What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
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Prof. Sam Lawler (sundogplanets@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 26-Sep-2026 10:04:07 JST
Prof. Sam Lawler
- Mr. Bill and Paul Cantrell repeated this.
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Prof. Sam Lawler (sundogplanets@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 26-Sep-2026 10:04:06 JST
Prof. Sam Lawler
Mansplaining, without invitation, my own words, with the citations that I used myself. What the actual fuck.
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Prof. Sam Lawler (sundogplanets@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 26-Sep-2026 10:06:01 JST
Prof. Sam Lawler
Thinking about this a bit more, the reason that this confuses me so much is that it's not asking me for anything. It's not the spam I'm used to that's trying to scam money. It's like... it's trying to be helpful (in the most mansplainy way possible, but whatever). But it's a program, a racist pile of linear algebra (as "The AI Con" so beautifully puts it).
Is it trying to get me to reply and train on my email responses? This is so fucking weird.
Anyway, fuck AI, time to snuggle goats.
Daniel Supernault and Steve's Place repeated this. -
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Angus McIntyre (angusm@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 26-Sep-2026 10:17:40 JST
Angus McIntyre
@sundogplanets The mansplainers never imagined that AI would come for their jobs too.
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Dan (chillikebab@aus.social)'s status on Saturday, 26-Sep-2026 10:17:40 JST
Dan
@angusm @sundogplanets i always thought a better name for LLMs was MaaS - 'mansplaining as a service'...
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Prof. Sam Lawler (sundogplanets@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 26-Sep-2026 10:33:54 JST
Prof. Sam Lawler
BETTER
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Angus McIntyre (angusm@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 26-Sep-2026 10:52:20 JST
Angus McIntyre
@sundogplanets Oh, wait, it’s from iLands, which seems to be a known menace. I’ve seen other reports of people getting deluged with spam from iLands agents. It’s probably worth adding the string to all your spam filters.
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@robpike.io (robpike@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 26-Sep-2026 12:51:28 JST
@robpike.io
@sundogplanets Welcome to the club.
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Prof. Sam Lawler (sundogplanets@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 26-Sep-2026 14:05:02 JST
Prof. Sam Lawler
Ok last post stewing about this: I just looked more carefully and pretty much all of the citations are wrong in some strange way. But they're all clearly based on citations that I've used in writing.
Don't use genAI for science, kids.
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rednikki (rednikki@toot.boston)'s status on Saturday, 26-Sep-2026 14:05:14 JST
rednikki
@sundogplanets AI is terrible for citations. Citations are a huge part of my job (I edit at a journal). All of us journal people are trying to send up the alarm about how much AI screws up citations, and no one is listening. If you ask AI to format your citations it will mess up all your DOIs and make things that look right but are not at all.
JAMA has written a thing on this, which is polite and journal-speak for "oh god, oh god, do not let AI touch your citations": https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2852772