we spent decades refining the model of “the computer gives the right answer” and I remain unconvinced people wish to replace this with “the computer gives the wrong answer, but in plausible-sounding words”
i do like how they are like fae. very powerful entities you can ask questions of who are just as likely to deceive you as help you and also you can bind them with cleverly worded requests to make them do something they don't 'want' to do
not sure what the state of the right to repair is but hopeing something comes of that movement. it is interesting to me how much of it is led by like ag workers and farming equipment and not tech consumers
I think AI is interesting in the sense that applying big data to the internet somehow results in massive copyright violations and insane amounts of racism. Who would have thunk
Teslas can be trapped in a circle of salt. AI can be foiled by wordplay. The inhuman voices on your phone offer you tempting deals.
Nothing ever dies, it just gets a fresh coat of paint and some googly eyes.
you can contain ai driven vehicles in a circle of salt. either ai escapes to the past and becomes the fae or someone from the future escapes to the past and warns us of the dangers of ai with fae tales
I was a fly on the wall with a zoom with some techbro execs chatting how to 'disrupt' AI.
Near quote:
"I think there's a great opportunity to hire a team of fact checkers to identify the most popular queries and provide sources for reliable answers."
"Mitch, you just invented Wikipedia."
"...Fuck."
One of my teachers at uni once told the story of how they'd experiment with different languages in the 80s, and Prolog seemed impenetrable. So they typed "help", because that'd usually open a manual of some sort.
Prolog just replied "No", and then he didn't touch Prolog
sudden image of trying AI art on a Babbage machine. by chimney smoke and sheer noise, the whole town knows someone is trying to create an engraving of a finely turned ankle-like image
(also, reading recommendation for The Difference Engine by Sterling & Gibson for fiction of this early computer)
Ha! You might think that, reasonably! But no, similar, yet FAR more cynical and world weary, it’s the skoolboy Nigel Molesworth: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_M...
Muggles (I cannot think of a better word for them) have such a poor grasp of the way the world works, yet for some bizarre reason that only social biology could explain, they are the ones in charge.
It tracks with how management and executive classes have gone from "I dont know everything, but Im semi competent at this job" through to "If I lie brazenly, convincingly and with sufficient bravado stock price go BRBRBRBRBRRBRBBR"
The wild thing here for me is that Google Knowledge Graph is actually tremendous at delivering correct answers! But now Google is just, "But what if the answer was worse?"
(There are valid criticisms of Knowledge Graph stealing traffic from sites that rely on search, but it gives right answers!)
My favorite challenge to the LLMs is to ask it lore questions about your favorite TV show / video game / movie / etc.—something you know a lot about, in detail but isn't universal common knowledge—and then see just how much of it the AI gets wrong.
It gets a lot wrong.
Sometimes the right answer is inconvenient or difficult to understand.
So you see, this is a perfect middle ground. A reasonable compromise that has market value for both company and consumer.
Resistance is unreasonable...and frankly, Luddite coded.
