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The text claims "Always at least one exploding head" and the number of exploding heads in the 20 posters shown is zero. It lists a number of "favourites from th
by gjm11 1y ago
The text claims "Always at least one exploding head" and the number of exploding heads in the 20 posters shown is zero. It lists a number of "favourites from the genre" not one of which is actually shown. The text, as you might surmise from the previous two points, has the definite scent of LLMs about it.
The net effect of this is that, while I can look at the pictures and admire them (if that's the word) I have no idea whether I can trust anything in the actual text, since any given claim might just be an LLM confabulation.
(Which is too bad, since on the face of it it seems quite interesting, and probably many of the things the LLM has generated are in fact true.)
Less of this, please.
- latexr 1y agoAnd six of the seven links in the “sources” are dead. For an article published last year. I searched them in the Internet Archive and didn’t find a single match. And we’re talking CNN, BBC, The Guardian, amongst others.
- zahlman 1y agoAgreed, and "definite scent" is underselling it. I didn't even attempt any deep analysis; I just skimmed a bit and found this bit and noped right out: > The posters were typically painted on used flour sacks, sewn together and primed for colour. These weren’t just any flour sacks either — they were durable, easy to roll up, and ready for reuse. > And the designs? Let’s just say they didn’t rely too heavily on accuracy. LLM writing tropes that are so bad, they're good.
- dmurray 1y agoI thought the writing was banal but fine. The stars of the show are the images, not the text. Assuming it's largely LLM written, this seems like a good use of that technology. The text adds some pieces of information you wouldn't get from the images alone: they were painted on flour sacks, used at mobile cinemas, now exhibited at galleries in the West, etc. And it provides citations and artists' names for those who want to learn more. The art criticism is unsophisticated, the images don't completely match the descriptions, and some of the facts might well be hallucinated or at least taken out of context. But you got that with traditional media and human writers/editors too. For what it's worth, I'd guess there is a real author, whose command of the English language is worse than ChatGPT, though his personality is more interesting, and who asked the LLM to rewrite his work in the right style for the website.
- zahlman 1y ago> For what it's worth, I'd guess there is a real author, whose command of the English language is worse than ChatGPT, and who asked the LLM to rewrite his work in the right style for the website. Sure. But if the author doesn't notice the nonsense that the LLM is introducing, it harms as well as helping. "Primed for colour" is a strangely uninteresting thing to be saying about the sacks. If this requires any non-trivial effort, it would make more sense to describe the process. If the author actually wanted to talk about that, chances are the LLM removed useful information. And putting aside that "These weren’t just any flour sacks either — they were durable, easy to roll up, and ready for reuse." is three "classic LLM tropes" in a row ("not just any"; a gratuitous emdash where any dash at all only becomes necessary because of that introduction; an ascending tricolon), it's just a bizarre thing to say. First off, if the sacks were sewn together to make a larger banner, then it doesn't make sense to talk about rolling up the individual sacks. Second, the phrasing suggests something exceptional, but these are all totally ordinary and trivial properties of pretty much any sort of flour sack. Many different materials are used, but all of them would be "easy to roll up" when empty, and making them durable and reusable is just common sense in that environment. The artists were clearly just using a fairly obvious material they had at hand, so this sudden bit of marketing-speak is entirely out of place. Third, the features highlighted all have to do with the sacks, but not with either each other nor the banners. In particular, a sack being "ready for reuse" is ready for reuse as a sack, not for its material being repurposed for something completely different (we typically call that "recycling", not "reuse"). The bit about "the designs" may well even be true, but it's a complete non-sequitur here, a point that doesn't really merit deeper explanation. The writing isn't just "banal" but nonsensical in context, veering off into free-association. There's more potentially being hallucinated here than just the "facts". Never mind the accuracy or truth of what's written; this sort of thing makes it hard to accept that the prose even reflects the author's intent.
- mock-possum 1y agoYeah it’s sadly obvious this is llm-generated
- low_tech_love 1y agoThe worst part of this is how it has this kind of buzzfeed-like style of semi-tongue-in-cheek-but-still-politically-correct aesthetics. Is this what regression to the mean is in the future of AI writing? Are we doomed to read buzzfeed everywhere now?