this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

I thought mistakes were considered symptoms (and therefore proof) of "AI slop".

[–] doomslang@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 hours ago

Absolutely not.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 7 points 17 hours ago

Meanwhile, I never even knew what an em-dash was until I started reading about AI. I always just used hyphens in the same way. Now I use em-dashes and everybody thinks I'm AI -- oh the ironing.

[–] DrunkAnRoot@sh.itjust.works 3 points 16 hours ago

Yea fr fr bro i be talkin likr i donf spaek engrish anymor jus to prove im human FU K captchas

[–] DevDave@piefed.social 34 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Reminds of the SG1 episode where the super advanced aliens turn to humanity for help against a constantly adapting AI scourge because humans are skilled at solving problems in unpredictably stupid but effective ways.

[–] SatyrSack@quokk.au 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Popular LLM overeliance reminds me of the one episode with that society of people who are all linked to the centralized computer core. The Link™ serves as their instant knowledge database, so they lose the ability to actually remember anything or really think for themselves. And if the Link decides to change something in the database, the people are unaware anything changed. As far as they are aware, the current information in the Link at any given time has always been the truth. If someone who does not use the Link tries to point out that something in the Link is not true or has changed, users of the Link vehemently insist that they must be mistaken, and that the Link is infallible.

Stargate SG-1 S7E5 "Revisions"

[–] heartSagan5@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 hours ago

Yeah, that one is more like AI these days. People’s memories are about to flop because they just sling AI slop, like “oh, did I even submit that?”

[–] DevDave@piefed.social 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

You left out the horror of how the machine balanced the books of citizens vs available resources.

[–] SatyrSack@quokk.au 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I felt that was getting spoilery.

If that sound interesting, I definitely recommend watching that episode. Even if you watch just that one episode without having seen the rest of the series. It works as a standalone story without having to have seen any other episodes.

[–] DevDave@piefed.social 1 points 8 hours ago

I had written SG1 off as silly for so long until getting hooked on season 2. Definitely a "don't judge a book by its cover".

Also the variety of stories worked so well. That said, nothing will top "How far is Alaris anyway?" /Several billion miles O'Neill/ "That's gotta be a record."

Or the free tickets to the "Virginia Dialogs or something like that"

[–] aeronmelon@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Asgardians needed humans to think of a stupid plan because they were too smart to.

And it was so stupid, it worked.

[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 17 points 1 day ago

And don't forget the ability to propel small lumps of metal real fast instead of energy based weaponry. Our advanced rock throwing was half of what they needed

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[–] starlinguk@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have a degree in English language and I'm an editor. I refuse to type like a moron.

[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 19 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I just, I comma splice so bad, no one can mistake it for AI, I just can't help myself. I think my ADHD, or something, leads to it, and other grammar issues that I've just never shaken.

[–] Apeman42@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's alright, Mr. Walken. We don't think any less of you for it.

[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 6 points 1 day ago

Mr Walken, boldly going where, no man, has gone before.

(In my head I'm hearing Walken give a Shatner impersonation)

[–] HumanOnEarth@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Well for what it's worth.....super ADHD here and I absolutely do this too.

But what the fuck? Aren't we supposed to use them as we would use pauses in speech? Did somebody teach me wrong or am I hallucinating that memory.

  • This thought brought to you by super ADHD

I've come to the conclusion that speech to text has played a significant role in the disappearance of commas. When things are written via speech to text, it almost never had any commas unless they say "comma", and almost no one ever does. From there, I guess people just get used to not seeing commas, and even when they're typing, commas don't cross their mind.

It's a pretty big pet peeve of mine, and I find it super frustrating to text with people who frequently used speech to text.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 6 points 1 day ago

There is more than one style of writing. Online and in communication, people tend to use conversational writing which would make the comma splices not grammatically incorrect.

In a research paper or something, they would be errors.

[–] exist@sopuli.xyz 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Yeah I never heard about them being usrd to signify pauses in speech. I'm not a native speaker but I think in general they are used to separate "sentences" (they have a verb and all that shit), interleaving sentences, and lists of items. Ofc there is a lot of nuance, for example, this sentence, and there are cases when commas should be left out (afaik). In my language I would always put a comma before "but" or "because" but in English it seems the words themselves separate the sentences. Anyway, shit is weird, English is very random.

[–] PattyMcB@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

I mean, that's totally valid, for most of us, anyway

[–] Stormy@thelemmy.club 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Same, but also I've noticed that all those years at university of, "Not typing like you speak," isnt helpful online. I know it makes me look like a robot. Even just using a higher level vocabulary is sus.

[–] WhoIzDisIz@lemmy.today 22 points 1 day ago (6 children)

I'd rather be who I am than let all this bullshit force me to play dumb. I earned my ability to speak (somewhat) intelligently, and I'm not going to let the AI bros discredit that effort. I, for one, refuse to contribute to the Idiocracy outcome the control freaks want.

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[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

And what happens when someone thinks you're an AI?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Either they ignore you or at worst they falsely accuse you of something you know not to be true, so I genuinely don't see why you should care. This seems completely pointless to me. Yet another example of the ways we try to please people who don't need to be pleased. I'd much rather just have them publicly make a fool of themselves so I can block them and move on.

[–] barryamelton@lemmy.world 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Responding with nothing but a link in a thread about not putting in any effort into one's responses.. What ever point you're trying to convey there is lost in the irony.

[–] crimsonpoodle@pawb.social 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I mean its true they could have offed more context; but the link is a short read. To summarize: the author believes llm writing to be of poor quality and when he notices it on linkedin he stops reading; he suspects that other people do this too. Making the argument that if you want people to listen to you or take you seriously you shouldn’t use LLMs to write your posts.

I think both of your perspectives are valid. Yours deals with the overt consequences: “you’re a bot” should be met with indifference and blocking of those people. Thats fair, be true to yourself.

However I think it is a valid aim when talking to other people to wish to convince them of things, or to not be put in a bucket with slop.

However, I’m not sure how effective not using em dashes or having some spelling errors will be in the ling run.

Already if you ask an llm not to do the things that it stereotypically does you can make it harder to detect. You could always add a static layer that intercepts the llms output and stochastically introduces spelling errors. So for now it’s mostly, amusingly, a human social convention due to lack of specificity in prompting.

So we need more IRL community; and social spaces online must to a certain extent become smaller and be reflections of those IRL communities, if we want to have genuine human connection in the long run.

It could be as simple as a meetup in your local area so you can create a graph of “known good humans”.

This doesn’t prevent accounts from being hijacked; but if recurring, meetings, could weed out the vast majority of bots. Takes effort though and a rekindling of the atrophied social constructs for IRL gatherings. Some portion of people may simply opt out for personal preference, and thats ok.

[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 1 points 14 hours ago

I read the text behind the link - I just didn't engage with it.

What's worth keeping in mind here is that using an LLM to assist in writing could mean anything from it fixing a few spelling mistakes and adding missing punctuation to a text the author wrote themselves all the way to AI writing the entire thing from scratch. Just because someone spots an em dash doesn't mean an LLM wrote the whole thing.

I don't think LLMs are the issue but poor quality writing is. Generic AI output tends to just make people's eyes glaze over so they stop reading. The same thing happens with poorly written human slop. People are only against AI use when they can detect it. It's the good old toupee fallacy: all toupees look bad - except the ones you didn't recognize as a toupee.

[–] gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 6 points 1 day ago

AI will copy the spelling mistakes to seem more human

I have become more lax because everyone makes mistakes and if your first way to win an argument is to point out spelling or grammar mistakes you're starting on the wrong foot.

[–] BurgerBaron@quokk.au 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I fix comments even if edited comments are looked upon less favourably. I refuse to use autocorrect so I suffer the consequences of that choice while using a touchscreen keyboard. I just felt one day I might be damaging my literacy skills relying on autocorrect.

Unfortunately that's combined with a weed habit so I also have a bad habit of editing in stuff I didn't think about* (see it just happened again) until 3 minutes later. You can probably track when I'm high with strings of edited comments all in a row 😅

[–] FunStuffIsFun@eviltoast.org 7 points 1 day ago
[–] capuccino@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

"Edited at ..." is the major sign of redemption.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We must keep these strategies to ourselves! The bots will adapt.

[–] Orioniae@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago

I think English will change in a way that being “wrong” will be part of the language itself.

AI can learn a language, but can’t learn the unpredictability of communities shaped by memes. AI for example doesn’t know memes, because requires processes unable to be emulated via pure logic.

The internet is a place where humans can let there hair down.

[–] Lumidaub@feddit.org 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Bad news: clankers occasionally throw in a typo or two as well. Can't tell you whether that's intentional or because the (human made) training data includes typos but there it is.

My observations: it can be for both reasons, though I think most modern ones will be better than the human average unless you ask them to add typos. Which they can do, but they have a hard time being consistent with it, especially if they're trying to pose as the same person over multiple responses (e.g. a reddit or fedi bot), they won't have the same type and frequency of typos that a human would have consistently across posts.

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