Stylish Communication - The Issue With AI · Real Men Real Style Community

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Stylish Communication - The Issue With AI

AI is a wonderful tool, with a great many exciting applications to explore. But when it's used in person-to-person communication, for example in a forum setting such as this, I feel it is more of a barrier than a benefit.

I think my issue is one of homogenisation. Like AI art, which faces a huge backlash from physical creatives and consumers alike, AI text and AI comments have an all-too apparent "AI-ness" about them, a quality that gives me the ick. If you look at, say, an event poster created by an AI prompt, it looks AI-created through and through. And because such things are ubiquitous, all you SEE is AI Event Poster followed by AI Event Poster, turtles all the way down. These days, I'd rather see an event poster with a bunch of crappy looking stick figures over yet another smiling identikit cartoon caricature with wide eyes and a rictus grin hollering about their upcoming yard sale.

Even AI "enhancements" of existing photographs apply a telling saccharine sheen that signposts the electronic intervention. And in an RMRS context, such manipulations feel at odds with the message, one step down from claiming I'm upping my style game by photoshopping my face onto a picture of Steve McQueen.

But aside from AI visuals, it's the posts, and the comments, that are obviously AI which I feel do us all a disservice. Initially this disservice is done in how they are delivered, with a polished soulless positivity that feels vaguely alien and insincere. AI posts and comments feel akin to the much derided Corporate-Speak of the Nineties, or the Clickbait Headline format of the 2010s. And maybe "AI-Speak" will go the same way, into that Uncanny Valley, mocked and ultimately rejected by the collective.

But more insidiously, I think the REAL disservice comes not in the AI words themselves, but in the fact that their over-use and abuse seems wholly at odds with the RMRS message. A tenet here is that one should comport themselves with intention, be it in how they dress or how they act; just throwing a prompt into an engine and cut-n-pasting the result in order to receive a participation trophy isn't particularly intentional, and definitely isn't stylish. REAL men, REAL style, right?

And AI commenting? I'd suggest that stuff like "ChatGPT, say something nice about the outfit in the highlighted forum post" offers nothing tangible to the conversation. It outputs a buzzword gumbo with no substance or depth. I'd much rather have a real opinion that I wholly disagreed with than yet another trite "you're demonstrating a timeless and classic fit - such style never goes out of fashion" type comment.

To end, I'll say I'm all for AI. I use it a lot at work, to help with coding or excel formulas, or even powerpoint presentations (although the art backlash makes that a little less palatable nowadays). And I'm aware that a lot of people here may feel a little "seen" by this post. Seriously, I'm not saying any of this as a callout. I just think that if anyone who is utilising AI in the ways I've outlined is doing so for engagement purposes, I should let them know that their doing so may not be as engaging as they imagine.

Oh, and I'm also posting to see what the recently-booted AntonioBot has to say about this! *eats popcorn* 😄

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Stylish Communication - The Issue With AI