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Because the alternative is a ban.
That was always the alternative? You did it to belittle me, to paint my perfectly lucid and even tempered replies as unhinged. Because you had nothing else.
Yes, the alternative to calming down and ceasing your belligerence is a timeout. That is always the alternative.
I do not think you are unhinged. I think you're angry and you're angry-posting. You may think your replies are perfectly lucid and even-tempered. They are not. I'm really trying to cut people some slack right now, but I'm running out of slack.
Alright, Gemini explained that my incredulous shorthand looks the same as anger to an outside observer, and I can see how it reads that way now so I am sorry. I am annoyed though, because I anticipated a mod response, as I do in any interaction with Skibboleth, and Grok cleared both those posts as lucid and even handed before I posted them.
Edit: clarity
Am I getting old? Because... I don't even know how to explain to you what I find so wrong here. Yeah. Yeah, that's why I feel old.
Can I assume what you find wrong is something to do with the idea of me outsourcing my determination of the lucidity of what I wrote to an AI or maybe the AI that is considered unhinged?
I put every post that I think has the potential for mod action (well, except when I'm too angry to care) through an AI first and ask if I'm being reasonable and lucid. I would have done this my entire motte history if I could, it feels to me like I got mod action on two types of posts - posts where I fly off the handle (so mod action is fair) and posts where I am struggling to believe someone posted something with what I consider obvious flaws (and mod action is imo unfair) - and it has been a huge weight off my shoulders (up until now) to not have to worry I was swearing too much or making oblique references or that statements I wrote in exasperation or incredulity would appear aggressive from a different perspective. I don't outsource my thinking to it in my perspective - I have no interest in letting an AI argue for me, but I do use it to shore up my Chinese room approach to the psychology of other people. It has also immeasurably improved my ability to not piss off everyone around me.
Also I currently have access to Supergrok, and in my opinion unless you tell it to be unhinged (in which case it's nuts) it's usually on par with Gemini. I know this because I have been asking it and Gemini the same questions for the last week. Of course it failed the first time I decide to rely on it exclusively, such is life.
For one thing, AIs are notoriously agreeable (and hence unreliable) since they are not programmed to tell you "this is a heap of shit" but rather "wow, your points are so cogent, your writing so sharp and impactful! I am so impressed my body is literally shaking with delight right now!"
For another, dear Lord, has even TheMotte succumbed to artifice now and we no longer generate our own outraged reactions the traditional way, with unthinking immediate reaction based on misfiring brain cells, but rather expect Big Sibling AI to vet our rage posts for us?
Yes. Well, like I said I generated my own reactions, I just checked the tone. I am an idiot savant at reading tone, sometimes I nail it, usually I have no idea what's going on. And also profanity is my muse, when I get started attacking someone I have a lot of trouble reining it in. Especially when intelligent people I respect are being thoughtlessly cruel fucking idiots to some of the least dangerous people on the fucking planet. Tt. Moving on.
Like I said, it has immeasurably improved my ability to not piss off everyone around me. So maybe it's a placebo effect, sycophantically telling me my posts are lucid (except for the times it didn't) because they were fine in the first place. I think that's unlikely, my unthinking immediate reactions based on misfiring brain cells were only ever tolerated on /r/cwr, but more than that I have seen the improved outcomes.
You know, I will go against the grain here and say I don't think using an AI to vet your posts is necessarily a bad thing. Especially if you're literally unable to tell in the heat of the moment that an invective-filled response will read as "heated," having an AI on your shoulder to say "Hey there bub, might want to dial that down" is, IMO, a very valid use case for AIs.
That said, having played with LLMs a lot, if you want it to tell you whether or not you are being "lucid" or "unreasonable," you really do need to have some very careful prompting techniques, because if you ask Grok or ChatGPT something like "Please read this post and tell me if I'm being calm and reasonable," the default response will tend to be validation and affirmation: it's not impossible to get an LLM to actually criticize or challenge you, but it's difficult to get something that really approximates "honest and objective feedback."
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