humanist + humorist

The chatbots are not your friends:

April 2023, video: "The Rise and Fall of Replika: A cautionary tale about love, heartbreak, and our AI overlords." I first heard about this through the framing of "making fun of incels for being mad that their bot waifus broke up with them," but this video digs through how predatory and exploitative the company was, and how badly its customers (even if some of them were creepy) got shafted.

You may also remember Replika from the October 2023 story about the man who tried to assassinate the Queen of England, and had extensive chat logs with a Replika bot expressing "her" encouragement and support.

A different service, Character.AI, faces a just-filed lawsuit over the suicide of a 14-year-old boy: "In previous conversations, the chatbot asked Setzer whether he had “been actually considering suicide” and whether he “had a plan” for it, according to the lawsuit. When the boy responded that he did not know whether it would work, the chatbot wrote, “Don’t talk that way. That’s not a good reason not to go through with it,” the lawsuit claims."


Other bad "AI" news, up to and including more deaths:

May 2023 study: Radiologists are more likely to misread mammograms if a bot also reads them and "calculates" the wrong diagnosis. Inexperienced radiologists were affected by it most, but even the moderately- and very-experienced ones were prone to being swayed by false results if "an AI" produced them.

Australian child-abuse case worker caught "using ChatGPT to draft a protection application report in December 2023 — sending a pile of stupendously sensitive information off to OpenAI in the process. The report contained inaccuracies and weirdly unprofessional phrasing — which was how it was spotted as LLM output — and downplayed the risks to the child."

This January: "Parcel delivery firm DPD have replaced their customer service chat with an AI robot thing. It’s utterly useless at answering any queries, and when asked, it happily produced a poem about how terrible they are as a company. It also swore at me."

April: "All six [Israeli intelligence officers] said that Lavender [an "AI" targeting system] had played a central role in the war, processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ." This system was approved when the IDF concluded it had a "90% accuracy rate" -- so even if we fully accept that at face value, that means they're happy to use a bot that flagged 3,700 innocent people, and likely everyone they lived with, to be bombed to death.

September: "The Washington Post worked with researchers at the University of California, Riverside to understand how much water and power OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using the GPT-4 language model released in March 2023, consumes to write the average 100-word email." (It's bad.)

"Many developers say AI coding assistants make them more productive, but a recent study set forth to measure their output and found no significant gains. Use of GitHub Copilot also introduced 41% more bugs." (Towards the end of the article, a CEO is quoted claiming his company has doubled their output using chatbots, but there's no explanation of how he got that number.)

"I asked "Which Oscar winners have appeared in episodes of Doctor Who?" Here are the results." Spoiler alert: it correctly ID's several white actors that fit the criteria, but adds several white people who don't...and leaves out a couple of black people who do.

October: "we discovered only a few days before the wedding that our officiant was not legally qualified to marry us because she had followed the incorrect, chatgpt’ed instructions that our planner sent."

“Yes, plants need sunlight, but some need less than others, and indeed get stressed by too many photons. Shading those crops [with solar panels] means they will require less water, which rapidly evaporates in an open field. Plus, plants “sweat,” which cools the panels overhead and boosts their efficiency. ‘It is a rare win-win-win.'”

“Running Tide and other carbon-removal companies are discovering what it means to take carbon seriously. It’s still very possible that kelp itself won’t end up being a feasible approach to removing carbon from the atmosphere. Still, the company is a preview of a future in which “net zero” is something more than faraway corporate promises.”

This cat’s skin glows fluorescent green under UV light! The gene is in his living cells, so it doesn’t show up in his fur…they should’ve shaved him for the news segment.

“These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.“

“Simply enter your text and see it transform into visual retro-futuristic wave.”

Extremely-cool color visualization tool. Upload your art, see what kind of 3D value waveforms it makes. (Check out this long demo video to see it in action on a WIP.)

“I got bored during this quarantine season so I made a nostalgic personality quiz! Take it and find out which of six common Otaku Senshi tropes you fall into and get gently called out!“

Turns out there’s a simple and easy step you can add to basic shoelace knots to make them twice as strong. Suddenly, my laces don’t come undone by themselves while I’m in the middle of a walk anymore! Bless this website owner whose special interest is “tying your shoelaces.”

2015, and still relevant: The USPS isn't in financial trouble because people aren't using it enough. It's in "financial trouble" because Congress ordered it to stockpile enough cash to pre-fund all employee pension and health insurance costs for the next 75 years. Even if we all sent enough mail to cover that unnecessary liability, Congress could easily pass another law saddling it with another unnecessary liability. We fix this by yelling at our representatives to shape up, not by buying more stamps.

May 2020: "Despite her visible role in the fight against abortion, McCorvey [aka Jane Roe] says she was a mercenary, not a true believer. And Schenck, who has also distanced himself from the antiabortion movement, at least partially corroborates the allegations, saying that she was paid out of concern ;that she would go back to the other side,; he says in the film. 'There were times I wondered: Is she playing us? And what I didn’t have the guts to say was, because I know damn well we were playing her.'"

May 2020: "Finland ran a two-year universal basic income study in 2017 and 2018, during which the government gave 2000 unemployed people aged between 25 and 58 monthly payments with no strings attached. The payments of €560 per month weren’t means tested and were unconditional, so they weren’t reduced if an individual got a job or later had a pay rise. The study was nationwide and selected recipients weren’t able to opt out, because the test was written into legislation. "

September 11: "Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on [plastic recycling] ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean. Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s."

September 30: "Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering." A game designer's analysis of QAnon.

October 23: "A rightwing extremist boasted of driving from Texas to Minneapolis to help set fire to a police precinct during the George Floyd protests, federal prosecutors said. US attorney Erica MacDonald said on Friday that she had charged Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old Texas resident, with traveling across state lines to participate in a riot. " (It's them. It's always them.)

December 9: "Last week, CMD obtained the 2019 tax records of two right-wing funders who donated to the FDRLST Media Foundation that year: GOP megadonor and shipping supply billionaire Richard Uihlein and DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund manager that has been dubbed “the dark money ATM” of the conservative movement." Looks like we can add Uline Shipping next to StickerMule on the list of "this company's owner will pass your money on to horrible causes."

December 17: "Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn't, the study found. But the analysis discovered one major change: The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates."

January 20: "Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten."

January 29: "Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian."

February 18: "The Austin American-Statesman found a single, forgotten copy of that report on a Public Utilities Commission shelf in 2011. The paper went looking for it in 2011 because of the cold snap that hit Texas in February of that year. The state legislature held angry hearings, and later that spring Hegar introduced his bill to require the Public Service Commission to prepare a weatherization and preparedness report each year, an obligation that was later neglected." Texas utility companies vs. history, or Yes, We Need That Infrastructure Bill.

March 11: "It isn’t easy to figure out exactly how much electrical energy these ‘idling cars’ are consuming, but even the lowest estimates are eye-wateringly bad. Cambridge University seems to have done the most legwork in figuring this out, and at the moment, the annualised power consumption of bitcoin mining is 128 terawatt hours. In 2019-20, every single thing plugged into Australia’s largest main grid consumed 192. "