💾 Archived View for gemlog.blue › users › hyperspaceparty › 1716229748.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 16:52:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Note: This was previously posted on the Fediverse but I'm reposting here to maintain another copy not buried in my timeline
I was recently shopping for vegan leather jackets and while browsing noize[.]com I found multiple examples of product copy referencing the "cool-girl," see [1] for an example. I was immediately curious about whether Noize copywriters are unaware of the negative connotations of the term, if they thought their audience might be unaware of the negative connotations and be drawn in by the seductive qualities of the concept, or if the concept of the cool girl has somehow evolved into something more positive over time. I started digging.
I quickly found evidence that the term has not evolved; see [2] for a 2019 review of the term in Gillian Flynn’s "Gone Girl." Also see Tove Lo's 2016 song titled "Cool Girl" [3] and Dodie's 2020 song of the same title and excellent music video [3.] This 2019 Mashable article [5] offers a similar take. I think we can conclude that at least up to 2019 the concept of the cool girl had not evolved substantially.
What about within the last five years? Also on offer is this absolute garbage 2024 article [6] by "Marlon Cortez." I broke the link in the citation because it has all the hallmarks of LLM text. It is repetitive, makes no real claims and offers no evidence that lead to any conclusion. The listed author of this piece also happens to have produced 7,820 samey articles between February 9, 2024 and May 20, 2024. The same pattern can be found here [7] and we can conclude that they are LLM produced text.
Using DuckDuckGo to perform some basic searches I was able to find one post-2019 source about cool girls [8] that appears to be written by a human in 2024. Perhaps the cool girl moment has passed, but if it is appearing in online product copy I think perhaps it has not. This is difficult to verify though based on the scarcity of good sources from the past two to three years that can be located with simple search engine searches that would in years past would likely have produced many quality hits.
My point: large language models and the search companies that enable them like Google are ruining the web. They are drowning out good information with garbage and they are doing it quickly. We all need to find ways to champion the small web.
1. https://noize.com/products/plus-vegan-leather-biker-jkt-w-zip-decoration-side-belt
2. https://www.salon.com/2019/12/26/how-the-scathing-gone-girl-rant-about-being-the-cool-girl-defined-the-decade/
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsFneCExrCQ
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI2eAwHM9uE
5. https://mashable.com/article/cool-girl-stereotype-dating-culture
6. https://coolerhunt[.]com/what-does-cool-girl-mean-in-slang/
7. https://www.33rdsquare[.]com/whats-a-cool-girl-slang-an-in-depth-look-at-this-cultural-trope/
8. https://nofilmschool.com/cool-girl-trope