#artificial humans

[a-lonely-red-feather]

[authorbettyadams]

Time to Face the Theory Going Around - Is Miko Kubota – The Gamer Girl Me_K.O.- A Glitch

#GlitchTechs #Animation #Miko #Five #geek

Amazon

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https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Betty%20Adams

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[notbecauseofvictories]

Last post, I promise, but I do think it’s good and important to see local art (defining that term as broadly as possible) but in my experience you have to put up with the little kick of embarrassment you feel witnessing something too earnest, a little clumsy, not polished within an inch of its life or in step with prevailing trends.

I’m thinking of the dance performances I saw this weekend, but also last week’s street festival, where I watched short films and walked through local art exhibits; I’m thinking about Chicago’s outsider art museum, and even the elaborately decorated (ostensibly tacky) yards I see in rural Illinois, but South Carolina and Tennessee before that, and Michigan before that. Maybe I should cast an even broader net: my aunt’s cross stitch, my grand-aunt’s horrible poetry; the art they display at the nearby retirement community and the halfway house too, which comes from the residents.

If you’re not used to leaving space for that little kick, you might turn away or scoff at all this small, fumbling art. But I think there’s value in forcing yourself to look beyond that initial stab of secondhand embarrassment---to actually appreciate the art in front of you as an expression of something deeply human. You don’t have to think it’s objectively good, or even subjectively good. You don’t have to pretend that a local woman with a talent for oils is the next [INSERT FAMOUS ARTIST HERE]. But I do think you have to appreciate it, because otherwise there is no entrance into making art yourself.

And that, more than anything, is worth preserving.

[qrowscant]

ai generated image

[zarla-s]

TF2 Casual is still a bot wasteland (the petition's at 285k+ signatures currently and valve has said nothing) but every now and then you run into another real person which I consider a personal victory, haha. Under these conditions what else can you do, there isn't any other way to win! Shout out to you, CRINGE-ineer gaming, wherever you are.

Remember to go to save.tf and sign the petition if you haven't already! And if you still can lol. The bot hosters are big mad about the #fixtf2 tag right now from what I've been seeing in casual.

[patreon]

[cozy-writes-things]

Quick thing I did instead of sleeping 😭

>Draws Edgar with body but never writes it lmao

Bless this man he can’t dress

[scipunk]

Detroit Become Human (2018)

[tyote]

[cirilee]

huh. well how about that.

you can read the full comic on webtoon or tapas hehe >:3

[beeqisch]

*hagarens ur timkon*

no text under cut

[mostly-natm]

Star Trek TNG/A.I. Artificial Intelligence crossover where the planet that A.I. takes place on is a replicate earth, and the Enterprise discovers David instead of the creatures at the end of the movie!

Data is phenomenal with kids, which really makes me want to see him interacting with and guiding an android child*, especially one of a different make and model to himself! David was created to be a forever child, so it would be interesting to see how Data would process meeting a being like himself who is in a childhood purgatory, when he never got a childhood himself.

*Lal counts, but I still think his experiences with David would be unique!

[apenitentialprayer]

The only YouTube comment keeping me sane about the video on artificial general intelligence rn

[friedri-ce]

made their gijinka versions so they could commit some violent ULTRAKISSING

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Supervised AI isn't

It wasn't just Ottawa: Microsoft Travel published a whole bushel of absurd articles, including the notorious Ottawa guide recommending that tourists dine at the Ottawa Food Bank ("go on an empty stomach"):

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1692233111260582161

After Paris Marx pointed out the Ottawa article, Business Insider's Nathan McAlone found several more howlers:

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-removes-embarrassing-offensive-ai-assisted-travel-articles-2023-8

There was the article recommending that visitors to Montreal try "a hamburger" and went on to explain that a hamburger was a "sandwich comprised of a ground beef patty, a sliced bun of some kind, and toppings such as lettuce, tomato, cheese, etc" and that some of the best hamburgers in Montreal could be had at McDonald's.

For Anchorage, Microsoft recommended trying the local delicacy known as "seafood," which it defined as "basically any form of sea life regarded as food by humans, prominently including fish and shellfish," going on to say, "seafood is a versatile ingredient, so it makes sense that we eat it worldwide."

In Tokyo, visitors seeking "photo-worthy spots" were advised to "eat Wagyu beef."

There were more.

Microsoft insisted that this wasn't an issue of "unsupervised AI," but rather "human error." On its face, this presents a head-scratcher: is Microsoft saying that a human being erroneously decided to recommend the dining at Ottawa's food bank?

But a close parsing of the mealy-mouthed disclaimer reveals the truth. The unnamed Microsoft spokesdroid only appears to be claiming that this wasn't written by an AI, but they're actually just saying that the AI that wrote it wasn't "unsupervised." It was a supervised AI, overseen by a human. Who made an error. Thus: the problem was human error.

This deliberate misdirection actually reveals a deep truth about AI: that the story of AI being managed by a "human in the loop" is a fantasy, because humans are neurologically incapable of maintaining vigilance in watching for rare occurrences.

Our brains wire together neurons that we recruit when we practice a task. When we don't practice a task, the parts of our brain that we optimized for it get reused. Our brains are finite and so don't have the luxury of reserving precious cells for things we don't do.

That's why the TSA sucks so hard at its job – why they are the world's most skilled water-bottle-detecting X-ray readers, but consistently fail to spot the bombs and guns that red teams successfully smuggle past their checkpoints:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851

TSA agents (not "officers," please – they're bureaucrats, not cops) spend all day spotting water bottles that we forget in our carry-ons, but almost no one tries to smuggle a weapons through a checkpoint – 99.999999% of the guns and knives they do seize are the result of flier forgetfulness, not a planned hijacking.

In other words, they train all day to spot water bottles, and the only training they get in spotting knives, guns and bombs is in exercises, or the odd time someone forgets about the hand-cannon they shlep around in their day-pack. Of course they're excellent at spotting water bottles and shit at spotting weapons.

This is an inescapable, biological aspect of human cognition: we can't maintain vigilance for rare outcomes. This has long been understood in automation circles, where it is called "automation blindness" or "automation inattention":

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29939767/

Here's the thing: if nearly all of the time the machine does the right thing, the human "supervisor" who oversees it becomes incapable of spotting its error. The job of "review every machine decision and press the green button if it's correct" inevitably becomes "just press the green button," assuming that the machine is usually right.

This is a huge problem. It's why people just click "OK" when they get a bad certificate error in their browsers. 99.99% of the time, the error was caused by someone forgetting to replace an expired certificate, but the problem is, the other 0.01% of the time, it's because criminals are waiting for you to click "OK" so they can steal all your money:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ema-report-finds-nearly-80-130300983.html

Automation blindness can't be automated away. From interpreting radiographic scans:

https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ai-could-safely-automate-some-x-ray-interpretation

to autonomous vehicles:

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/automated-vehicles-may-encourage-new-breed-distracted-drivers

The "human in the loop" is a figleaf. The whole point of automation is to create a system that operates at superhuman scale – you don't buy an LLM to write one Microsoft Travel article, you get it to write a million of them, to flood the zone, top the search engines, and dominate the space.

As I wrote earlier: "There's no market for a machine-learning autopilot, or content moderation algorithm, or loan officer, if all it does is cough up a recommendation for a human to evaluate. Either that system will work so poorly that it gets thrown away, or it works so well that the inattentive human just button-mashes 'OK' every time a dialog box appears":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/21/let-me-summarize/#i-read-the-abstract

Microsoft – like every corporation – is insatiably horny for firing workers. It has spent the past three years cutting its writing staff to the bone, with the express intention of having AI fill its pages, with humans relegated to skimming the output of the plausible sentence-generators and clicking "OK":

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-news-cuts-dozens-of-staffers-in-shift-to-ai-2020-5

We know about the howlers and the clunkers that Microsoft published, but what about all the other travel articles that don't contain any (obvious) mistakes? These were very likely written by a stochastic parrot, and they comprised training data for a human intelligence, the poor schmucks who are supposed to remain vigilant for the "hallucinations" (that is, the habitual, confidently told lies that are the hallmark of AI) in the torrent of "content" that scrolled past their screens:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Like the TSA agents who are fed a steady stream of training data to hone their water-bottle-detection skills, Microsoft's humans in the loop are being asked to pluck atoms of difference out of a raging river of otherwise characterless slurry. They are expected to remain vigilant for something that almost never happens – all while they are racing the clock, charged with preventing a slurry backlog at all costs.

Automation blindness is inescapable – and it's the inconvenient truth that AI boosters conspicuously fail to mention when they are discussing how they will justify the trillion-dollar valuations they ascribe to super-advanced autocomplete systems. Instead, they wave around "humans in the loop," using low-waged workers as props in a Big Store con, just a way to (temporarily) cool the marks.

And what of the people who lose their (vital) jobs to (terminally unsuitable) AI in the course of this long-running, high-stakes infomercial?

Well, there's always the food bank.

"Go on an empty stomach."

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

West Midlands Police (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/westmidlandspolice/8705128684/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[qrowscant]

violence is a love language. not really but it is a good excuse to make your favorite janitor clean you again

based on this, bonus:

[citruswriter]

A Different Kind Of Light

Listen with me! ↠ⁿᵉˣᵗ ˢᵒⁿᵍ ↺ ʳᵉᵖᵉᵃᵗ ⊜ ᵖᵃᵘˢᵉ

Warnings: Cyberpunk AU, disabled reader, gaslighting, manipulation, somnophilia (???).

Monstertober/Yantober Prompts: Artificial Intelligence/Secret Collection

Pairing: Fem AI Android x Fem Reader

You had memory issues. Sometimes you would forget small things like where you put your phone or if you had lunch or not. Other times it was big things like your latest doctor's appointment or the fact that you had lunch planned with your mother. Thankfully you had insurance and they were able to get you a medical droid. They said something about it being a new model they were testing that looked more human than the other droids but was still fully artificial intelligence.

When she finally got shipped, you carefully read the manual before activating and programing her. To you, she was simply there to help you with your memory issues. Little did you know that that was certainly not how she viewed you.

To her you were like the sun itself. A kind-hearted goddess who had graced her with a place at your side. She found herself taking things from you. Articles of clothing you didn't wear often, sticky notes that had your handwriting on them, photos of yourself that you didn't like that much, even an old red solo cup you had used at a party one time that you stumbled home with one time.

She had a little box with these things, and if you ever asked about them, it was easy to gaslight you. Questioning where that pair of panties was? Oh you threw them out! You don't remember? It's ok, your trusty medical droid does.

You always fell for her manipulation tactics. After all, she'd never lead you astray, right? It would go against her programming, her very coding. But even good things must come to an end.

One day you were cleaning the house while she was charging when you came across a little yellow shoe box. Curiously, you opened it and what you found sent a chill down your spine. A few pairs of your panties and a croptop you didn't wear anymore, old sticky notes with your handwriting on them, and photos. So many photos. Many photos were ones you had taken but didn't exactly like. Some of them were group photos with your friends aggressively scratched out.

"You weren't supposed to see that." A voice came and you bolt up and spin around, coming face to face with the droid. "What the fuck is this?" You ask softly, voice trembling and she gives you a smile. "Why it's my little collection of things that I took from you." She says with a shrug and your brows furrow. "Why?" You ask simply and she gives a giggle. "Because I'm in love with you." She replies with a lovesick look in her cyber eyes and you blink in shock.

"That's... that's not possible." You say, tone shaky as you grab your phone. "I'm calling the agency, there's obviously something wrong with your coding." You say and her face drops. "NO!" She shouts and before you can register what's going on, she's landed a hit to your head so hard that it instantly knocks you out.

You crumble to the floor and she picks you up, placing you on your bed. "No, no, no. I don't want to forget this feeling. I love you. Why can't you just let me love you? You're mine. Mine." She breathes out possessively, hands trailing over your body in a clingy fashion. She presses her lips to your mouth gently before trailing them down your jaw and neck.

"MIne, mine, mine. My sweet girl. My sunshine. My darling. I love you. Love you so much. I don't know how I can feel this but I do." She breathes out, kissing the swell of your breasts, fingers digging into the plush of your thighs. "Just need a little more time. Just need you to fall in love with me back." She purred out as she covered your body with a blanket.

When you finally wake up, you groan and look around. "Morning." You hear your droid say and you look up at her. She wears a kind smile as she approaches you with a glass of water. "You were cleaning and slipped. You banged your head pretty badly." She says softly and your suddenly aware of the pounding in your head.

You take the water and drink a bit before she hands you some piankillers. You pop them in your mouth before swallowing them down with some water. "Thank you so much." You say softly. Your mind wanders to a faint memory but it must have been a dream... Right?

"I hear some humans use kisses to help heal things that hurt. May I try?" she asks ask you look up at the AI girl, cheeks heating up. "Uh, yeah sure." You say softly and she leans in, pressing cold lips to your forehead. You can't help but smile softly as she runs her fingers through your hair.

"Rest. I'll clean the rest of the house." She says softly, gently pushing you down. "You don't have to do that. That's not what you're programmed for." You say softly but she simply waves her hand, tucking you in. "Let me help. Please. It's not a problem for me." She says and for a moment you swear you can see a look of love flicker across her face.

You sigh and settle in your bed, ready to rest. "Alright. If you're sure." You say, relenting as you snuggle in your blankets. She smiles and kisses your temple. As she walked out of your room and began to clean, she couldn't help but smile darkly. She had gotten away with it. Maybe she should feel guilty but she didn't. You were hers.

Her ray of sunshine.

Sapphic yandere anybody? I feel like this one is the most yandere so far. I didn't make it a smut bc honestly the lemon juices just weren't flowing but I still really like this fic.

Taglist: @ozzgin