Image Description: A digital meme divided into two main panels: a mathematical whiteboard explanation at the top and a reaction image at the bottom. Top Panel (The Whiteboard): Titled “P-ADIC FINANCE where p = profit.” It explains a fictional financial system using real advanced mathematics. Left text: “In this metric, a number’s size is how little profit divides it. The more profitable the crime, the closer its penalty sits to zero. String together ever-bigger crimes and the fines don’t blow up, they converge.” A sequence shows: “p, p^2, p^3, … arrow pointing to 0.” Right chart: A table titled “Crime, Profit, Fine, Fine Size in P-Adic Metric.” It lists crimes: Outsource pollution: Profit = p, Fine = $1M, P-adic size = 1/p (small). Fake the numbers: Profit = p^2, Fine = $10M, P-adic size = 1/p^2 (smaller). Fix the market: Profit = p^3, Fine = $100M, P-adic size = 1/p^3 (tinier). Ruin a country: Profit = p^4, Fine = $1B, P-adic size = 1/p^4 (minuscule). Repeat infinitely: Profit = p^n, Fine = p^n (lol), P-adic size = 1/p^n which approaches 0. Below the chart: A number line showing 0 on the far left (labeled “Where your fines live”) and numbers increasing to the right (labeled “Big in absolute world”). A final box states: “The true crime in a corporate environment is not choosing p.” Bottom Panel (The Reaction): A sepia-toned photograph of a group of wealthy white men in suits, including former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, laughing uproariously together at a gathering. Edited comic speech bubbles are assigned to them: One asks, “Why’d we even need lawyers?” Another laughs, “We just changed the metric lmfao.” A third says, “Fines are for poors.” A man in the foreground laughs, “Infinite money glitch found boys.” In the bottom right corner, a modern internet meme character (a crying, angry “Wojak” in a suit wearing a badge that reads “REGULATORS”) has a thought bubble that reads: “They took us for absolute fools.” Bottom Caption: Superimposed across the bottom in large, bold, white Impact font: “THEY TOOK US FOR ABSOLUTE FOOLS”—a pun on the word “absolute” referring to both being deeply tricked and the standard mathematical “absolute metric.”
You really cooked with that image description
the top of the image looks somewhat AI, so it is likely the image description is also generated using it.
It is! Everything you see here comes from collaboration with AI.
Mainly because I’m an old fart with too many ideas and RSI to stop me from doing anything with them, so I can’t exactly do it myself with a mouse and keyboard.
Don’t go hating my executive prosthetics. Collaboration with AI can be a positive force. It’s just being used and marketed the wrong way.
No single human is likely to have deep expertise in all of those domains simultaneously, whereas an LLM can synthesize explanations across them instantly.
I knew as soon as I read this comment there would be chaos. Sorry, friend
You can not “collaborate” with an LLM as it has no agency on its own, merely the simulation of it. You use it as a tool, that’s it. It also has no inherent expertise on anything (let alone a deep one), it merely generates the closest match which is why it will confidently do total nonsense so often. To use AI as tool safely and correctly you can only ever use it in domains you already know enough to understand when the LLM completely derails. Therefore I (as an example) can use and understand it for research on coding (but not letting it generate code for production, oh my god), but could never use it for finance advise as it could tell me any kind of nonsense without me being able to pick up on it.
You’re right on some things, like that AI is marketed and used the wrong way. It’s also made the wrong way by stealing literally the collected works of mankind, so to have reasonable approach to AI / LLMs as tool you have to be really cautious, use it carefully and quite frankly skip the media (pictures, audio) generation completely. That one is morally corrupt even in small amounts, plain and simply.
You knew what he meant. Don’t be pedantic. Having “a back and forth conversation with an AI, where I also made manual edits at times, to iteratively produce on an image” is too verbose, and “collaborate” sums it up nicely.
Especially since the conversation with the AI is literally in plain English. Do you talk to your power drill in English? Or table saw? Or toaster? No, but you do talk to an AI and have a conversation.
Just because it’s not “intelligent” or “self aware”—or other things you definitely don’t want it to be anyways—doesn’t mean you aren’t having a conversation or collaborating. Those words apply just fine.
No, they fucking don’t. These differences matter a lot especially because LLMs behave so human-like (as it was trained on us) and we got way, WAY too many people already treating them like equals, work buddies, friends or even fucking falling in love with a tool (ever heard multiple people genuinely fall in love with a power drill or a toaster, or killing themselves because the table saw told them they’re the messiah?). Words matter, especially in regards to what we call “Medienkompetenz” in german (lit. “media competency”, meaning bring educated in how to safely consume and use any kind of media or digital tool). And even more especially with AI, where not just the salesmen but even the tool itself tells us it can do shit it certainly can not while trying to abuse our emotional weaknesses.
You do not “collaborate” with a fucking toaster. If you think you do with an AI then your Medienkompetenz is lacking and you will eventually, even accidentally, put too much trust in what is essentially a game of chance and the machine will fuck you over, on which it will just say “You’re absolutely right!” while you have to witness all the consequences of your action (an AI can’t take responsibility because it’s just a bunch of complex math). The fact this tool uses natural language doesn’t change anything except your impression of it.
Stop subtly treating LLMs like a god damn entity, you’re fooling yourself.
I am sorry. I take it back. You are correct. Words only have one meaning, and that meaning can never be stretched to mean new things.
I certainly don’t want one of my memes to fuck me over.
To be pedantic, LLM’s don’t behave like us, they pretend to behave like us. They’re really just complicated auto-correct.
Neural networks have more promise to eventually behave like us, but that’s not what the AI craze is trying to propogate.
Most of what you speak of is caused by this simple statement from the onset:
If you use it as a tool, then expecting anything but minimal compliance would be an irrational expectation, because it will do exactly as you ask, which is the bare minimum to satisfy your requirements.
I got tired of that, so as an experiment, I decided to go about it differently, and made a couple discoveries about how to make it work. Turns out LLMs can’t pattern match things they don’t have in their training sets.
Accessibility is of extreme importance to me.