#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

B&N

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

Google

[zephyrine-gale]

thinking about scaramouche team dynamics ft scarabedo

[f-identity]

[Image description: A series of posts from Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@octodon.social dated Dec 08, 2022, 04:33, reading:

It's good that our finest minds have focused on automating writing and making art, two things human beings do simply because it brings them joy. Meanwhile tens of thousands of people risk their lives every day breaking down ships, a task that nobody is in a particular hurry to automate because those lives are considered cheap https://www.dw.com/en/shipbreaking-recycling-a-ship-is-always-dangerous/a-18155491 (Headline: 'Recycling a ship is always dangerous.' on Deutsche Welle) A world where computers write and make art while human beings break their backs cleaning up toxic messes is the exact opposite of the world I thought I was signing up for when I got into programming

/end image description]

[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]

he's been doing this for DECADES, the absolute freak

[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

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

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