Everyone can tell you used AI to do it. They just aren't saying anything about it because they want to be polite.
(Do you know someone who needs this thought to pop unbidden into their head?)
Write it in sidewalk chalk ... it'll find its mark.
Maybe we could crowd fund a billboard.
If this is you? Just stop. Stop today and everyone will forget about it in a few weeks. That's the solution. Just stop using AI to make the images or "improve" the writing or to design the flyer or whatever. Please don't force your friends and coworkers to confront you about it.
The other option is to clearly label all such work as "made with AI" ...
If you don't want to do that? Let us ponder together *why* that is. What does reluctance imply?
@futurebird
leftist messaging strategy: "we're hoping a sneaky teenager with a can of spraypaint will do our job"
nazi messaging: "ah, we literally spent many decades and billions of $$ buying nearly every billboard in the USA "
Well if you aren't really interested in controlling people expressing dismay at personal choices that degrade social well-being and reduce joy is always awkward.
To propagandize itself can feel "unleftist"
But sometimes it's just repeating the truth over and over until it seeps in.
@futurebird or at least a LinkedIn ad
Oh. Oh yes I like that even better.
@futurebird god yes, where I work pretty much everyone in marketing and above VP level. Always illustrating their posts with AI slop when stock images are easily available (we have a subscription) or an illustration is not necessary.
@futurebird I'm reminded of the ad agency that switched to AI photos, then switched back to real photos. There was nothing obviously wrong with the AI photos, but engagement went way down anyway. Using AI somehow made the results less interesting.
I think this applies to everything now…but I’ve particularly noticed it a lot with estate agents recently. They manipulate the images of the house with AI and get AI to write the particulars. It’s really very obvious and I don’t think potential buyers trust it at all. Trust is already at minimal levels with estate agents - why reduce this?
"everyone else is doing it"
And sometimes it seems like it works?
I don't understand having photos of a property that don't show how it will really look when you show up. That is just wasting everyone's time.
And there is a gradient to this. Did the agent use photoshop to remove some junk from a room to show how it would look empty? Did they use a wide angle lens to make it seem bigger? Did they improve the contrast?
But it's hard to see what's too much.
It’s been the case for many years they have used photoshop to ‘tidy up’ cluttered homes and taken the photos with a wide angled lens to make everything look twice as wide as it actually is.
They argue if they don’t do this - and everyone else is doing it - people will just swipe straight past the property. I don’t know?!
But using AI to write the particulars results in generic flowery verbiage…nothing stands out!
@futurebird I am in Germany right now and noticed that commercial ads and flyers do have a little label "made with AI". Seems to be a new EU law. Very helpful in deciding which stores to avoid.
I want this law in the US. Please can we have this?
@futurebird no, we can't have all the nice European things, like universal healthcare, almost free education or lower poverty or marked AI content.... Because... FREEDOM!!! /s
Oct 16, 2026, 11:53 AM@futurebird a coworker told me that she had to take a letter written by another superior coworker that was obvious AI generated. She said she removed half the words and corrected the rest for style and content. And sighed.
@futurebird - Understandable - I like it.
@futurebird In most cases it's a "I believe everyone does this and due to my usage with AI, it slowly made me believe that doing so is perfectly fine".
I've learned to accept it and cut ties the moment someone started valuing AI (and what it tells him) above decade old friendship.
I'm kind of having fun revisiting old family photos that were faded, blurry, black and white, overexposed, low resolution, etc and using machine learning to fill in some imaginary detail that might be statistically similar to the details that have been lost. I delete or hand-edit the ones where it makes up a false face, or makes things hairy that shouldn't BE hairy. (This is a weird glitch of the algorithm I'm using! People end up wearing furry clothes and furry glasses!)
But I keep the original versions of those photos in my online albums as well, and I make a note in the captions on a "enhanced" versions that AI was used. The point is to let you better imagine what the original scene might have looked like, to make the past feel more present. But it's still imaginary.
I feel like that's what everyone would do, if they were using it for artistic purposes and not deceptive purposes.
@futurebird One of the things I find annoying (hey, I'm almost 70, I could go on and on about the things that annoy me) is that this stupid fantabulist LLM junk is giving AI a bad name. Personally, I love the spam filter that comes with Proton Mail. Radiologists can do great things with the tool built with old school machine learning and knowledge engineering. The problem with LLMs is that they patch together some really nice AI work like natural language recognition, with a gigantic Google search engine. The tech bros are selling this "If we just scrape enough stuff, intelligence will 'emerge'". When you use that to write or draw, you are just copy and pasting from the Internet.
Maybe Trump is almost right by accident. It should be "SI" for "Stupid Intelligence".
Ive stoppef being polite, if they dont respect me enough to write their own words,i just deletw whatever it is they've sent me, with null reply.
Oct 16, 2026, 3:02 PM@futurebird I would never be so polite.
@futurebird my boss looks up everything with AI, then is surprised when it gets a command or something wrong, which it does every time. Meanwhile I use the question mark CLI help tool to find the correct command before he’s finished telling it the command is wrong.
@futurebird don't be polite to slop jockeys