“Oh look at this guy reading a BOOK at the cafe, he must think he’s sooooo cool! I get he thinks a woman will sleep with him cuz he’s so smart and cultured.”
Or maybe my roommate is having their partner over and they kicked me out and I’d rather do this than just be on my fucking phone for two hours?
I have the reverse experience reading in public. Usually people are polite and curious but I’m reading something that weirds them out. Like the other day I was reading a collection of Louis Althusser essays, coworker asks about it, I respond with something like “uhhh, just some philosopher guy. I’m not sure how to explain succinctly.”
Too late, guy asked grokkk which responded with something like “Louis Althusser was a schizophrenic French Marxist who murdered his wife in 1980.” And I mean I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that because yeah that’s who he was
It’s very depressing to me that many people won’t even really google anymore. Without thinking - they’ll wolf down the AI SLOP instead.
in extremely mild defense, google has been garbage for a decade because of SEO and advertising, but i do wonder why the impulse is to LLM instead of wikipedia for looking up somebody with a published book
Google’s goal now is to keep people at a google. Ideally for them - you won’t click away. For example - their Youtube embeds aren’t right-clickable. If you want to open them in a new tab - you have to click twice. First click to make the vid an interstitial. And then you can right-click the Youtube link overlay on the vid.
And there’s “top of the page” syndrome. People assume that the best stuff is at the top of the page so why keep scrolling? When people go to a news site - their main focus is the top of the page. The same is true for google. And google puts its AI slop embed at the very top of the page. Plus the drop downs answers are likely (very likely?) AI answers too.
Also some people (many people?) have decided an AI slop is good enough. Google has caused Wikipedia’s traffic to drop.
:yea: the internet was a mistake now they will grill me on fanfics
Asking grokkk what “My Immortal” is because I saw someone reading it in public.
But yeah lol. “I’m just reading.” “Reading what?” “Uhhhhhhhh…”
WHY DID YOU HAVE TO ASK ME THAT!
Why did my brain immediately go to the Evanescence song?
i just say its the bible and try to hide the cover
More like “My Immortal Love For Jesus Christ Our Lord”! What’s a “Draco”?
I belly laughed at this, it would be just my luck something like this would happen to me too.