that they're actively choosing peace and kindness for themselves and I love that.
sam’s reveal at the end makes this a thousand times funnier
People who hate Frodo Baggins are my enemy. "He didn't do anything and was useless"--yeah, okay, so what you're not understanding is that he was the sacrificial lamb. He endured physical, mental, and emotional torment that got worse and worse as his will broke. Everyone knew this. EVERYONE KNEW THIS. That's why everyone was devastated about it. Because Frodo was the most innocent among them, that was the entire point. He represented ordinary peaceful people being destroyed by the horrors of war. And as a hobbit he also represented some of the last vestiges of magic in what was basically a post magic apocalypse.
Frodo was basically an innocent puppy thrown into the Torment Nexus so that EVERYONE ELSE could maybe have a hope of surviving. And he did that willingly. HE DID IT OF HIS OWN FREE WILL, KNOWING IT WOULD RUIN HIM.
Frodo haters won't see the light of heaven
after a lifetime of hearing about aragorn but not reading the books or watching the movies, genuinely nothing could have prepared me for his actual introduction. the hobbits picked this man out of a dumpster. he is a textbook softspoken angst prince and he is covered in dirt and he probably smells so bad. he’s the coolest man alive and is so casual about it. his number one skill is Knowing Where They Are and his number two skill is Having A Horrible Destiny That Torments Him. tolkien got it in one i’m afraid aragorn son of arathorn you are the guy of all time
Idk there's something really sweet to me about fix-it writers. Like, me and you- maybe we couldnt make it this time, but in another universe, a million people saw the pain of our story and are writing us a happy ending, giving us the chance we never had
