[Aurornis]

It’s true. You can even go on Reddit and find anecdotes and guides about which clinics to call and what to say to get prescribed with minimal hassle.

Some of the clinics were even prescribing anabolic steroids intended for terminal cancer patients.

If you want to read about something even crazier, look up the services that were started during COVID to be prescription mills for Adderall or Xanax. The relaxed COVID prescribing rules allowed telehealth providers to give schedule II prescriptions to new patients remotely, so services were created to advertise on TikTok and give prescriptions for a monthly fee. The FDA cracked down on these, though.

There’s even a famous story of a whistleblower who worked at one of these clinics and got reprimanded for not prescribing Adderall enough. There was a leaked memo where they pushed providers to prescribe Adderall over other options because their data showed the highest customer retention rate that way.

[jstummbillig]

Did you use a LLM to write these comments?

[Aurornis]

I do not. I’m typing on my phone from a waiting room. I’d probably have fewer incorrect words and awkward sentences if I did.

[jstummbillig]

I see. I got curious because of the correct usage of ’ (instead of the common ')

[K0balt]

Argh. It’s so strange to be ridiculed and have your ideas devalued just because you know how to use punctuation marks. I have 20 year old blog posts with hundreds of comments accusing me of using AI. I understand people being suspicious, but it’s beyond annoying when it becomes an entire personality online, as it has for many persons.

How about we go back to valuing ideas, regardless of their origins, if they deliver insight, value, or joy? I don’t care if someone writes something good or if the idea was stolen from something they read, or if a machine made it for them, unless the value proposition is their personal capacity for original prose.

AI gotchaism is becoming as least as tiring as the droll, tone deaf creations of LLMs.

[jstummbillig]

I hope you are not writing this in reference to my question, because this does not in any way capture the feelings or thoughts I had while asking. Just some mild curiosity living in a strange new world.

In case this is not obvious: I am aware that you could just not answer honestly. If I thought this was a critical issue and that you were likely to be dishonest about it, I would not have asked to begin with.

[K0balt]

I think I read things into your comment you did not intend, and for that I apologize. I confess I have been pretty sensitized from the barrage of accusations I recieve—mostly from em dashes and using “ai words” whatever that means lol. It wouldn’t be so bad if AI wrote better prose, but I really hope that my own writing doesn’t come off with that singularly droll countenance that AI tends to present.

[peddling-brink]

It’s also the default for iOS, at least when swipe typing.

[ryandv]

No, it's quite real and has been reported on in the press. It's straightforward to get prescribed hormones for even the flimsiest of reasons [0]:

> This patient expressed no gender dysphoria, but he got hormones, too. I asked the doctor what protocol he was following, but I never got a straight answer.

[0] https://archive.is/eDKDR

[turtlesdown11]

certainly reads like it