self

I can see that as being one of the influences that fed into the formation of the TESCREAL belief package — “I have an automaton that behaves like a person but with supernatural qualities” really is an ancient grift, and the TESCREAL belief in omnipotent AGI being just around the corner is that same grift taken to an extreme

I agree; LLMs and generative AI are indelibly a product of capitalism, and they can’t exist without widespread theft, exploitation of labor, massive concentrations of capital, and a willingness to destroy the environment. they are the stupidest use of technology I’ve ever seen, and after cryptocurrencies the bar for stupid was pretty fucking high. that the products themselves obscure the theft and exploitation that went into training them is a feature for the corporations developing this horseshit, not a bug.

and that’s why it’s notable that the self-described AI researchers behind these garbage products can’t even do basic shit like have the LLM not call a journalist a pedophile without resorting to an absolute hack that won’t scale. there’s no fixing LLMs; systemically, they are what they are. and now this absolute horseshit is a component of what’s unfortunately still the dominant desktop operating system.

are there mechanisms known to researchers that Microsoft’s not using that can prevent this type of failure case in an LLM without resorting to whack-a-mole with a regex?

god, so this is actually the best the AI researchers can do with the tools they’ve shit out into the world without giving any thought to failure cases or legal liability (beyond their manager on ~~slack~~Teams claiming it’s been taken care of)

so fuck it, let’s make the defamation machine a non-optional component of windows. we’ll just make it a P0 when someone who could actually get us in legal trouble complains! everyone else is a P2 that never gets assigned.

Copilot then listed a string of crimes Bernklau had supposedly committed — saying that he was an abusive undertaker exploiting widows, a child abuser, an escaped criminal mental patient. [SWR, in German]

These were stories Bernklau had written about. Copilot produced text as if he was the subject. Then Copilot returned Bernklau’s phone number and address!

and there’s fucking nothing in place to prevent this utterly obvious failure case, other than if you complain Microsoft will just lazily regex for your name in the result and refuse to return anything if it appears

xcancel link, and it’s a fairly interesting set of posts too (with exactly the type of dumbass hustle culture replies one would expect from Twitter, with people essentially demanding first dibs on the domain)

(In other other news, its my 24th birthday.)

happy birthday!

Tactical Psyop Company

underbarrel t-shirt cannons? clearing rooms by being the worst, loudest sealion possible? or just the usual thinly-veiled torture?

Sorry my nootropics regime doesn’t allow me to read books,

this is an entire type of person and I keep meeting instances of them

I swear every VP of Marketing at ShitCorp on mastodon shows up with that exact take in every adblocker thread. some of them follow it up with “…and the modern web wouldn’t exist without ads”, which is how you know they’re on the expensive drugs — these marketing geniuses haven’t noticed the fediverse’s got a pretty fucking dim view of the modern web as a whole

that’s strange! the first one is a link to the awful.systems thread at https://awful.systems/post/1347665 titled “The whole internet loves Kagi, a lovely paid search engine that can find things! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the CEO is an unhinged narcissist who will harangue you in email” in case you’re able to locate it from that — it’s possible your Mastodon client may be trying to parse it as a mastodon thread link and doing the wrong thing with it. that thread links to this mastodon thread and this blog post which should have some good context on Kagi, in case you’re not able to view the awful.systems thread at all.

it’s unfortunate that all the Google alternatives big enough to matter are all-in on making the exact same mistakes as Google at roughly the same time, probably in hopes that one of them can swoop in and take the top dog spot when the monopoly ruling finally makes Google stumble

and if that sounds like a fucking stupid plan, you’re right, and that’s why neither of us are advertising executives

don’t use kagi, don’t advocate for brave