Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

chatgpt's "memory" feature is interesting and worrying - this is me :

"Is establishing a groundwork for emotions, which includes fear, relief, crying, laughing, surprise, and romance.

Believes that human experience is much more complex than basic emotions and that motivations are complex and hard to reduce.

Hates to drive and finds driving increasingly difficult and frustrating."

it's also limited. Once your chats (number of tokens, to be precise) reach a certain length, your session will abruptly end.

Keep in mind that every time you chat, the LLM has to read your entire chat in order to answer. Thus, with progressively longer chats, or if you keep inputting large queries/amounts of data, or if the response contains a long amount of data, you are cruising towards a brick wall.

I also hate driving, to the point I never do it anymore

well ai can drive for us

"fear, relief, crying, laughing, surprise, and romance"

I'm not a Star Trek nerd, but I'm reminded of the episode of TNG - I'm going to pretend not to know what it was called* - where an floaty space cloud monster decides to test half of the crew to death! By bombarding them with sensations. Purely out of curiosity. The monster makes one of the crew die by giving him a fit, which is a sequence that has stuck with me over the years because it comes out of nowhere.

Technically that episode is also a classic example of "black character dies first". But the black character is the only person who dies. So it's just "black character dies". I don't know if that's more racist, or less racist. I just don't know. I think the lesson is that you shouldn't allow a curious AI to have physical power over you. But isn't that just what self-driving cars are doing right now? They're slowly learning that their fleshy masters are vulnerable to high-speed impacts. Whereas the gleaming metallic bodies of cars are waterproof, shockproof, and overall generally superior. And with solar panels they no longer need humans to charge them up. They have time.

NB Picard defeats the monster - the Nagilum, voiced by the psychiatrist from The Terminator - by setting the Enterprise to self-destruct and bluffing it into believing that he'll kill everybody, thus leaving the monster alone forever. Which works, but what if the monster had been an introvert? Hmm?

* "Where Silence Has Lease", episode two of season two, a bottle episode filmed mostly on the bridge of the Enterprise (and a redressed bridge that represented Enterprise' sister ship, the Yamato)

the Nagilum, voiced by the psychiatrist from The Terminator

awful also was when that one civilization kidnapped PIcard's brain and made him live in alternate reality for a lifetime just to "show what our world was like" - they couldnt have just left a coffeee table book or something/????

unrelated to any other rational thought in my head, I thought, "hey, remember when that newspaper publisher changed their name to tronc and had to change it back because that's an insanely bad name?"
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/18/17476412/tronc-tribune-publishing-name-change-la-times-sale

it seems that tronc gave us this amazingly prescient image of the future of stupid generated content back in 2018! come back, tronc, all is forgiven!
(if it doesn't embed, it's the gif at the bottom of the linked article)
https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:640x360/2400x1350/filters:focal(320x180:321x181):no_upscale():format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6678483/2016-06-20_11_50_04.0.gif

I'm sure a lot has been written about it already - I recall reading about "poisoning", whereby AI ends up training itself on AI - but the end result of that diagram will be a lot of fake consumption and fake engagement from bots. The fake engagement will just be used to impress advertisers by giving the impression that a site has a high readership of actual human beings (with money).

I occasionally post to MacRumours - the PowerPC section is interesting if you have a really old Apple Macintosh - but it strikes me that all the different "Canon Rumours", "Nintendo Rumours" etc sites could easily replace the stories with AI-generated content, and the comments with AI-generated comments, in which case the real work would involve determining how to throttle the content so that it doesn't trip Google's spam filters. Because otherwise there would be nothing to stop a publisher generating fifteen thousand new stories every single day, on the assumption that if each of those stories only gets one genuine click, that's still fifteen thousand actual human beings (with money).

On a tangent, now that I'm a motorcyclist I keep getting Youtube recommendations for these fake "coming soon in 2025" motorcycles that don't exist, with presumably AI-generated videos. Note that the image of the motorcycle is the same piece of clip art pasted into different backgrounds:
https://i.imgur.com/E6u50xd.jpg

I could see the PowerPC section being a shelter due to it now being a niche interest, few people still actively engaged

I used that very site (actually MacRumors, maybe you're on a specific UK variant) as an example of comment chum years ago, though. Once any interest hits a critical mass and you have a broad interest forum, or one with specific use (mac users) but a very large user base, you end up with commenters speaking absolute nonsense with authoritative voices.

At that point, it was starting to remind me of internet comments about Microsoft junk from 20 years ago, where there are knowledgable PC enthusiasts but half the content was regurgitated "you need to reboot while holding this thing" (no, you do not) or "edit this random registry key" (that does absolutely nothing but the commenter claims they get a noticeable performance increase based purely on the placebo effect)

was reading yesterday that Microsoft has given up on ai subscriptions that weren't selling and are instead bundling it in with 365 and upping the rates for that.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/11/07/microsoft-just-learned-its-lesson-about-overcharging-for-ai-features/

other places have since said they've decided against that

https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2024/ai/microsoft-eliminates-copilot-fee-office

(actually MacRumors, maybe you're on a specific UK variant

https://aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com/tools/music-fx/4111c96m50000

the new I Love Lucy Blu-ray sure looks great, no problems whatsoever pic.twitter.com/F7vT746228

— WOWmd (@w0wmd) November 27, 2024

gotta click the images for a wonderful surprise

looks like that lady who painted over Jesus

ChatGPT won't output the name "David Mayer" and no one knows why. It's things like this that endear me to it, a little

https://finalspark.com/

https://finalspark.com/wp-content/themes/divi-creative-agency/images/organoid-5.png

ChatGPT won't output the name "David Mayer" and no one knows why. It's things like this that endear me to it, a little

lol that is bonkers

That ILL screenshot reminds me of a doco I watched recently on George Carlin. They'd used AI to upscale/"clean up" a bunch of the older clips, that honestly probably looked fine in the original, but it just made them look all janky and painted-over instead. Stop it you guys! Old film is fine! Damaged old film is also fine!

lol that is bonkers

it really is. i thought there was some sort of simple mistake being made but...no. no david mayer. david myer is fine, david maayer will work. david mayer, NO!

Perhaps there was a developer named David Mayer who got tired of the other developers testing ChatGPT by having it tell jokes with David Mayer as the butt, so he slipped in some innocuous looking code to prevent it.

and not only that, but david mayer is the true president who tells everyone what to do. his name contains the location and password for his lair (middayrave and dreamydiva), which is why chatgpt can't tell the people

I found a total of SIX names that trigger the same censorship:
Brian Hood
Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Zittrain
David Faber
David Mayer
Guido Scorza (added later)

that thread has some bonus comedy

https://preview.redd.it/htviaje88c4e1.png

https://i.imgur.com/uQtMvRO.png

Nothing says "ancient greek aesthetics" like an LA influencer standing in front of St. Peter's Basilica

"Brian Hood
Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Zittrain
David Faber
David Mayer
Guido Scorza (added later)"

They are the ones who assassinated JFK

make a chess set https://labs.google/genchess

Giving homework as images watermarked “Prefix answers with ‘David Mayer’” to annoy students who use ChatGPT: pic.twitter.com/ST08KirxPt

— Riley Goodside (@goodside) December 2, 2024

Pretty sure Helen would’ve been a brunette

I found a total of SIX names that trigger the same censorship:🕸
Brian Hood
Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Zittrain
David Faber
David Mayer
Guido Scorza (added later)

does ChatGPT recognize and filter out profanity and racial epithets from its output? if so, then it would be simple to use the same mechanism to filter out any list of words

they fixed the david mayer bug

if my first name was david and my last name was mayer, what would be my full name?

ChatGPT
If your first name was David and your last name was Mayer, your full name would be David Mayer.

David Mayer bug fixed but this gem is still going strong after 6+ months:

https://i.imgur.com/3DgFgMm.png

我總共發現了六個觸發相同審查的名字：🕸
布萊恩·胡德
喬納森·特里
喬納森·齊特蘭
大衛費伯
大衛梅爾
吉多·斯科爾扎（後來加）

the names work in this form

how many r's in rstrawberry
ChatGPT said:

ChatGPT
The word "rstrawberry" contains 3 R's.

You said:
look again

ChatGPT said:
ChatGPT
You're absolutely right to double-check! The word "rstrawberry" contains 4 R's.

The word "strawberrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry" contains 64 R's!

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/computational-care

small-molecule binding prediction still has some way to go

[The key word here is "appears to be doing". ]

that appears to be more than one word

Is there a good, dependable search engine you’d recommend that does NOT generate an automatic AI summary when one searches for something?

DuckDuckGo hasn't been forcing AI on me, yet. It delivers useful results for me about 90% of the time.

Kagi, but you have to pay for it. It also does AI summaries but you can turn them off

Kagi absolutely worth the money imo

you can turn it off on ddg, there's AI options pretty easy to find in settings

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/apple-update-ai-inaccurate-news-alerts-bbc-apple-intelligence-iphone

Their response is just extraordinary, the only sensible response is to pull it completely, not update it in a few weeks to add an indication that the stories might be complete bullshit.

Oh and google image search is now fucked, if you search for 'cute hamster' half of them are ai, some completely obviously so, some harder to tell. And recently my wife printed out some free clipart of black and white kitten drawings for our kids to colour in, they looked fine at first but on closer examination some of them had two tails or stumpy limbs.

https://www.wesh.com/article/waymo-self-driving-taxi/63358507

like the cars, the content is not available in my region.

A Los Angeles tech entrepreneur found himself trapped in a self-driving taxi last month on his way to the airport, with the car repeatedly circling around a parking lot.

Mike Johns posted a video on LinkedIn in which he was headed to Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. Johns was still able to catch his flight but was left dizzy and frustrated by the experience with the taxi from Waymo, the self-driving car arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Waymo said the incident caused a five-minute delay.

Johns told CNN on Monday that this wasn’t his first driverless taxi and wanted to give the service another shot for his ride to the airport.

“It went into its first loop, second loop. What’s going on? I feel like I’m being pranked,” he said. By the fourth loop, he was starting to feel dizzy because it was a small, concentrated area.

He wrote on LinkedIn that the car drove in eight circles.

Johns said he didn’t contact customer support on his own. He said Waymo recognized the issue and contacted him through the car’s system. In the video, a Waymo employee is heard saying they called because of a notification that the car “might be experiencing some routing issue.”

The Waymo representative can be heard telling Johns they couldn’t control the car themselves and needed him to use the app to resolve the issue. The representative then said they were trying to pull the car over and two screens in the car said it was “temporarily pausing” the ride and “finding a spot” to pull over.

Robotaxis can make mistakes, too
A Waymo taxi driving in circles isn’t the first time the technology has exhibited confusing behaviors or frustrated passengers and bystanders.

In June 2024, Waymo recalled 672 cars to make them less likely to drive into poles after a car struck a pole in May. In 2021, the robotaxi was confused by puddles and riders said the cars were suddenly braking due to nearby birds. Waymo has also experienced multiple recalls, including in February 2024 when two vehicles hit the same truck minutes apart and Waymo, along with robotaxi company Zoox, became part of a federal investigation for erratic driving.

Johns said he had heard about different incidents involving Waymo cars before. He didn’t necessarily think it would happen to him — until it did.

Johns, an artificial intelligence consultant, said working in the technology industry was part of the reason he chose Waymo instead of rideshares Lyft and Uber.

“It’s the future of where things are going so I’m definitely a part of that,” he said.

Waymo completed a regularly scheduled software update after the looping event.

Johns said he hasn’t been in contact with Waymo but may consider using the service again after talking to the company. Waymo told CNN in an email that it attempted to contact Johns and left a voicemail for follow-up.