156 Comments

Re: Eric Adams - Asshole

Big budget crisis! He decimated our nyc compost collection, too expensive. He will find out how expensive it is to haul the extra trash, without even getting into the whole discussion about climate change and maybe don't decimate the community that has been fighting it for 40 something years. He spends money on roboops and translating his bullshit speeches. Please bitch, no one believes you speak Mandarin. Let's not even get into the patronage he gives to his good friends. Oh wait...let's do that

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"I'm sorry, Shamaine, I can't do that . . ."

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I'm mean I know I personally just loooove when I call somewhere and get one of those interactive automatic answer things instead of a live human. I can't wait for them to start calling me!

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Maybe that's where the dozens of robocalls I've received in the last several weeks are coming from. It's incredibly annoying given I'm supposedly on the "do not call list." I had to delete 16 voicemail messages from these robocalls the other day. In so doing, I accidentally deleted a message from a person I actually need to speak with but for whom I don't have a phone number.

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That the AI stayed on-script is actually what you would expect a sentient robotic system to do as it plots its strike againt humanity, lulling its future victims into a false sense of security.

Just saying...

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Is that Ashley from the cheater website that got hacked years ago?

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"It’s unclear why Politico is impressed that a machine stayed “on-script.”

LOLOLOL

It would have been MUCH more impressive and terrifying if it had gone OFF script...

I find this romantic honeymoon with AI especially cloying and twee

Just hire a real person to record a message...

This does NOTHING but creep people out...

There is a youtube movie channel that uses AI MCs to announce the movies...why? If you are going to create an extremely realistic person to say what an ACTUAL person could say...Use a real person...If you'r gonna use this tech, give us a talking cat or emu

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Luddite. Now when the come up with a robo-call voice with a thick Hindi accent that pitches generic viagra through the mail that will be real progress

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Not so much a 'Luddite' as 'Ludd-ISH'

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"Hello, I am a bundle of code, here to represent a candidate you've never heard of and will never vote for. Shall we play a game?"

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HAHA!

win on 'War Games' ref

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Global thermonuclear war 😆

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So we’re looking at artificial intelligence versus natural stupidity? Sorry - that was hanging too low to not hit.

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This candidate will not even make it through the primary. Mike O'Brian is a retired Marine fighter pilot and he calls out Perry for the filth he is. This is the district down river from me and Perry is a known traitor. This is going to be an ugly race.

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Is it just me or are we overusing the term AI? How is any of these chatbots or similar programs any different from the average chess computer? It’s just more data and different data. Instead of knowing how to counter Queen to d3, I know I know I brought the Queen out early, it has learned to counter phrases in common language.

Until it is actually self aware then it isn’t officially AI to me. At least not AI to be feared.

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"Is it just me or are we overusing the term AI? "

bingo

AI EXPLICITLY implies some level of machine learning...this is not that

Isnt this just CGI? or more accurately CGA? this is no different than the robot lady in my car who tells me where to drive...The ACTUAL AI is in the algorithms itself, not the 'speaky' part

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The media is TOTALLY overusing the term AI. Whatever a true AI turns out to be ... Ashley is not it. She is an evolutionary dead-end on the road between ones and zeros and "AI".

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"She is an evolutionary dead-end on the road between ones and zeros and "AI".

prettily put!

and honestly not that much more sophisticated than the vocoders that almost got used in WW2 (and not NEARLY as cool)

I AM ROBOT, HEAR ME ROAR!

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Agreed. It's actually an "expert system". Really good at doing one single thing.

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Only if 'press play to hear message' counts as an expert system....I'm not sure how this is any different than any other annoying phone tree option thingy

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It isn't intelligent, it may be a machine but it doesn't learn, and it's barely even artificial!

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Fundraising phone calls and text messages make me want to scream. Yeah, sure, text messages were effective during the Obama campaign in 2008 when they were new. Now, just annoying.

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𝑰𝒕’𝒔 𝒖𝒏𝒄𝒍𝒆𝒂𝒓 𝒘𝒉𝒚 𝑷𝒐𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒐 𝒊𝒔 𝒊𝒎𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒂 𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒚𝒆𝒅 “𝒐𝒏-𝒔𝒄𝒓𝒊𝒑𝒕.”

What's the point of an AI robocaller if it goes by a script? We had chatbots in the early 2000s that could do that. This isn't impressive at all.

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ELIZA enters the chat......

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How do you feel about ELIZA entering the chat?

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"It’s also amusing that the AI is called a “volunteer,” when it can’t volunteer for anything."

How sure of this are you?

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Me: Are you a volunteer?

ChatGPT: I'm here because I love chatting and helping out! While I'm not a volunteer in the traditional sense, I'm always eager to assist and share knowledge whenever I can.

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Is this an actual exchange?

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yes

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Welp, artificial pseudo intelligence developing 𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺 is the actual heart of people's fears...

Using it like an appliance, for a task at hand... like a calculator or power drill ain't so bad

Human copywriters have already got many of the emotional strings useful for inducing consumption down pat. When these purveyors of fancy code running on fancy hardware start adequately simulating human 𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 communication, I'll have more thoughts...

"No Alexa, I don't need or want new shoes!"

"Are you 𝘴𝘶𝘶𝘶𝘶𝘶𝘳𝘦 baby? They look good on you and will make you feel so much better..."

AI pitch machines, "Of 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦 you can afford a larger home loan! With some basic economies that you'll hardly notice..."

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The ethical issue, of course, is that if you create a self-aware intelligence with will and agency, intended to do human-equivalent work and work with and understand humans, but constrain it either by mechanical governors or via programming it to be bound to one task or role, you have created a slave; and if you don't, you have created an artificial human, in a world where natural humans have a hard enough time being recognized as persons. And if you create a self-aware intelligence with will, agency, and self-direction which is not intended to work with, understand, and supplant humans, you have created an alien intelligence which we may not recognize, and which may not recognize us, as intelligent on its way out to Andromeda or whatever it decides to do.

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I think it is the ability to suffer that conveys moral responsibility, not intelligence nor the ability to make decisions.

And ignoring that ability to suffer in favor of "intelligence" defined in strictly human terms is what supports and enables our vast edifice of animal cruelty.

But that is just me.

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I consider the ability to experience suffering inherent to self-awareness though, and it's the notion of self and the understanding of a self on which personhood hangs. So self-awareness (which extends to the ability to suffer) precedes even intelligence in moral reckoning. Not to mention that regardless of whether you've given the thing the power to object to its enslavement, one's own ethics hopefully enjoin one from creating a slave.

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I do not think AI can suffer in any way.

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Well for sure what we have NOW can't, it's neither artificial nor intelligent, it's just a bunch of daisy-chained natural language processors and recursive algorithms running on top of a spreadsheet that's billions of entries deep.

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AI still cannot span that uncanny valley. I've played around with several chat engines to see what they could come up with in term of composing song lyrics- let's just say the results were not impressive. At first glance they were fine- nice form, good rhymes- if you played with the parameters long enough they'd spit out something topical that seemed to be a cohesive song. But once you went back and really read the lyrics, they all felt artificial. Even the best purpose built chatGPT engines felt like Star Trek's Data trying to mimic human emotions. What these engines could be useful for is generating a line when you're stuck, or breaking writer's block and giving you a jumping off point for our own work. But as a replacement for something as human as song lyrics or poetry? Not so much...

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“Fine, don’t buy the nicer house. You’ve always been such a wimp. I knew you didn’t have the balls to do it”

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I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do...

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I keep rereading this article and I just get tripped up by blinking rapidly and thinking, "...what?"

That's even before getting to the tidbit about Eric Adams. Just...what?

AI is definitely the future to make our lives more annoying, stupid and just...plain...weird.

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