Tag: keyboard

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…and sometimes, unreality is intentional and benign.

Today, Ars Technica posted an article with a header image featuring a keyboard modified to add an “Ars Subscribe” button. But the keyboard looked weird: the visible keys looked like this:

OPGU↵
LS.,
OC/[Ars Subscribe]

The extra letters, especially the two O keys, immediately drew accusations of AI slop generation.

And yet the image was credited to Aurich Lawson / Getty.

I figured Lawson had grabbed a stock image without noticing it was slop and then added the Subscribe button. So I did some reverse image searches. And it turned out that the apparent source photo was uploaded to iStockPhoto in 2016 (Getty owns iStock now), long before the advent of modern “AI” image generation.

That left the question of why the 2016 image had weird keys, though.

Then @lw replied on Mastodon that it matches a Turkish keyboard layout with the diacritics missing. I looked back at my search results and noticed another image that looked the same, only with the extra keys blanked out. The same account uploaded this one in 2018, and this time iStock had tagged it as having been uploaded from Turkey.

So, mystery (mostly) solved! It’s a real keyboard layout. Almost certainly a real photo, deliberately edited by hand to remove the extra markings. Why? Probably the original uploader figured it would be less distracting to a global audience. Who could have predicted that a decade later it would end up looking more suspicious because of it?

The discussion picked up in the article’s comment thread, where narteb found an even older version from 2014, still with the missing diacritics, but with a different action button and a darker (presumably original) skin tone on the finger.

A Proxy for Quality

It’s no surprise that readers were so quick to assume the photo was flat-out generated slop based on the apparent mismatch (not counting the obviously intentional subscribe button). “AI”-generated images have flooded the zone, and while there used to be some obvious tells — badly drawn hands, for instance — they’re getting to be a lot subtler.

Now we all second-guess everything we see, because to do otherwise would leave us open to being manipulated by falsehoods. And it’s not just knowing whether the image shows something real, but to know whether the image represents real human intention. The *ahem* key aspect of this image is the big red subscribe button, which is obviously not real, but it’s intentionally not real.

No one was under any illusion that the photo was an actual, unmodified keyboard. But when people assumed it was generated slop, they also assumed that was an indicator of laziness. When you see an article accompanied by an obviously junk image, you wonder, what else did they skimp on? Did they generate the article too? Did they research it properly? Did they fact-check it? This particular article was just a “here’s our new forum” announcement, but what about the other stuff that they publish?

Trust

Earlier this year, Ars retracted an article that contained fabricated, LLM-generated quotes. They fired the reporter and spent time developing an AI usage policy. This kind of thing burns trust, and trust is a news publication’s most important asset.

And it doesn’t even have to be a real mistake, or a real bias, to do damage. Conservatives spent decades painting NPR and PBS as some sort of bizarre “Marxist” strawman parody of what they actually broadcast, forcing them to dig out of a hole with large parts of their potential audience, until they’d lost enough trust that it became politically expedient to defund the networks.

Gut reactions and snap decisions have a purpose. But they’re still only heuristics. When we have time, it’s good to second-guess our impressions. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they’re right. But we have to look at those impressions clearly, not just spend the effort justifying the conclusion we’ve already reached. That’s something the human brain is also really good at, and when we’re cherry-picking evidence for the wrong conclusion, that makes things even worse.

I saw at least one commenter on the thread following up and insisting it couldn’t possibly be a Turkish keyboard, because those would have the diacritics on them, and this one doesn’t. It reminded me of the character in Mystery Men rejecting the idea that the Clark Kent expy couldn’t possibly be the Superman expy on the basis that he wears glasses, and not-Superman clearly has better eyesight than that.

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I’ve been reading a Slashdot thread where people who don’t and won’t use tablets argue over why they don’t count as personal computers, because they supposedly aren’t useful for anything except consuming media (not that they’ve tried, I imagine, except maybe the 2 minutes they tried typing on an iPad that one time in Frys or Best Buy and didn’t allow themselves time to get used to the onscreen keyboard), and therefore can’t possibly have any valid use case. (And besides, if we admit that a tablet is a computer, then Apple wins!)

You can certainly make a distinction based on form factor. You can maybe make a distinction based on OS, but then you have to define what makes a PC operating system and what makes a tablet/smartphone/whatever operating system, and things are going to get blurry when you look at, say, Windows 8.

You can sort of make a distinction based on whether you can develop and install your own software, but even that isn’t hard and fast. You can write code in an editor. Compiling is a matter of whether a compiler is available, not something intrinsic to the device itself. Installing software from outside the walled garden is easy on Android, not so much on iOS. (Incidentally, this is the main reason I’ve chosen Android over iOS.) Both have large software ecosystems that developers can contribute to and the average user can install from, which is what actually matters to the average user. (The funny thing is, I remember plenty of arguments about how hard it is to install third-party software on Linux where the counter-argument was that with apt-get, you mostly don’t need to.)

But a lot of Slashdotters are spouting gems on the order of “It doesn’t have a keyboard!” OK, neither does your desktop until you plug one in. Which you can do with a lot of tablets. Or “It doesn’t have a mouse!” – Really? Are you serious? They’ve merged a trackpad with a screen. “I can’t upgrade the parts!” Well, that rules out a lot of consumer-focused desktops, doesn’t it? “PCs have applications, tablets have apps.” – Is there really any meaningful distinction between the two terms?

Pair a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse with your tablet. Hook it up to an external monitor. Or don’t, since the typical tablet already has a better screen than an SE/30. Now you’ve got a workstation, with no more hardware than you would have hooked up to your desktop box. Install an office suite, an image editor, a coding editor — heck, a tax program. At this point the key difference in what’s useful is which applications are available. Wow, I’m having a flashback to all those old Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux arguments.

And yet people insist that these devices are “only toys.”

I still can’t get over the fact that a tech discussion site like Slashdot is so full of neophobes…but then they’ve always been. Look back at the “who would want a touch screen?” debates from a few years ago, or the “wow, this iPod thing is lame” initial reviews.

There’s a bubble a lot of geeks live in where they don’t think about other people’s use cases or workflows. That touch screen debate was full of talk about arm strain from vertical monitors, not considering horizontal or handheld screens, and not considering touch as a complement to keyboard & mouse. (My two-year old wants to touch the screen on the desktop and laptop, and I keep having to explain that they don’t work that way.) There are people out there who consider GUIs to be useful only for opening multiple terminals. And let’s not even get started on the decisions driving Gnome 3, eliminating things like files on the desktop or the minimize button because who uses those?

I learned my lesson when the iMac came out and I thought it was ridiculous. Who would want such a limited computer? As it turned out, lots of people…because they wanted and needed different things from a computer than I did.

So these days, when I see a piece of technology I can’t fathom the use for, I try not to rant about how useless it is. Instead, I wait and see what other people come up with. Sometimes it really is useless (though even the CueCat found a second life as a scanner for LibraryThing), but sometimes the failure isn’t in the technology, but in my own imagination.

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