So I got a call tonight from the campaign for Rob Ashton for the Federal NDP.
One point they very strongly wanted to get across was that Rob Ashton is *the* candidate who will put his support behind Nenshi and the Alberta NDP and Alberta's energy sector, unlike the previous leadership. Which, as we all remember, then-leader Rachel Notley very publicly took swipes at after Singh and the federal NDP continued to voice opposition to Alberta's energy sector. She proceeded to put a good deal of distance between the two parties, and of course -- under Nenshi -- the provincial party removed the requirement of federal party membership when signing up for provincial membership.
It's obvious that Team Ashton sees that as a big failing of the federal party's leadership. They asked for my thoughts, and I was happy to tell them I thought that Ashton was the only serious choice for leadership, and that choosing someone like Avi Lewis would basically turn the party into the Greens with a different colour palette and just as many seats.
So, there you have it. Someone vying for federal leadership of Team Orange has finally been paying attention.
Pro labour and outspoken AI critic candidate for the NDP using AI to help answer questions is certainly not something I had in my bingo card of expected NDP out of touch transgressions.
Obviously poor form and unfortunate, especially as he would be the best candidate if the NDP was looking into turning over a new leaf and going back to its labour roots.
One of the biggest tells are the long hyphens that chatgpt inexplicably loves to use.
FYI these are called em dashes. They are called that because during the old typesetting days they were the width of a capital M. The shorter ones are called En dashes (width of an N, naturally).
/useless type facts
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One of the biggest tells are the long hyphens that chatgpt inexplicably loves to use and using bullet points on an AMA.
Unfortunately, so does the iPhone keyboard in its default settings.
iPhone by default will autocorrect multi-dashes to em dashes and quotations to smart-quotes (and directional apostrophes). This used to be a handy feature until every semi-literate moron on the internet possessing the grammatical prowess of a bowl of Alphaghetti dropped on the living room carpet woke up one morning and started to fancy themselves a human LLM-detector.
Every time I wrote a reasonably comprehensive post about a topic on Reddit and used my phone to do so, some dickhole would unfailingly show up to accuse me of using ChatGPT because of the em dashes and smart-quotes, so I turned it off.
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Originally Posted by Azure
Typical dumb take.
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Pro labour and outspoken AI critic candidate for the NDP using AI to help answer questions is certainly not something I had in my bingo card of expected NDP out of touch transgressions.
Obviously poor form and unfortunate, especially as he would be the best candidate if the NDP was looking into turning over a new leaf and going back to its labour roots.
The reddit AMA if curious. One of the biggest tells are the long hyphens that chatgpt inexplicably loves to use and using bullet points on an AMA.
Honestly, looking outside the AMA, he's been using it for other responses as well.
It is not a good look on Ashton. What is the point of trying to have an "Ask Me Anything" and then turn it into a "Ask AI Anything"? I do not think it disqualifies him from consideration but it does make you wonder if he is the right guy for the job if this is the kind of thing he is doing while applying for the job.
At the same time Ashton is scoring on his own goal, McPherson is getting an endorsement from Charlie Angus:
I could see this becoming more of a 2 horse race going into the final stretch.
Note: if anyone wants to participate in the vote (or have the option to participate) they need to join the Federal NDP by January 28.
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It sounds like he needs to give his staff a talking to if they're feeding his positions into an LLM for re-writing, especially given that he's pushing back on AI as a matter of platform.
With that said, I think AI is one of those things that probably do provide value to politicians provided you can restrict the data from being used to train the public dataset for privacy reasons.
I also think the race comes down to Ashton and McPherson.
Every time I wrote a reasonably comprehensive post about a topic on Reddit and used my phone to do so, some dickhole would unfailingly show up to accuse me of using ChatGPT because of the em dashes and smart-quotes, so I turned it off.
God forbid anyone uses formatting to make their writing easier on the eyes. Any use of bold and bullets = automatic accusations of AI
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There have been a few interviews of the leadership candidates but not with a lot of consistency (ie. being interviewed by the same person). It looks like Rachel Gilmore is one of the few people to actually interview each of them independently heading up to the deadline to buy memberships for the vote.
