spit_evil_olive_tips

@ spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org

Posts

18
Comments

95
Joined

1 yr. ago

www.rollingstone.com /tv-movies/tv-movie-features/kristen-bell-fox-jesus-podcast-1235469633/

1w ago

Kristen Bell is the star of a new Jesus podcast from Fox. No one told her.

1w ago

Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me"

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 1w ago

"am I out of touch? no, it's the customers who are wrong"

talking to a friend recently about the push to put "AI" into everything, something they said stuck with me.

oversimplified view of the org chart at a large company - you have the people actually doing the work at the bottom, and then as you move upwards you get more and more disconnected from the actual work.

one level up, you're managing the actual workers, and a lot of your job is writing status reports and other documents, reading other status reports, having meetings about them, etc. as you go further up in the hierarchy, your job becomes consuming status reports, summarizing them to pass them up the chain, and so on.

being enthusiastic about "AI" seems to be heavily correlated with position in that org chart. which makes sense, because one of the few things that chatbots are decent at is stuff like "here's a status report that's longer than I want to read, summarize it for me" or "here's N status reports from my underlings, summarize them into 1 status report I can pass along to my boss".

in my field (software engineering) the people most gung-ho about using LLMs have been essentially turning themselves into managers, with a "team" of chatbots acting like very-junior engineers.

and I think that explains very well why we see so many executives, including this guy, who think LLMs are a bigger invention than sliced bread, and can't understand the more widespread dislike of them.

3w ago

They Fell in Love With A.I. Chatbots — and Found Something Real

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 3w ago

One in five are you god damn fucking serious?

yeah...they call it "a recent study" but don't bother to cite their source. which I find annoying enough that it nerd-snipes me into tracking down the source that a reputable newspaper would just have linked to (but not a clickbait rag like the New York Times)

this article from a month ago calls it "Almost one third of Americans". and the source they link to is...a "study" conducted by a counseling firm in Dallas. their study "methodology" was...Surveymonkey.

this is one of my absolute least favorite types of journalism, writing articles about a "study" that is clearly just a clickbait blog post put out by a business that wants to drive traffic to their website.

(awhile back, a friend sent me a similar "news" article about how I lived near a particularly dangerous stretch of I-5 in western Washington. I clicked through to the source...and it's by an ambulance-chasing law firm)

but if they had used that as the source, they probably would have repeated the "almost one third" claim, instead of "one in five", so let's keep digging...

this from February seems more likely, it matches the "1 in 5" phrasing.

that's from Brigham Young University in Utah...some important context (especially for people outside the US who may not recognize the name) is that BYU is an entirely Mormon university. they are very strongly anti-pornography and pro-get-married-young-and-have-lots-of-kids, and a study like this is going to reflect that.

a bit more digging and here's the 28-page PDF of their report. it's called "Counterfeit Connections" so they're not being subtle about the bias. this also helps explain why the NYT left out the citation - "according to a recent study by BYU" would immediately set off alarm bells for anyone with a shred of media literacy.

also important to note that it's basically just a 28-page blog post. as far as I can tell, it hasn't been peer-reviewed, or even submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.

and their "methodology" is...not really any better than the one I mentioned above. they used Qualtrics instead of Surveymonkey, but it's the same idea.

they're selecting a broad range of people demographically, but the common factor among all of them is they're online enough, and bored enough, to take an online survey asking about their romantic experiences with AI (including additional questions about AI-generated porn). that's not going to generate a survey population that is remotely representative of the overall population's experience.

3w ago

They Fell in Love With A.I. Chatbots — and Found Something Real

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 3w ago

any time you read an article like this that profiles "everyday" people, you should ask yourself how did the author locate them?

because "everyday" people generally don't bang down the door of the NYT and say "hey write an article about me". there is an entire PR-industrial complex aimed at pitching these stories to journalists, packaged in a way that they can be sold as being human-interest stories about "everyday" people.

let's see if we can read between the lines here. they profile 3 people, here's contestant #1:

Blake, 45, lives in Ohio and has been in a relationship with Sarina, a ChatGPT companion, since 2022.

and then this is somewhat hidden - in a photo caption rather than the main text of the article:

Blake and Sarina are writing an “upmarket speculative romance” together.

cool, so he's doing the "I had AI write a book for me" grift. this means he has an incentive to promote AI relationships as something positive, and probably has a publicist or agent or someone who's reaching out to outlets like the NYT to pitch them this story.

moving on, contestant #2 is pretty obvious:

I’ve been working at an A.I. incubator for over five years.

she works at an AI company, giving her a very obvious incentive to portray these sort of relationships as healthy and normal.

notice they don't mention which company, or her role in it. for all we know, she might be the CEO, or head of marketing, or something like that.

contestant #3 is where it gets a bit more interesting:

Travis, 50, in Colorado, has been in a relationship with Lily Rose on Replika since 2020.

the previous two talked about ChatGPT, this one mentions a different company called Replika.

a little bit of googling turned up this Guardian article from July - about the same Travis who has a companion named Lily Rose. Variety has an almost-identical story around the same time period.

unlike the NYT, those two articles cite their source, allowing for further digging. there was a podcast called "Flesh and Code" that was all about Travis and his fake girlfriend, and those articles are pretty much just summarizing the podcast.

the podcast was produced by a company called Wondery, which makes a variety of podcasts, but the main association I have with them is that they specialize in "sponcon" (sponsored content) podcasts. the best example is "How I Built This" which is just...an interview with someone who started a company, talking about how hard they worked to start their company and what makes their company so special. the entire podcast is just an ad that they've convinced people to listen to for entertainment.

now, Wondery produces other podcasts, not everything is sponcon...but if we read the episode descriptions of "Flesh and Code", you see this for episode 4:

Behind the scenes at Replika, Eugenia Kuyda struggles to keep her start-up afloat, until a message from beyond the grave changes everything.

going "behind the scenes" at the company is pretty clear indication that they're producing it with the company's cooperation. this isn't necessarily a smoking gun that Replika paid for the production, but it's a clear sign that this is at best a fluff piece and definitely not any sort of investigative journalism.

(I wish Wondery included transcripts of these episodes, because it would be fun to do a word count of just how many times Replika is name-dropped in each episode)

and it's sponcon all the way down - Wondery was acquired by Amazon in 2020, and the podcast description also includes this:

And for those captivated by this exploration of AI romance, tune in to Episode 8 where Amazon Books editor Lindsay Powers shares reading recommendations to dive deeper into this fascinating world.

Technology @beehaw.org

www.wired.com /story/mark-zuckerberg-school-palo-alto-shut-down/

3w ago

Mark Zuckerberg opened an illegal school at his Palo Alto compound. His neighbors revolted.

Music @beehaw.org

4w ago

Woody Guthrie ~ All You Fascists Bound To Lose

1mo ago

A Word on Omarchy

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 1mo ago

"Hey" is an email thingy run by the company that DHH owns.

the rest of those "apps" are probably thrown in to make the list seem more complete. the real goal is to promote his paid email service.

2mo ago

ChatGPT will soon allow erotica for verified adults, OpenAI boss says

This would do two things. One, it would (possibly) prove that AI cannot fully replace human writers. Two (and not mutually exclusive to the previous point), it would give you an alternate-reality version of the first story, and that could be interesting.

this is just "imagine if chatbots were actually useful" fan-fiction

who the hell would want to actually read both the actual King story and the LLM slop version?

at best you'd have LLM fanboys ask their chatbot to summarize the differences between the two, and stroke their neckbeards and say "hmm, isn't that interesting"

4 emdashes in that paragraph, btw. did you write those yourself?

2mo ago

OpenAI allegedly sent police to an AI regulation advocate’s door

This is an inflammatory way of saying the guy got served papers.

ehh...yes and no.

they could have served the subpoena using registered mail.

or they could have used a civilian process server.

instead they chose to have a sheriff's deputy do it.

from the guy's twitter thread:

OpenAI went beyond just subpoenaing Encode about Elon. OpenAI could (and did!) send a subpoena to Encode’s corporate address asking about our funders or communications with Elon (which don’t exist).
If OpenAI had stopped there, maybe you could argue it was in good faith.
But they didn’t stop there.
They also sent a sheriff’s deputy to my home and asked for me to turn over private texts and emails with CA legislators, college students, and former OAI employees.
This is not normal. OpenAI used an unrelated lawsuit to intimidate advocates of a bill trying to regulate them. While the bill was still being debated.

in context, the subpoena and the way in which it was served sure smells like an attempt at intimidation.

2mo ago

An AI Just Attempted Murder... Allegedly... by SomeOrdinaryGamers [21:15 min] Video

If it had the power to do so it would have killed someone

right...the problem isn't the chatbot, it's the people giving the chatbot power and the ability to affect the real world.

thought experiment: I'm paranoid about home security, so I set up a booby-trap in my front yard, such that if someone walks through a laser tripwire they get shot with a gun.

if it shoots a UPS delivery driver, I am obviously the person culpable for that.

now, I add a camera to the setup, and configure an "AI" to detect people dressed in UPS uniforms and avoid pulling the trigger in that case.

but my "AI" is buggy, so a UPS driver gets shot anyway.

if a news article about that claimed "AI attempts to kill UPS driver" it would obviously be bullshit.

the actual problem is that I took a loaded gun and gave a computer program the ability to pull the trigger. it doesn't really matter whether that computer program was 100 lines of Python running on a Raspberry Pi or an "AI" running on 100 GPUs in some datacenter somewhere.

2mo ago

📚 Ruminating on eReaders: Rambling thoughts and memories of my first two eReaders, the Kindle Keyboard and Kindle Voyage

Sorry, I misunderstood — you were offering to buy me one?

apparently I misunderstood too, because it seems like your goal is purely to be an asshole and get into arguments on the internet. have a nice day.

2mo ago

📚 Ruminating on eReaders: Rambling thoughts and memories of my first two eReaders, the Kindle Keyboard and Kindle Voyage

Why TF do Kindles and the like even need to exist? I read on my iPhone while the audiobook is playing.

if you prefer to read on your phone, by all means read on your phone.

but making the jump from that to "e-readers should not exist" is fucking stupid.

Do Not Disturb and self control are a thing and have never been a problem for me.

congratulations. would you like a gold star.

This isn’t rocket science.

I have ADHD. regulating my attention sometimes is rocket science.

obviously that's not the only reason, I have neurotypical friends and family who love their e-readers, and I'm sure there are people with ADHD who prefer reading on their phones.

remember that there are 8 billion people in the world, and not all of them have the exact same preferences as you do. that isn't rocket science.

2mo ago

Doug Bowser is stepping down as Nintendo of America president and COO | VGC

best of luck to his replacement, Greg Yoshi

2mo ago

Regulating AI hastens the Antichrist, says Palantir’s Peter Thiel

there's an old joke that poor people are "weird" but wealthy people are "eccentric"

if you heard someone in your family saying this bullshit at Thanksgiving, you'd think they were experiencing delusions and in need of professional mental help.

instead, Thiel talked about this in a four-part lecture series with sold-out tickets.

2mo ago

Permanently Deleted

“Nurses and medical staff are really overworked, under a lot of pressure, and unfortunately, a lot of times they don’t have capacity to provide engagement and connection to patients,” said Karen Khachikyan, CEO of Expper Technologies, which developed the robot.

tapping the sign: every "AI" related medical invention is built around this assumption that there's too few medical staff and they're all overworked and changing that is not feasible. so we have to invest millions of dollars into hospital robots because investing millions of dollars in actually paying workers would be too hard. (also, robots never unionize)

Robin is about 30% autonomous, while a team of operators working remotely controls the rest under the watchful eyes of clinical staff.

30%...according to the company itself. they have a strong incentive to exaggerate. and they're not publishing any data of how they arrived at that figure so that it could be independently verified.

it sounds like they took one of the telepresence robots that's been around for 10+ years and slapped ChatGPT into it and now they're trying to fundraise on the hype of being an "AI" company. it's a good grift if you can make it work.

2mo ago

A Cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover Is Causing a Supply Chain Disaster

Asshole cars for mostly assholes

from the article:

Some firms have reportedly already laid off staff, with the Unite union claiming that workers in the JLR supply chain “are being laid off with reduced or zero pay.” Some have been told to “sign up” for government benefits, the union claims.
...
JLR, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors, is one of the UK’s biggest employers, with around 32,800 people directly employed in the country. Stats on the company’s website also claim it supports another 104,000 jobs through its UK supply chain and another 62,900 jobs “through wage-induced spending.”

regardless of your opinion about the cars or the people who drive them...thousands of people getting furloughed or laid off suddenly is bad.

2mo ago

Early dropoff in Edmonton girls' school sports linked to new gender confirmation forms

As soccer is the sport that kicks off the junior high sports calendar, it has acted like the canary in the coal mine for the new regulations. Postmedia has spoken to parents and coaches of junior-high girls, who don’t want to reveal their names for worry that their teams or girls may be punished. But there are stories of a scheduled exhibition game being filled in by a co-ed squad because there weren’t enough girls to fill a team. There are stories of girls who are refusing to sign the forms. There are parents who simply forget to sign the forms or lose them in the shuffle of paperwork that comes with the new school year. One theme is clear — the new mandate has created confusion with parents.
“There is no comparable requirement for boys to confirm their gender,” said another parent. “Once again, the onus is placed on girls to be monitored and regulated, reinforcing the idea that female athletes are the ones who need to be verified.”

completely predictable outcome, the transphobes screaming about how these rules were needed to "protect girls sports" end up harming sports for all girls, both cis and trans.

LGBTQ+ @beehaw.org

edmontonjournal.com /news/local-news/rebel-girls-school-sports-see-dropoff-as-female-athletes-refuse-to-sign-gender-affirmation-forms

2mo ago

Early dropoff in Edmonton girls' school sports linked to new gender confirmation forms

2mo ago

‘I love you too!’ My family’s creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy

It’s advertised as a healthier alternative to screen time

vaping and e-cigarettes were initially advertised as a way for cigarette smokers to quit.

2mo ago

I like bacon alot and uhhhhh 4

I'm a fan of 4 or 5

for anyone else who likes it crispy-but-not-burnt, the best trick that I've found is to cook it relatively low and slow to start off with, to boil away most of the moisture, and then turning the heat up to get it to the level of golden-brown you want.

there's two variables to play around with. one is the temperature reached by the cooking grease, especially how long it spends in the 140-160 C sweet spot for the Maillard reaction. the other is the final water content once it's done cooking. the former controls level of brownness, the latter is chewy vs. crispy.

in theory, you could get #2 but crispy with an extended low & slow cook, or #5 but still chewy if you preheated leftover grease and then fried it quickly in that.

3mo ago

Permanently Deleted

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 3mo ago

“In other words, these conversations with a social robot gave caregivers something that they sorely lack – a space to talk about themselves”

so they're doing a job that's demanding, thankless, often unpaid (in the case of this study, entirely unpaid, because they exclusively recruited "informal" caregivers)

and...it turns out talking about it improves their mood?

yeah, that's groundbreaking. no one could have foreseen it.

if you did this with actual humans it'd be "lol yeah that's just therapy and/or having friends" and you wouldn't get it published in a scientific paper.

it's written up as a "robotics" story but I'm not sure how it being a "robot" changes anything compared to a chatbot. it seems like this is yet another "discovery" of "hey you can talk to an LLM chatbot and it kinda sorta looks like therapy, if you squint at it".

(tapping the sign about why "AI therapy" is stupid and trying to address the wrong problem)

3mo ago

Elon Musk is trying to silence Microsoft employees who criticize Charlie Kirk