humanist + humorist

This essay has already been shared all over the place, I’m sharing it again, it’s a masterpiece:

“And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper’s robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet’s engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn’t worked out how to test database backups regularly.”

The rest of this post is just Bots Being Wrong:

(Sometimes the results are funny, other times they’re dangerous. At least one involves real people ending up in real hospitals. Be careful out there, folks.)

Last May: “I figured that there would be a likelihood that most of the essays would at least have some problem, but I didn’t think all 63 would have confabulated info, that surprised me, too.”

February: “In one case, one user who’d been screened out submitted the same application but tweaked the birthdate to make themselves younger. With this change, they landed an interview. At another company, an AI resume screener had been trained on CVs of employees already at the firm, giving people extra marks if they listed “baseball” or “basketball” – hobbies that were linked to more successful staff, often men. Those who mentioned “softball” – typically women – were downgraded.”

May: “how many rocks should i eat each day”
 

Not sure the date on this one, just that it’s also from Xitter:

June: “In one video, which has 30,000 views on TikTok, a young woman becomes increasingly exasperated as she attempts to convince the [McDonald’s order-taking] AI that she wants a caramel ice cream, only for it to add multiple stacks of butter to her order.” (Weirdly, the article ends with a quote from IBM about how “comprehensive” and “accurate” this tech is. It’s not! This link is the one where we get to say, we literally have the receipts!)

June, AI versus Good Omens: “I’m glad the AI knows which one of Dottie and Sadie Aziraphale is married to and which one Crowley is. I can never remember.”

“Turns out I had just grew a botulism culture and garlic in olive oil specifically is a fairly common way to grow this bio-toxins. Had I not checked on it 3-4 days in I’d have been none the wiser and would have Darwinned my entire family.”

“A NewsGuard audit has found that the leading chatbots convincingly repeat fabricated narratives from state-affiliated sites masquerading as local news outlets in one third of their responses.”

July, video: AI tries to create a gymastics video: “Natalie M’phylgwnth from Carcosa just finished her beam routine, which has left another judge screaming and blind. We’re going to take a break as they look for another volunteer.”

August, from r/LegalAdviceUK: “Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book we bought from major online retailer.” Sounds like they have enough documentation for a genuine “selling this is dangerously irresponsible” case. Fingers crossed.

“LLMs have been trained on all the data companies can possibly get hold of — the whole Internet, including all of Reddit. So if you ask an LLM for a link to a video, what does it do?”

(…yeah, I do realize there was a much funnier thing I could’ve done with that last link.)