u/dmorin

My dude, I defended you from the "minimal effort AI slop" reports, but now I've got 3 of your nearly identical posts in the queue, which is getting to be very spammy. How about we focus on quality over quantity and not just posting everything? The downvotes should be telling you something.

Multiple reports for "AI Content", but that's not the rule. The rule says "primarily AI-generated and show minimal human effort." I think human effort did go into this. I don't think it's just "pasted output."

I don't really like it either, but that's not what report and remove is for. That's what votes are for.

You're absolutely right, slip of the fingers.

I think most folks point to Macduff's line:

his fiend-like queen (Who, as ’tis thought, by self and violent hands, Took off her life)

as the "proof" of suicide. Though it does say "'tis thought" right there, so plenty of room for interpretation. Does "took her own life" imply "deliberately"?

Approved, because it's simple enough, doesn't seem covered in ads, and OP is looking for engagement and ideas, not just eyeballs and clicks.

Having said that, and having written numerous Shakespeare games myself (Bardle, Pairicles, Bardic), a few thoughts:

Needs some help or hints or something to get the user started. 9 guesses, and right ones count? That means you have to play a perfect game.

I'm curious if it's hardwired behind the scenes or if you've got some AI in there. Is it deterministic? Does each puzzle only have one answer?

Is it a "puzzle a day" type of thing? Or can you play as much as you want?

I don't think the error handling works, I deliberately put Hamlet in the no suicide / no ghosts spot, and nothing happened. It just left it blank.

Well, no, it's not "low effort AI slop" - but it is spam. The point of posts in the sub isn't just to link to content elsewhere. People are responding to the only content that's actually in the post - which is an AI image.

If you want to get some conversation going, I'd suggest that you put the content in the post, and leave the unnecessary image (AI, stock photo, whatever...) out of it. You're admittedly new to Reddit. Reddit is its own world with its own etiquette, and your post violated a whole bunch of unwritten rules most likely without you even realizing it. Every day I have people modmail requests to post things like this and we explain the spam guidelines. Often, Reddit's autofilters will remove posts without us even getting a say in it.

OP's account doesn't appear to be a bot; they're actively commenting on threads in this and other subs. That doesn't mean that the content's not written by AI. But honestly, I think it might be a non-native-language issue. AIs don't typically make the same kind of grammatical mistakes we're seeing here.

Well, OP, 3 out of 4 AI checkers I ran this through say its AI. If I were a college prof and you submitted this as a Google Doc I'd be looking at change history and for some other indicators that an actual person wrote it.

Got any more thoughts on the subject? I see that you're a new account and this is your first post. Welcome to the sub. Was it your intent to start a conversation?

Ok, I've been out of town, but here's some thoughts. I'm not taking it down as AI because it is far from "low-effort" AI slop. It's clear that a lot of work did go into it.

Full disclaimer, I have a version of this same project on my own site (*). The idea of an "everything you might want to know about Shakespeare" browser is a tempting project for anybody who otherwise already has the ability to bring up a reasonable web site. AI is just making it go faster.

Having said that, I think it ultimately does more harm than good. Because, from experience, I can tell you that the AI makes mistakes. And unless you're manually verifying everything that it generates, you're going to miss some. Especially the more esoteric plays that people aren't exploring daily. If you are that fully versed (ha!) in all the plays that you did double check everything, well then I'd ask, why use AI in the first place? So we'll logically assume that much of this is unverified AI, and therefore we can assume there are mistakes.

Students who don't know any better may stumble across this resource, see those mistakes, and assume they're the truth.

Is this the end of the world? Well, no - it's not like everything you read on the net is true, or is ever going to be. But steps can be taken. For instance on my site I have "This was AI generated, and there may be mistakes" disclaimers, as well as feedback links encouraging people to write me when they find such mistakes, so I can correct them. And I've gotten maybe half a dozen or so updates, which I appreciate.

It's also still broken in lots of places. One of the FAQs for Midsummer told me who Young Siward was. When I asked for a translation of Hamlet's "What hour now?" I got, "I need the actual Hamlet speech you'd like me to rewrite — it looks like only the stage direction or prompt came through. Could you paste the full text you'd like me to work with?" Which makes me think, are you actually doing real time translation requests? That's not going to scale, my friend. Why wouldn't you just systematically get that data once, and cache it? You might be caching on an as-needed basis, but given how slow everything is I thought probably not.

I don't offer those samples to be a dick, but rather to point out a problem I know you'll end up dealing with. This is a lot of content, and you are forever going to be behind in trying to fix all the places where it comes up short. So as a resource you have to ask yourself what value it's really providing its audience. When it's broken or wrong, that's bad. When it's not, is it really offering anything that, as noted, isn't already available a million other places? You need a hook. Sheer volume of content is not that hook.

In summary, I'm not against it purely on AI principles. I just don't think it's ever going to turn into the resource you might be imagining, and I hate to see you waste all that effort.

(*) I'll admit freely that mine is an SEO play. My site covering many other Shakespeare things has been around for years and has several thousand pages of original content. One day while I was out of work I wondered if I could integrate a Shakespeare browser so that when I mention a play or character on the site, I can link to my own play and character summaries. Likewise, when people land on my AI-generated browsable pages, they can get linked into the various blog posts and other areas of interest that they might not otherwise have seen. But like so many of my projects it was a "Get it up and running and then move on" type of project. I wouldn't say I spent a year on it - weeks, at best. And now I really only go back to it when it needs an update. I gave it the amount of effort i felt it merited, then went on to scratch other itches.

Well, this has been an interesting way for people to spend their afternoon.

I've been around the internet a very long time. Long before "the web". Back when, in order to get internet access, you had to understand what it was and why you want it. Then one day, AOL connected to the internet and the flood of people who have absolutely no idea how to act came pouring in. We called it Eternal September, since from then on it looked forever like the children had started school again.

Man, I hadn't thought about that expression in a long time.

Until this post.

OP's not actually breaking any rules. They're correct, they're welcome to an opinion. What they're not doing is adding anything of value, or actually presenting any kind of interesting debate. This is the kind of low effort troll post you're supposed to just downvote and forget ever existed. But there's no reason for me to remove it.

Carry on.

Well, potentially, if you'd actually mentioned Shakespeare at all in the post?

https://www.reddit.com/r/shakespeare/search/?q=AITA

Before we go down this rabbit hole again, let me just say that it came up 2 months ago, and a year ago, and 2 years ago ....

Lookup the "Shakespeare mural" in your GPS, it's worth it for the pictures. I'm not sure if he's there every day, but there's a man with a tophat playing a flaming tuba right in front of it. He's now part of the story whenever I get to show this picture.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DWUdDGBETk6/

Just to add that I've been in touch with these fine folks, and they're legit and verified!

Jumpstart your Daily Gratitude practice by reading anonymous notes left by others, and hopefully contributing your own.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gratitudedrop.mobile

Absolutely free forever, no ads, no accounts, no nothing. Just a place to read about gratitude and maybe (optionally!) contribute to the pool.

I made this because, while I'm a believer in the "Take a moment each day to identify those things you're grateful for" philosophy, I often had trouble finding things. I figured maybe other people did, too. So I made a place where those with an abundance of gratitude can share it with those who need a little help sometimes. Content is curated, so it'll never descend into noise and nonsense. Thank you for your time.

And, we're done. I didn't immediately remove this as racist because there seemed to be an intelligent conversation going on. But I've been watching and it's kind of devolved a bit. Everybody's opinion has been expressed at this point, and nobody's changing anybody's. Locked.

Because the voting system has a purpose, too. Most of OP's comments get downvoted into oblivion. What I'd prefer, personally, is if people could manage to stop engaging because that's half the problem. Say OP posts something about authorship. Sure, it gets reported by one or two people, it gets downvoted by half a dozen or so - but a dozen more people respond, too. Doesn't that suggest that people *do* want to talk about the question, and it's just that they only want to take one side of it?

What I think we're going to do is rewrite that rule a bit to make it more clear that there are other places to discuss authorship theories, but not here. I liked "There is no authorship question" when I wrote it, but I can also see that it's inflammatory to those who feel otherwise.

OP asked me about this post, and I did approve. Look, the question exists. Some people want to discuss it. We've agreed, through popular vote, that it's not something we want to be discussing here. So I didn't think it in violation to say hey, there's another place where they can talk about it.

I will never stop recommending Dame Judi Dench's rendition of Sonnet 29 on the Graham Norton show. It's like listening to a magical incantation. There's meaning in the damned pauses. I've rewound it just to point out to people how she says "lark". It reminds one that the sonnets can be performed as much as the plays are. The craziest thing is that to her, she's just banging it out off the top of her head. She even gives a sort of "Well, there ya go, there's a sonnet" shrug at the end, which is precisely the point. She's not even trying that hard, she just does it.

And then of course frickin Arnold Schwarzenegger steals the whole scene with one line :) It really is one of my favorite clips.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BAYtnCAnNU8

You're welcome! Glad you like them!

Thanks! And, I agree - I already bumped it up once, if you can believe it, but I'll see if I can add an "even more space on mobile" adjustment. In the original version it was letting words wrap so you'd see a single letter starting a line and think "I got this" only to realize that wasn't I or A (or O, hint hint), it was just the last letter of the previous word.

The book has almost no Shakespeare content, except for the end. All of the Shakespeare content that was inserted - the balcony reference, the Macbeth, the god-awful misuse of "To be or not to be" - only served to weaken the movie.

I'm gonna go ahead and drop a link to my own Shakespeare Geek Shop :) because it definitely answers the question. Everybody and their mama is doing "Prose before hoes" and "Does thou even hoist" and, <shudder> "I would challenge you to a battle of wits but I see you are unarmed," which isn't even Shakespeare. All my designs are original.

https://www.shakespearegeek.com/shop

https://thelondonsockexchange.net/en-us/collections/the-shakespeare-collection

The London Sock Exchange has a whole Shakespeare Box Set that I would kill for. I'm not about to spend $100 on socks for myself but as a gift I'd be in my heaven.