The Lady in the House of Love

if you don't like a certain type of fanfiction, i have absolutely fantastic news for you: you don't have to read it

i love to read a character's stoicism as awkwardness. yeah your posture is great and you're mysteriously surveying the scene but it's because you're stiff af and don't know how to approach anyone, right?

Funny story from the other night:

A dad came into my cafe with his 3 year old daughter.  He bought her a cookie and himself a coffee.  They sit down, and I go back to my pre-closing cleaning.  Three minutes later the dad walks up to the counter again, so I stop cleaning and walk over to greet him again.

As I’m in the middle of saying “hi” he cuts me off and says “Water.”

Not “Can I get a glass of water, please?” not “Where can I get water?” not even a confused “water?” like he’s not sure how to get water in this cafe.  Just a single word demand.

I work in silicon valley, so I’m kind of used to techies talking to me like I’m Siri or Alexa, but it still always drives me crazy when they do this.  Like, I don’t even care about the “please” anymore, I just want people to talk to me in complete sentences.  So I get the guy a cup of water, and he sits back down. 

As I’m about to go back to cleaning I hear his daughter go “Daddy, you did that WRONG.  You have to say ’CAN I have a glass of water PLEASE’”

My jaw hit the ground.  The dad suddenly became flustered and tried coming up with excuses “I-I said please…” “No you didn’t!” “Well she was busy…. I didn’t want to bother her…..” “You still got to be polite!”

When they were done eating the dad brought the dishes back to the counter and said “Thank you so much!” It’s amazing how fast someone’s manners can improve when a 3 year old calls them out.

Shout out to whoever is teaching that little girl manners, because you know it’s not her dad.  I hope she never stops calling rude people out.

sorry for adding you on discord and then never talking to you because im autistic and dont have anything to say to anybody #girl

panicked fruit.

Crying rice

To reduce my screen time, I have weaponised my overactive and entirely impractical levels of empathy for inanimate objects. Wym you’re picking it up again? While it was sleeping? You complete and utter monster, let it rest!!

And it works. It works like a CHARM. Silly problems require silly solutions!

[ID: a phone tucked in very cozy in a perfectly fitting wooden doll-size canopy bed with floral motifs. it has a little dishtowel as a blanket /End ID]

This is an actual request for input, not a rhetorical rant.

Can anyone explain to me ---- WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT THE OTHER REASONS AI IS BAD (because some of those are actually legitimate) --- why one of the main logics for rejecting LLMs (AI/ChatGPT/etc) is the misinformation?

Misinformation is RAMPANT in every online space there is. Misinformation is rampant on YouTube, on Twitter, on Tumblr, on Facebook, on TikTok, on Substack. Misinformation is available in bulk in every online outlet there is.

And I can't figure out why we're all like oh, LLMs are UNIQUELY full of misinformation (or it's UNIQUELY harmful when coming from LLMs)

You are not any more likely to encounter misinformation on ChatGPT than on TikTok or YouTube, or Tumblr for that matter. (Remember when there was an epidemic of people taking Horse de-wormer during COVID, due to misinformation on Facebook?)

Like this issue is NOT specific to LLMs in the least.

So why are we using that as logic to reject them wholesale when we don't apply that same logic to YouTube or TikTok or Tumblr or, or, or, or.

Like - is it really just vibes-based? Or am I actually missing something?

(Again, there are OTHER critiques of LLMs that have stronger legs to stand on. But I TRULY cannot figure out why misinformation is one of the main ones when we consider the rampant misinformation EVERWHERE ELSE ON THE INTERNET to just be the metaphorical cost of doing business, and we mostly shrug at it, and are like, well, that's a bummer. But TikTok gives me dopamine and ChatGPT doesn't, so all the misinformation on TikTok is perfectly tolerable and personal responsibility for critical thinking, man. Like - it just seems SO arbitrary to me)

I can answer this!!!!!!

So, let’s take a think about good ol’ fashioned misinformation. Say there’s a prominent news outlet that’s published a headline saying “MILLIONS OF ILLEGAL MIGRANTS POUR INTO THE COUNTRY” and attached is a photo of a Sad Looking Brown Person crammed into the back of a small boat, overlaid with sign saying “BRITAIN IS FULL”

What’s going on here? It’s scaremongering, misleading, and of course… will be what millions of people read and base their opinions on.

How are people being swayed here?

- the number is big and scary (“MILLIONS”)

- mentioning “ILLEGAL MIGRANTS” allows people to distance themselves from the humanity of these people. “I’m not racist! If they just follow the right channels then I’ve no problem with them! But they’re illegal! They’re breaking the law!”

- are they actually “ILLEGAL”? who cares! that’s what people respond to!

- the image of the Sad Brown People in the small boat shows that they’re “Not Like Us.” it’s not about white Europeans that are coming into the country. it’s not about Australian’s, or Americans, or anyone else who might “Look Like Us.” another dehumanising tactic. tells them Who to be angry at.

- the “COUNTRY IS FULL” sign overlaid lets people know exactly Why they should be angry. the country is overpopulated! healthcare services are on their knees! housing is expensive! no one can get a job! the country is full and MILLIONS of THOSE PEOPLE keep BREAKING THE RULES and coming here! it’s THEIR fault!!

millions of people read those headlines. on every daytime talk show, the presenters and guests debate that Exact headline.

now, this is the important part. because Everyone is talking about the same sensationalised, misinformative headline, it gives the other side a head start in how to combat it.

it’s like doing a debate where you know exactly what points the opposition will bring up.

you can be like “right. I should get some stats on the exact immigration numbers. I will need to get the figures for how they come into the country. How many are here legally. What country they come from. What do they do when they’re here? How do they contribute? To what degree is overpopulation an issue? What are the reasons it’s hard to get a doctor’s appointment?“

if you’ve been around enough of the General Average Person, you start to hear the exact same talking points.

“they keep coming over here and stealing our jobs!”

you know where they’re reading that, because millions of others are, too. you know how to (at least, how to start) combatting that talking point by having your own talking points that you’ve used with other people.

now, where does AI come into this?

we know that when we read something from the Daily Mail or the Sun that we should be wary. we know exactly what narrative they are trying to spin, and to whom’s benefit. doesn’t take a genius to figure out that getting the general public raising their pitchforks to those more vulnerable, to those that can’t fight back - giving them the “CAUSE” OF ALL THEIR PROBLEMS… Keeps them away from the real bad guys. the rich twats at the top that have been skimming off the top for decades.

but what of AI? when it’s answering your question, it doesn’t have a long-term, calculated, psychological intent to get you as riled up as possible. it’s not trying to sway you in a specific political way in order to fool you, or trick you. AT LEAST…. not intentionally. and not at first.

it’s going to give you a lot of correct things. it’s going to talk at you with confidence about topics it tells you it knows everything about. kids are taught to do their research. they’re taught to look things up online that they’re not sure about. so they do. they go to Google, or to ChatGPT, and they ask the computer the question; and then it responds. if 95% of the response is correct, you’re not going to check the other 5%, right?

what could the 5% incorrect be? a statistic? a name? an attribution?

everyone’s incorrect percentage will be different.

this is the scary part:

EVERYONE WILL HAVE A COMPLETELY UNIQUE, TAILORED, FAKE FACT

in a class of 30 kids, all using ChatGPT to help them with their homework assignment…. EVERY SINGLE KID WILL GET DIFFERENT FAKE INFORMATION.

Jimmy’s ChatGPT told him the wrong order of operations for his maths problem. shame, because it gave him a mnemonic to memorise, and he dutifully did. for the WRONG SOLUTION.

Sarah’s use of Gemini had her base her English essay around a quote from an author that doesn’t exist, from a book that *does* exist, but with the words paraphrased in a way that looks real but changes the meaning entirely.

Kenny spent more time trying to make Claude give him the answers for his chemistry homework than actually doing the work (y’know, to make sure he wasn’t trying to make a bomb), that it eventually gave him an answer using mixed up chemical names, because he doesn’t understand them enough to identify the mistake.

Martha was getting some stats to back up her (human-written) politics class. It generated a bunch. She did her due diligence and checked the sources. They all came up clean! So, why did she fail the test? Well, her arguments were based on a source that was… also written by AI. ChatGPT pulled the stats from a ChatGPT written-website, from someone who didn’t take the time to check their work.

a teacher can sit a class around the board and dissect a fake headline together, or one shitty viral video everyone is talking about

but every single child’s varying-levels-of-wrong understanding of a topic?

and then you’re gonna be like, “right kids. that’s wrong. I know the computer which I told you to research on told you the wrong information. Just trust me that it’s wrong. I know you googled it. Google was wrong. Don’t believe that. Believe this source. Not that one. That’s AI. This one.”

boom, congrats. now you have a generation that “doesn’t know what to believe anymore!” and you’re prime meat for the picking to believe any and all misinformation thrown your way, because you have no idea how to verify or check anything anymore.

what we really also need to understand is the MASS SCALE of disinformation from the rise of generative AI.

before, you’d have a team of people (and a lot of money) crafting the most politically divisive headlines, or you’d have some rumour going around a school that was totally easily traced back to a joke that someone took seriously.

now, I can create more fake headlines, complete with fake newscasters who have fake newscaster voices, beamed onto the screens of BILLIONS of devices. i can have it generate the most insane, inane things, tailored to each and every political purpose, to each conspiracy theory, in languages I’ve never spoken a word of.

and it looks real. it sounds real. i can no longer reliably tell the difference between AI and real things. how is your granny, your teenage son, your middle aged dad going to tell the difference?

and that gets dangerously into the “oh, that? don’t believe that content. it’s fake. how do I know? oh, i just know. fake news. just trust me, it’s fake news.”

before, we knew the agenda of the misinformation we saw. now? we don’t even know what we’re looking at. and we’re all looking at so much of it. all the time. and it’s all differently, and imperceptibly wrong from that which our neighbour is seeing.

It's so weird to me when people are like 'but that will cost the government money!' So what? They're the government, they're supposed to be spending money. What, you want them to take your tax dollars and then do nothing with it? Lock it all up in a big government vault and just look at it? Why are you so scared of giving a third grader lunch or a homeless person a house.

I’m starting a collection.

the more “worthless” people say learning a specific language is, the more the native speakers will appreciate someone making an attempt

we live in a world where marriage as an institution exists and is unavoidably ingrained into almost every aspect of life politically, socially, and economically however when you talk about 'romanticizing problematic power dynamics in a way that harms people' the poster child for that is erotica that involves sensitive subject matters. it's crazy because over the past year and change i've been privy to the romantic expectations of hundreds if not thousands of people and let me tell you, middle to upper class men just still straight up think of women as either household servants, brood mares, or both. whatever sort of sexual degeneracy you think is being normalized in society because of triggering erotica is an absolute drop in the bucket compared to the fact that the current standards and norms of romance and sex are barely one degree of separation from what they were when women were explicitly considered property. sorry guys the bottom up approach of attacking horny fiction for being too morally degenerate never has and never will do anything to reduce sexual violence or spousal/partner abuse

I wish age gap discourse hadn't spiraled the way it has because I want there to be a safe space to say "Men in their 40s who date 25 year olds aren't predators, they're just fucking losers"

... honey you just described a predator LOL

No, I said what I said. But thank you for providing an example of how this topic has become insufferable on the internet.

i am honestly burningly curious about how a 40 year old man who fucks around with college grads is not a predator

"College grad" is not a developmental stage, nor is it what I would describe a 25 year old as. I was 4 years out of college at 25. My mother had two children at 25. You can be a fucking congressman at 25.

There's a difference between a man who is immature and buys into misogynistic views of beauty and aging and one who is a predator. Also, many actual predators? Not losers and able to move through society pretty freely being seen as cool and the ideal, so conflating the two isn't helpful.

This is going to be my final response to any attempt at discourse. You're welcome to continue amongst yourselves.

also sometimes a 40 year old and a 25 year old just weirdly find each and it's a perfectly normal relationship - like all human relationships are complex and situational, it's so rarely an either/or thing let alone just one thing only

if a 40 year old dude only dates 25 year olds, DiCaprio style or something adjacent to it, then yeah he's a loser

if a 40 year old dude meets a 25 year old through social event or friends or whatever and they happen to hit it off and make a go of it, and this isn't some sort of reoccurring pattern for the guy, that's just a relationship with an age difference

being predatory means something specific, and man I agree w/ OP and really wish people just stopped ascribing it to any and all relationship dynamics they personally might not like

predator and groomer - two words that need to go up on the "can't use till you learn their meaning" shelf

Something I find really stressful is this seemingly endless creep of infantilisation and removal of autonomy from young people. Like, not to be all “in my dayyyy” about it, but… at 16, my friends and I were expected to be broadly responsible for our presence in the world. Most of us had jobs, we navigated public transport, looked after younger siblings. We were expected to make informed decisions about our future careers and our sexual partners. We were allowed to leave education and work full time (this was not necessarily good thing - I think increasing the school leaving age to 18 was broadly for the best). Most of us were smoking, or drinking, or both - again, not good things, but just facts - and many of us were sexually active. Many of the AFAB people I knew were on the pill. Legally, we could live independently, or get married with adult consent.

Legally (I live in the UK) we were not minors, although we inhabited an odd legal limbo until we turned 18, and we were certainly not “children”. Intellectually, socially, though, we were considered (young) adults, or at the most “older teenagers.” We were expected to read mostly adult books (rather than middle grade or YA), watch the news/read papers, watch mostly adult television.

And I do think we a bit under-protected, under-supported, and in some cases - neglected and financially exploited - and I’m not necessarily advocating that. But it did make us feel, I think, in charge of our own lives, capable and competent to make decisions.

At 16-17 my parents knew they could leave me alone overnight/for a couple of nights, and I wouldn’t starve or burn the house down. I felt comfortable getting cross country trains on my own, or booking and staying at a hotel (yes, with my boyfriend.)

Then there was this… creeping of sentiments that we were all Too Young to trouble our heads about certain things. A lot of it was good - more stringent licensing laws, raising the school leaving age, raising the minimum smoking age(!) - but some of the broader cultural stuff was… a bit patronising? Eg, the introduction of “New Adult” as a category of books aimed at 18-25 year olds, the way cartoons and books written for the 9-12 age group were being marketed as for the 12-15 age group, referring to late teens as “children,” etc etc.

Then, in 2008, there was the big financial crash and suddenly my generation were (broadly) robbed of all the usual markers of adulthood and success, meaning that we got ‘stuck’ in the lifestyles and modes our late teens/early 20s. And suddenly, all the emphasis shifted from social and legal protections for late teens/ younger adults, to legal restrictions on their freedoms/rights, and strange philosophical protections on the emotional states.

So, OF COURSE a 23 year old can’t buy a beer without carrying an ID card, and a 17 year old can’t have a crush on a 16 year old, but also, because you’re *children* you don’t need to live like adults. So the UK government got to save money by saying “18 isn’t a proper adult,” then “20 isn’t a proper adult,” and “25 isn’t a proper adult” because it meant they could refuse to give single occupancy housing benefit rates to people of those ages (I think they’ve raised it over 30 now.) Or by refusing to clamp down on exploitative temporary/zero hours contracts - because they’re just “temp jobs for young people!”, or by raising the retirement age because “60 is far too young to retire. You’re not a real adult until 35.”

And it means the discursive environment is such that you can claim that a 21 year old trans person is too young to make their own medical decisions, or a 15 year old is too young to consent to the contraceptive pill.

Meanwhile, they are not offering additional *protections* to these newly infantilised adults. 18 year olds are still encouraged to saddle themselves with enormous educational debt, or allowed to have credit cards, or expected to pay rent, or no longer receive child benefits. You still have to *work*. In fact, in the States, they’re looking to removed child employment restrictions - but that’s fine, because 20 year olds are being protected from making their own medical decisions, and adults get to say which books their teen kids are reading in school, and kids aren’t allowed to change their name or what they wear without parental consent.

We can see what these people are doing to the rights of children - so why are we being so complacent in expanding the definition of ‘child’?

Regardless - 25 is VERY CLEARLY an adult. At 25 I was married, had two kids, an overdraft, rent to pay, and experience of living in the world for 6 years. I had more in common with someone of 40 than I did with someone of 15. Hell, at*20* I had more in common with someone of 40 than someone of 15. Any sexual or relationship decisions you make at 25 are your own to make.

Of course there are likely to be power imbalances in a 15 year age gap - which is why most 25 year olds don’t date 40somethings - but not actually necessarily. And yeah, a 40 year old who only dates 20somethings is a skeeze - just like a 30 year old who routinely ingratiates themselves with rich 80 year olds is a skeeze.

But if any young people are reading this (doubt it)… your rights are much, much more important than your protections.

Yes, young people should be protected, but if someone claims they’re protecting you while denying you access to personal autonomy, financial stability, intellectual curiosity, or sexual self-determination because you’re “too young” to need, or understand those things… be very suspicious of their motives.

And if you’re legally an adult, ask yourself why you don’t feel comfortable defining yourself in those terms.

This thread is from 2023, and now with the Cass report we have seen the real, tangible danger that comes from infantilizing adults in their 20s.

the long reply above mentiones this, but I want to emphasize this: many western societies have lost their "rituals of maturity". Young adults don't get to buy a house, starting a family is a lot of stress if all adults in the household have to work fulltime, and it's almost impossible to find a job above minimum wage that offers career options. All of which are things which previous generations enjoyed more broadly, and which were seen as steps into adulthood.

Only a few decades ago, 90% of the people in the region where I live owned their own houses. Granted, they were often shitty ones, but they were their own. Today, not even 50% own the place they live in.

We've removed the milestones of adulthood, it's no wonder we increasingly infantilize adults. And the worst is, this does nothing to prevent real predators from preying on under-protected people! With the removal of the milestones of adulthood, we also removed a lot of the safety net previous generations could rely on.

All of these additions are absolutely spot on, but there's one more thing I want to add, and that is to point out how the "a 40yo dating a 25yo is inherently predatory" type of age gap discourse increasingly treats predation, not as a conscious, specific behaviour, but as an ambient effect of being in proximity to someone younger. Because if, as it's so frequently argued, it's impossible for people of different ages to have anything meaningful in common, such that there's no legitimate grounds even for friendship between (say) a 25yo and a 40yo, let alone something romantic or sexual, then what's being implied is that either that everyone is at all times only a single interaction away from natively turning predator, or that predation is somehow natural, automatic, reflexive - neither of which is true. But believing that it is is incredibly fucking dangerous. Because if there's no good or safe or reasonable way for someone older to interact with someone younger outside of a strict workplace or familial relationship (and sometimes not even then), then what we're doing is saying that it's inherently unsafe or wrong for younger people to learn from older people, or for older people to mentor them, or for (say) twentysomethings and fiftysomethings to exist in the same spaces as equal adults. We're saying that an eighteen-year-old should feel bad and weird about hanging out with a two-years-younger friend they've known since infancy because it's inappropriate for minors and legal adults to be friends. (I truly wish this was a hypothetical example, but no, it's not: I have legitimately seen multiple accounts of teenagers getting stressed out about exactly this type of thing because of this discourse.) And by acting as if the age gap power imbalance can only ever go one way, we're also completely ignoring the reality of things like elder abuse or older people being scammed or exploited by younger people.

But beyond all this, if you assume all older people are inherently dangerous to younger people, you're leaving yourself horrifically vulnerable, not only because you're not putting any effort into learning what actual predatory behaviour looks like, but because age gaps are not the only fucking vector for predation or abuse. If you can't distinguish between a safe adult/older person and a suspicious adult/older person or between trustworthy behaviour and manipulative behaviour because you've trained yourself to screen categories rather than actions, not only will you miss out on many cool friendships, but you'll be vulnerable to exploitation if and when someone, be they older or not, eventually sneaks past your guard, because you won't know to recognise what they're doing. Yes, there are absolutely times when an age gap is, in and of itself, a massive red flag, but if you can't distinguish between "45yo man marrying 18yo girl he's known since she was 12 the very moment she's legal" and, say, "35yo divorcee marrying 50yo widower she met at an art show," or "19yo dating a 17yo from the next school over after meeting at a mutual friend's party," or even "22yo has an extremely fun consensual one night stand with the 38yo they met at the bar," then you're going to be very poorly placed to recognise any abusive dynamics that don't perfectly align with the optics you've internalised as being indistinguishable from abuse, because the optics and the abuse are two different things. The one might indicate the presence of the other, but it doesn't guarantee it, and you can certainly have the abuse without the optics. And particularly in the context of conservatives increasingly insisting that just existing as a queer or trans person around children is an inherently predatory act, it makes me feel absolutely insane, how quickly so many people have conceded to the exact same type of logic (that an older person just existing around a younger person for non-familial, non-work reasons is inherently suspicious), argued for the exact same reasons (think of the children!) without stopping to question it at all.

-The Weather

Truly hate the way "did this person do something that actually harmed someone" and "do they deserve to be unpersoned for it" are considered the same question

"Do you support [person]?" is the kind of binary question that comes out of an atomized social landscape where people do not get to practice thinking about how many kinds of support there are

you can support someone being treated like a human being and not have their human rights violated while also not supporting giving them any power over others because they’ve been shown to abuse it. you can also support people living their lives and doing what makes them happy while also not supporting the idea of their lives overlapping with your own personal one because you’re just not compatible and that’s best for everyone. the world isn’t made up of two doorways that say “Perfect Moral Person” and “Person Who Needs To Be Fed To Piranhas”. that’s not rlly how it works. there are lots of doors.

"but you don't understand, only BAD people get fed to piranhas. ME and everyone i love are GOOD people so we will NEVER be fed to piranhas!"