My day as an (unwitting) sea lion

Like a lot of people, especially in the UK recently, I've got more than fed up with Musk and everything he's up to, and also with the fact that on Twitter/X I seemed to be getting forever more sucked into reading fights about polarisation. So I thought I'd try BlueSky, which looks and feels very much like Twitter, but now seems to have enough people on it that you can actually find interesting things. (And, for me equally important, it's an open model, a protocol which can be used by others, and you can move your data on and off the server, and you have more control over the algorithms that determine what you see.)

I've been reading stuff on Twitter on and off for years, but I haven't been interacting so much. I like having conversations with people I only partly agree with, so my opinions can formulate and develop. I think that kind of discussion can be health for everyone. So I thought I'd try a bit of interaction on BlueSky.

Then I saw a post from an artist, and they were criticizing a fairly generic image that had been created by AI, and they said it was horrible in so many ways. So I asked, "I'm interested, what in particular don't you like about it?"

The guy came up with some interesting reasons why he didn't like the picture so much, or actually why he hated it. And I responded from my own point of view. (I'd share the picture but he has since blocked me so I can't.)

I think the person I'd originally responded to was probably well connected in the creative arts community. And what I wasn't really ready for was the level of anger that people were feeling, which I hadn't really thought about, but now can completely understand, because it's an existential threat to creative people's jobs.

I just couldn't persuade people that I was genuinely just trying to explore the issues and wasn't trying to shove my opinion down anyone's throat. I what was pretty immediately called the a*hole word on a couple of occasions and I people were sharing their outrage about my questions with one another and calling me, uh, various things, including a sea lion. I had to look that up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

The sealioner feigns ignorance and politeness while making relentless demands for answers and evidence (while often ignoring or sidestepping any evidence the target has already presented), under the guise of "just trying to have a debate", so that when the target is eventually provoked into an angry response, the sealioner can act as the aggrieved party, and the target presented as closed-minded and unreasonable.

I guess there really are people who engage in this special kind of trolling, making a point of wasting their own and other people's time.

(I also found the Twitter-like tree structure of the conversations really hard to manage because many people made similar accusations at different parts of the threads, and my efforts to address each of them, they may maybe made it seem like I was just messing about on this point. (I think Slack's very simple structure with main threads and just a single level of sub thread though maybe less logical to a computer person, is easier to navigate.))

I was accused of not acting in good faith by asking a question and then not responding enough to the answers. So I made a better attempt to consolidate my responses in one place, and then was accused of, again, not acting in good faith, but this time because, as I'd now been given all the actual answers, I shouldn't have anything really more to add, therefore I hadn't been listening. By this time, I'd already been blocked by a few members of what I guess was a creative arts bubble, which is quite different from the sort of bubbles I move in.

But maybe if a group of people start calling someone else a sea lion, they should ask themselves how they would know if the person was in fact genuinely trying to engage in a dialog, or maybe it's an issue that's maybe so important to them, that they can't really distinguish through the red mist. (I didn't say that, too scared.)

I I did feel they were, without exception, engaging in a kind of black or white thinking where specific aspects of AI were such a specific threat to their livelihoods or what's valuable to them that they didn't want to spend any energy on differentiating or thinking critically about anything, so every single thing about AI was bad, and at the same time it was also not fit for purpose and useless, and obviously always produces poor quality content, and is obviously only going to take everybody's jobs, and is obviously a zero sum game in which only massive corporations win and everyone else uses, and it's a uniquely bad waste of electricity energy. (I didn't say that either.)

On the other hand I got a lot more food for thought about what this is all going to mean for people in creative industries, and about where good people can and should pick fights against the corporations. I don't think my co-discussants got anything from it though, just a confirmation of why they need to keep angry.

So my sea lion koan for today is:

The harder I tried not to be a sea lion, to simply respond to others and make distinctions and comparisons, the more people thought I was one.

(If I get a chance I'll make a separate post about what I learned from the discussion.)