We live in the world of paywalled content, unilateral contract modification, micro transactions, serialised content, upsells, and the list goes on and on and on. Everyone is trying to find a way to extract money in one way or another, and that is something I find personally draining and soul-crushing.
I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down.
— Neal Stephenson, as quoted on simonwillison.net
Classic 1960s Volkswagen ads. (Nick Sherman / Fonts in Use) — Thanks, Dave!
Rep. Darrell Issa’s mail-ballot lawsuit may be thrown out of San Diego federal court (Ken Stone / Times of San Diego) — Issa is arguing that if all the votes are counted, Republicans lose and that’s just not fair. Gotta admire the chutzpah on this guy.
The Dream of the Metaverse Is Dying. Manufacturing Is Keeping It Alive. Forget Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of VR meetings; the industrial metaverse bridges digital and physical worlds in a way that’s actually useful. (Nicole Kobie / Wired)
Meta Battles an ‘Epidemic of Scams’ as Criminals Flood Instagram and Facebook (Jeff Horowitz and Angel Au-Yeung / WSJ) — “Battles?” Facebook seems to be doing the minimum to appear that it’s fighting fraud, while splitting the profits with the crooks.
How Chronic Disease Became the Biggest Scourge in American Health Americans live shorter and sicker lives than people in other high-income countries. (Brianna Abbott / WSJ) —
AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state: Big Tech wants you to share your private thoughts with chatbots, while backing the US government and its contempt for privacy. (Adi Robertson / The Verge)
For One Hilarious, Terrifying Day, Elon Musk’s Chatbot Lost Its Mind
How Grok’s AI became obsessed with false reports about white genocide in South Africa, and what the incident tells us about generative AI.
Grok says someone instructed it to accept this racist propaganda as real, and xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, says the culprit was a “rogue employee.” But you can’t believe either of them.
The incident is a perfect example of generative AI’s limitations, Zufekci says.
L.L.M.s [are] extremely useful tools at the hands of someone who can and will vigilantly root out the fakery, but powerfully misleading at the hands of someone who’s just trying to learn.
Yes. Chatbots are great for casual, low-stakes research, the kind of thing where you’d accept Wikipedia or some credible-looking Internet source.
They are outstanding for reminding you of a fact you once knew, and still half-remember.
Chatbots are fantastic for suggesting ideas — solving the blank-screen problem.
They are excellent for writing summaries of text you feed into them (which is, surprisingly, a significant part of my job).
They are also excellent for serious research — but you have to fact-check the chatbot’s output thoroughly.
I fed ChatGPT a link to Zufekci’s article and asked for a summary. ChatGPT wrote two paragraphs, most of which came from other sources — not Zufekci’s article. Those two paragraphs may have contained other errors; I didn’t bother to check.
ChatGPT demonstrated the limitations of AI while writing a bad summary of an article about the limitations of AI.