







A newly published study of how college students interact with chatbots and human strangers showed talking to a random person offers more connection than an LLM.
How to write it like you told it
What do you say to someone who wants to write but struggles with writing and is tempted to use an LLM-based chatbot?

Humans are social creatures. We crave bonding and social connections. In our digital world, our common social space is a campfire, which is the group chat.
WinGPT
Do you use Windows 3.1? Do your friends send you jokes and haikus written by ChatGPT, and make you feel left out? Do you wish you had the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips? Or wish you had your very own AI chatbot on your trusty 386?
Michael R. Crusoe (@biocrusoe@fairpoints.social)
Oh, I like this part > No AI-generated text in human-to-human communication > When our maintainers volunteer their time to review your issue, PR, or proposal, they do not want to talk to a machine. This is a basic principle of respect. https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@godotengine/116839550229253906
Small talk acts like social glue – here’s how to get better at it
Maybe think of small talk as a technology: a human invention for accomplishing social goals.

Millions of Volunteers Are Keeping the Internet Human. For Now.
We’re never going back to the human internet we had. But we can hope for a better internet than the AI-dominated one that is emerging, writes Sarah Gilbert.

proto instant messenger
AIM-inspired group chat on the AT Protocol. Real-time chat rooms, presence, away messages — a safe space for community.


What Happens, Exactly, When a Person Talks to an LLM?
A phenomenology of thinking with a model.

Why the fuss about conversational programming?
First, there isn’t much fuss … yet. But there will be.

AI Fiction in the Wild
This website hosts anonymized ChatGPT-user conversations where users requested some form of fiction generation—including stories, novels, scripts, roleplay, hypothetical scenarios, erotic imaginings, and more. The data is drawn from WildChat and was collected voluntarily and with users’ consent between 2023 and 2024. The models were powered by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.
AI Fiction in the Wild
This website hosts anonymized ChatGPT-user conversations where users requested some form of fiction generation—including stories, novels, scripts, roleplay, hypothetical scenarios, erotic imaginings, and more. The data is drawn from WildChat and was collected voluntarily and with users’ consent between 2023 and 2024. The models were powered by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

Artificial
An LLM is a computer program. We should talk about it like a computer program.

Giving LLMs a personality is just good engineering
AI skeptics often argue that current AI systems shouldn’t be so human-like. The idea - most recently expressed in this opinion piece by Nathan Beacom - is that language models should explicitly be tools, like calculators or search engines. Although they can pretend to be people, they shouldn’t, because it encourages users to overestimate AI capabilities and (at worst) slip into AI psychosis. Here’s a representative paragraph from the piece:

Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing
This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. It is a field guide to help detect undisclosed AI-generated content on Wikipedia: while some of the signs may be broadly applicable, some may not apply in a non-Wikipedia context.[a] Not all text featuring these indicators is AI-generated, as the large language models that power AI chatbots are trained on human writing, including Wikipedia. Many elements of AI writing can be found in editorials, blogs, or fan fiction.