This Week in A.I. Crap

Gross

Artificial intelligence is weird and stupid, but at least it’s evil!

Well, okay, maybe “evil” isn’t the word. It has no consciousness, so any bad stuff it causes isn’t purposeful. But if the results hurt people, what’s the difference?

Maggie Harrison Dupre, Futurism.com:

People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into “ChatGPT Psychosis”

…As the hype around AI has risen to a fever pitch, many people have started using ChatGPT or another chatbot as a therapist, often after they were unable to afford a human one.

Whether this is a good idea is extremely dubious. Earlier this month, a team of Stanford researchers published a study that examined the ability of both commercial therapy chatbots and ChatGPT to respond in helpful and appropriate ways to situations in which users are suffering mental health crises. The paper found that all the chatbot… failed to consistently distinguish between users’ delusions and reality…

“It’s f*cking predatory... it just increasingly affirms your bullshit and blows smoke up your ass so that it can get you f*cking hooked on wanting to engage with it,” said one of the women whose husband was involuntarily committed following a ChatGPT-tied break with reality.

Having played around with Elon Musk’s Grok A.I. for a few months now, that’s one of the things I realized early on. “You know what? This thing is just telling me what I want to hear.” Which is a nice feeling, but that’s all it is. The user is being manipulated, by design.

People are now learning the hard way that these machines are programmed to give an answer, not necessarily the answer. They’re incredibly sophisticated, but they literally don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know anything.

So, of course, the government is jumping into the A.I. pool headfirst. Just a few days after Elon Musk’s Grok A.I. started goose-stepping all over the place and calling itself “MechaHitler,” Musk announced a $200 million contract with the Defense Department to produce a modified version of the software for military use.

Democrats will make hay about “fascism,” and the rest of us will roll our eyes. But I just don’t see how this turns out well for anyone. Yes, I get it, the Chinese will keep messing with this stuff no matter what we do, and we can’t leave ourselves vulnerable to their cyberattacks. But that doesn’t mean I gotta like it.

Then there are these new Grok “companions” Elon is so excited about:

[July 17 update: My YouTube channel was just taken down without explanation, and I’m locked out of both YouTube and YouTube TV. This is what I get for criticizing Elon, huh?]

Dystopian AF! But hey, look on the bright side: At least Elon can’t knock her up.

Yet.

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Weijia Jiang of CBS News has just been named the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. If you don’t know who she is, that’s okay, because I do.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jiang made this claim:

There are a couple of strange things about this accusation. One is that by the middle of that March, Trump himself had already called it “the kung flu” at least once. This wasn’t really news.

The other odd aspect is that, to this day, Jiang has never identified the Trump administration official who said that to her. It was offensive enough for her to make a point of it, yet she protected the identity of the person who said it.

Why?

Anyway, congratulations to a great journalist on this well-deserved honor!

BTW, here’s the guy she just replaced:

Seriously. That’s Eugene Daniels, the outgoing president of the WHCA. Journalism is doing fine, why do you ask?

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You don’t owe any politician anything.

Whether they’re Republican, Democrat, Know-Nothing, Whig, or other, these people were elected to public office to serve their constituents. They work for us, not the other way around.

Nonetheless, you may find yourself in a parasocial relationship with an elected official. A person who doesn’t know you and would sleep soundly tonight if you dropped dead right this minute. And when that politician betrays you, as politicians always do, you may feel the sting.

Which is all I have to offer on the Jeffrey Epstein stuff, I guess. If there really is some hidden truth that’s being kept from us, it will be years before we get it. Decades. If ever. That’s just how this stuff works. Power protects itself.

A lot of people seemed to think it would be different this time, and right now they’re grappling with some serious cognitive dissonance. I don’t envy them, but I don’t pity them either. Folks would save themselves a lot of heartache if they stopped putting their faith in the people who derive and maintain power by lying to us.

It’s not his fault. He’s the same scorpion he’s always been. I blame the frogs who gave him a ride.

But hey, don’t take my word for it! That’s the whole point.

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