Okay, so you know how search engine results on most popular topics have become useless because the top results are cluttered with page after page of machine-generated gibberish designed to trick people into clicking in so it can harvest their ad views?
And you know how the data sets that are used to train these gibberish-generating AIs are themselves typically machine-generated, via web scrapers using keyword recognition to sort text lifted from wiki articles and blog posts into topical subsets?
Well, today I discovered – quite by accident – that the training-data-gathering robots apparently cannot tell the difference between wiki articles about pop-psych personality typologies (e.g., Myers-Briggs type indicators, etc.) and wiki articles about Homestuck classpects.
The upshot is that when a bot that’s been trained on the resulting data sets is instructed to write fake mental health resource articles, sometimes it will start telling you about Homestuck.
in my history of comics class for the webcomics unit i sat there thinking please can we not bring up homestuck. so everybody in this class can continue believing that i am a normal human being. but somebody DID bring it up. and then i was like. fine. i wont say anything. ill continue being normal. but when the class discussion boiled down to “this comic is influential but none of us know anything about it so we cant say anything meaningful” i was like fine. fine. takes the deepest swig imaginable from my flash and unmutes my mic. i hear youre all in need of an expert
i commend you for your bravery
Homestuck fan coming out of their self imposed exile to shame the history of comics class
The worst thing about Homestuck being the masterwork of our generation is it retroactively makes all those 1993-ass “Multimedia Studies” professors teaching courses on HyperStudio kinda onto something
Cursed thought: the Homestuck typing quirks are just how you would do Sandman’s Endless speech bubbles if you were rendering dialog with a computer instead of manual ink lettering
