- It would be pretty weird if they were so broken they were incapable of saying anything right, even at times when they were trying to be ingratiating. You'd have to be astonishingly insane, more even than these people are, to be totally unable to identify something that would be good press.
I'm not saying they can't reach that point, but this ain't it. They are just getting details wildly wrong and being generally obtuse, but this is an attempt at not seeming completely insane and should be graded on that curve. You can't expect every little detail to be insane, that's asking a lot.
- Wait, what? I lift weights and chicken breast is a fundamental part of my diet but I'm eating 1/3 to 1/2 a single chicken breast a day, and an egg for breakfast. That CAN'T be right.
I get that I include some rice, peanuts etc. in there, but even if I quit EVERYTHING else there's no way 4 to 5 chicken breasts a day is accurate.
- No, when you bring in the genetic algorithm (something LLM AI can be adjacent to by the scale of information it deals in) you can go beyond human intelligence. I work with GA coding tools pretty regularly. Instead of prompting it becomes all about devising ingenious fitness functions, while not having to care if they're contradictory.
If superhuman intelligence is solved it'll be in the form of building a more healthy society (or, if you like, a society that can outcompete other societies). We've already seen this sort of thing by accident and we're currently seeing extensive efforts to attack and undermine societies through exploiting human intelligence.
To a genetic algorithm techie that is actually one way to spur the algorithm to making better societies, not worse ones: challenge it harder. I guess we'll see if that translates to life out here in the wild, because the challenge is real.
- Trump is Russia's guy. There is no way I'd be screaming for revenge over a horrifying complicated nightmare becoming even more toxic, even more complicated, and even more nightmarish. If anyone comes and gets Trump it ain't Russia: he is already theirs, and acting in such a way as to further all their aims and all their narratives.
- Yup. It's certainly an art project or something. It's like setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other to see how insane they go.
…kind of IS setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other, and that's pretty much it. We've just never had Chaneys this complicated before. People are watching the sparks, eating popcorn, rooting for MechaHitler.
- Github Actions, web development, stuff like that, are terrible examples of where not to use AI.
You can't really go to giant piles of technical debt and look to those for places to be human. It's soul-destroying. My concern would be that vibe coding will make those places of soul-less technical debt even deeper and deadlier. There will be nobody there, for generations of cruft. Where once the technical debt was made by committee, now it'll be the ghosts of committees, stirred up by random temperature, only to surface bits of rot that just sink down into the morass again, unfixed.
When 'finicky' is actually an interesting problem, or a challenge, that's one thing. When 'finicky' is just 'twelve committees re-hacked this and then it's been maintained by LLMs for years', there is nothing gained by trying to be human at it.
- This really makes for a good natural experiment: carry on :)
I have a hard time imagining how much you'd have to literally bribe me to get me to try doing it the way you describe. I'm too interested in implementation details of things and looking for innovations—in fact I make my living doing that, like some cyberpunk gremlin just delighting in messing with stuff in unexpected ways. I don't understand why you're not, but maybe it's not for me to understand.
Carry on. We'll check back and see how it worked for ya :)
- I don't take from it personality judgements, so much as it makes me want to look into how Reiner was trying to develop a series called 'The Spy and the Asset' on how Putin and Trump met and began working together.
That tracks for me, so Trump has personal reasons for behaving the way he does, though arguably self-preservation would induce him to not carry on the way he has done. But then he cannot be quiet about things he's guilty of, so I can't see his behavior as anything other than having a motive for just what's happened. I can't imagine he would take Rob's proposed series with equinamity: I'd love to know what Rob knew.
- It's an AI. You might do better by phrasing it, 'Make a plan, and have questions'. There's nobody there, but if it's specifically directed to 'have questions' you might find they are good questions! Why are you asking, if you figure it'd be better to get questions? Just say to have questions, and it will.
It's like a reasoning model. Don't ask, prompt 'and here is where you come up with apropos questions' and you shall have them, possibly even in a useful way.
- Or know people personally. There's two people I promote because they actively helped me do my own work, pitched in open source code and did development to support my project. There's another guy who lives in my town, so he gets some mention just because of that (his work's good, but that's my angle for mentioning it). And a microphone company got a shout out not because they give me microphones, but because the guy running the company noticed and liked my ethos and did a repair for free for me. That counts as a form of sponsoring so I talked him up, am already a fan of his work.
Make friends and work with people where possible. I get that some of this only works for us open source types, but the microphone guy isn't, he just did good work. I initially heard of his company through a pro sound engineer website, and ran with it when the advice turned out to be good.
- I'm already seeing this. I very much fall into the category of 'delete all email offers' as I'm a small youtuber, big enough to be targeted by AI sponsor deals, so I'm just buried with it.
The last five times I've looked at something in case it was a legitimate user email it was AI promotion of someone just like in the article.
Their only way to escalate, apart from pure volume, is to take pains to intentionally emulate the signals of someone who's a legitimate user needing help or having a complaint. Logically, if you want to pursue the adversarial nature of this farther, the AIs will have to be trained to study up and mimic the dialogue trees of legitimate users needing support, only to introduce their promotion after I've done several exchanges of seemingly legitimate support work, in the guise of a friend and happy customer. All pretend, to get to the pitch. AI's already capable of this if directed adeptly enough. You could write a script for it by asking AI for a script to do exactly this social exploit.
By then I'll be locked in a room that's also a Faraday cage, poking products through a slot in the door—and mocking my captors with the em-dashes I used back when I was one of the people THEY learned em-dashes from.
One thing about it, it's a very modern sort of dystopia!
- …over a road of bones? Is that your image?
I'm not scared for me, but I'm definitely worried for some of you. You seem weirdly trusting. What if the thing you're counting on is really not all you think it is? So far I'm about as impressed as I am of the spam in my inbox.
There sure is a lot of it, but the best it can do is fool me into evaluating it like it's a real communication or interaction, only to bounce off the basic hollowness of what's offered. What I'm trying to do it doesn't _do_… I've got stuff that does, for instance leaning into the genetic algorithm, but even then dealing with optimizing fitness functions is very much on me (and is going well, thanks for asking).
Why should I care if AI is marching if it's marching in circles, into a wall, or off a cliff? Maybe what you're trying to do is simply not very good or interesting. It'd be nice if my work could get away with such hollow, empty results but then I wouldn't be interested in it either…
- I'm familiar with it. In my opinion, Adam Curtis's moviemaking style is strongly informed by attention-getting, which is relevant to his subject matter: it's like how the youtuber Harry Litman produces salient and reasoned content (albeit opinionated) but never fails to label it with completely clickbait titles and thumbnails.
If your concept is that your work should be heard, you're obligated to take whatever steps are accepted to meet the bar for 'culturally being heard', a bar that you don't yourself set.
I think Adam Curtis makes non-tinfoil points and takes pains to present them as explosively as possible, something he's good at doing. I sympathize with the idea that it's distasteful to do that, but within the culture that hosts him, it's correct action.
- I played the Parker Fly at Fishman Transducers before it came out, when I was a kid.
I was actually working there, not for Ken but for Larry Fishman. I should never have been: I was too young and inexperienced and had no idea the responsibility I was taking on, or how underpaid I was for that responsibility. For a brief time I was shipping, receiving, inventory and stockroom. It near killed me and when they let me go I could only agree, I had no more to give and was totally burned out. I can still see the general manager, though I don't remember his name now.
I was trying to make guitars myself at the time, along very different lines, and when I played Ken Parker's new creation, I had enough sense to not recoil and show how much I just didn't click with it, but I still made Larry Fishman real mad and Ken alarmed and unhappy. Turns out Ken knew better than I did that there were people who'd understand what he'd invented: among them, Adrian Belew.
I ended up doing Ken-like stuff in my own field: I hope he learned that secret, that if you're doing anything really original you can only measure it by how intensely it affects people, both positively and negatively. I'd love to hear one of his archtops, and I have no idea whether I'd love or hate it, but I feel certain I'd immediately react in some way, and that's the highest compliment.
- How much do you know? One of my strongest things as somebody who's looked to as a person who knows a lot, is that I will immediately go to 'I don't know' when asked that sort of question. I don't even make an additional promise, I just stop at 'I don't know'.
With your emphasis on 'confidently', it sounds like you're looking at social consequences. I find that stopping the conversation with 'I don't know' and getting on with what I'm doing, socially 'reads' as authoritative. I'm sure part of it is my lack of equivocation: if I went 'I'll get back to you, I promise I swear I'll be able to know eventually, soon, I promise, pinky swear I will honest!' there would obviously be no authority, I'd be grovelling.
I could probably double down, unethically. 'I don't know, what a stupid question, why would you even ask that malformed question, that's not a real question'. I think that would lead to suspicion, though.
'I don't know' can be a power move, if you HAVE the confidence to mean it and let it lie there. I guess that's the answer. "I don't know. This is what I'm actively doing now…" This relies very much on there being many things you do know…
- If you postulate 'good', who is in there wearing the AI actor like a mask?
I find it easy to imagine some disabled, or disfigured, otherwise blocked-from-stardom person using tech like this to transform themselves and be able to express their truth without being unfairly judged by the physical form they were born into.
But that's not what we're talking about, is it? Be honest.
If you want to impress me, well, I'm a techie nerd. Make a furry celebrity actress, that's the expression of a person. Like a Hollywood-grade implementation of a VTuber. Let 'em be driven by a person that I can get to know and recognize. In this day and age I'm not wedded to forcing everybody to be trapped in the form they're born in, still less so in art.
But this is NOT what we're talking about. You're going to have an AI by committee, drawn from a pandering mass of popular reactions, producing problems not unlike modern-day movies that try so hard to pander to the audience at any given moment that there's no weight to them and no point to any of it.
Here's hoping we also get the other thing. Sort of 'T-pain autotune turned into a style' but for acting. And again, I'm down with it if it's letting artists execute on realities they are otherwise completely unable to reach. But that's not what we're going to get, is it?
I'm arguing that the egalatarian 'lift my lamp beside the golden door' society is a cheat code for producing the variety and ferment that makes everybody frustrated and unhappy but producing with wild abandon. As a society this tactic dominates the hell out of would-be ethnostates and dictatorships, which seems to also be a natural tendency of humans. They are interested in not being challenged, in those like them not being challenged. Comfortable for those fortunate individuals, hopelessly suboptimal for the society they're in.
The rallying cry of 'NO New York Cities! Only sundown towns where if you don't look right you are killed and nobody ever knows about it!' might please some people (who have never been anywhere near those evil cities) but it just goes to show that many people have unhealthy wishes that are bad for them and the societies they're in.