#human assistant

[criticalcrusherbot]

💁🏽‍♀️: Informal rant post right quick. What the majority of critics are missing is that the tragedy of Stolas’ marriage is not that “Stella is a huge fucking bitch.” Rather, the true tragedy lies in the fact that the marriage was arranged.

He is gay.

He had little to no say in any of the major decisions which shaped his life. His job, his destiny, his family, were all decided for him.

AND Stella is abusive and a massive fucking bitch. His character arc isn’t simply “sticking it to the bitch of an ex-wife” (even though I’m sure that will be part of it). Instead, it’s about how his arrangement-turned-situationship-turned-maybe something more with Blitz gave him the epiphany and the courage to live outside of the expectations set for him by Paimon and the rigid structure of goetic society.

“Then you walked in my room and like sparks in the dark, life was suddenly thrilling and new.”

“My entire life has been written in stone, he taught me that I could choose.”

“I am the Mastermind, the master of my fate.”

This isn’t about hating Stella, people. (I personally think she’s a really fun character with a lot of potential for some interesting character development.) What it IS about is Stolas taking control of his life after living thirty-whatever years with the entirety of it being decided for him.

It’s high-society period drama-esque, people. I thought the show was being very clear about this 🥲 I’m really trying not to overuse the term ‘media illiteracy’ but????

[remindertoclick]

Here's your reminder to Click for Palestine today!

If you have time, open the website in different browsers and on different devices as well! 💙🩷

[mrghostrat]

POV: you just tried to "steal a moment of aziraphale's time" without scheduling an appointment with his rabid guard dog PA first

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 334

So. Danny has discovered he might erm, might be technically a necromancer. At least as far as magic is concerned. Like even if it’s just via resurrecting himself the magic side of things (god, he’s more scientist- sided dangit) count it as such. 

Which means that half the time someone tries to summon a necromancing-esque being, he’s the one who gets tugged if he’s even a centimeter within range. It was annoying enough in high school, it’s no less annoying in this world they’ve all moved to. 

On the bright side, thanks to also being half dead himself, the summonings and other rituals can’t actually drag him somewhere. It just causes him to feel like someone was crushing a lung or two, which honestly nothing new. (Gosh were those days of vigilante work really that violent? Huh, guess they were)

What he wasn’t expecting was for a tiny child, a living child, to track him down despite him not existing legally or anything similar in this world, to revive their previous local child vigilante. Which like, hey, first of all, he has a few questions? Just a couple and yeah sure, he’ll shake on it- can he have your name first there kid…? 

Tim, on the other hand, is getting a little concerned when he realizes a lot of the questions the probable-fae keeps asking are in line with the stuff CPS asks. (Unknown to him, that is exactly where Danny is getting several of his questions about this scrawny vigilante kid. Erm. He might have to take the kid, for like, his own safety- hey Frostbite he needs your help he has some questions-) 

[furiouskettle]

The Nose Fairy

[ozzgin]

I had some funny brain rot I needed to share with you for this October/Halloween season 😏

Imagine a dullahan who will let you borrow his pumpkin head to go trick or treating with (he takes you around the neighborhoods on his horse), but he couldn’t find it this year, or it got destroyed. So instead he gives you a giant dick-squash to carry your candy 😘

Don’t be shy. Draw a nice fat cock again ☺️

-👘

content: gender neutral reader, mention of pumpkin genitals

Pumpkin Assistant is always at your service. A humble butler to all of your needs and wishes, their greatest fear is not being able to fulfill their duty towards you.

Imagine their terror when you approach them with a request: to use their head as a trick or treat basket. Mind you, the matter itself would be trivial, you see, if it wasn't for the fact their head is currently missing. It must've rolled away when they were in the middle of, uh, serving you.

A true, proper assistant does not have words of refusal in their vocabulary. Thus, your headless beloved has to improvise rather quickly. If they must, they will not hesitate to go for unexpected, creative solutions.

You're observing the night scenery when they finally hand you the basket. You hold it in your lap, distracted, mumbling a quiet thank you before you resume your lazy sightseeing. Your fingers run across the object; the ridges, the curves, it all feels familiar indeed.

Not in the way you'd expected, however. Your eyes shoot down, and your mouth parts at the obscenity you've been flashing to everyone on your path.

"The children," you cry out, scrambling to hide the phallic jewel. "We're in public, for Christ's sake!"

"Have you not held it in public before too, my Dear? It was rather recent, if I recall correctly. We were-"

"Ride in silence," you demand, lowering your head in shame.

[Navigation] | [Ozztober Masterlist]

[theblindgoddess]

Epic the Musical AU

An au that begins after Aphrodite wins the golden apple and she shows Paris what is basically a magic video recording of Helen, telling him about his future bride.

However, in this magic video recording Helen is spending time with Penelope, and Paris goes "forget that Helen chick, I want that one."

And Aphrodite just goes with it, so instead of kidnapping Helen, Paris and Aphrodite kidnap Penelope, and a baby Telemachus to help them better control Penelope.

Odysseus is rightfully murderous, and even if he doesn't have the benefit of a treaty to get all of the Greeks on his side, he is still able to strong arm and lie his way into getting that massive army to besiege Troy and get his wife back.

And over in Troy Penelope is making the situation as insufferable for Paris as she possibly can, she will cause all of the problems until she can get back home safely with her son.

This au would be called Penelope of Troy.

[charlietheepicwriter7]

"Hey, buddy-"

"Shit!" Danny startled, jerking to his feet. Unfortunately, his shoes caught under each other and he toppled right over the edge of building. Nightwing's fingers just barely grazed him before he crashed to the ground six stories below.

Bones broken and blood leaked out, yet a still very much alive decided that playing dead was better than facing the embarrassment (or risk any of the Bats realizing he was planning to rob Wayne Enterprises).

[ninyard]

When I start to get a lil crazy about characters and aus/hcs, I like to imagine them doing real person things to bring me back to earth. Kevin getting an eyelash in his eye. Andrew almost tripping up over a step but saving it. Neil accidentally stubbing his toe or walking into the corner of a table. Aaron buttoning his shirt wrong and having to start all over again. Jean pushing a pull door. Jeremy making a doctors appointment. Make them human.

Like yes they can fuck nasty and get themselves into situations but they can also screenshot things on their phone. They can reverse park and carry a basket in a grocery store.

[surreal-duck]

es rarepair week 2024 day 1 | AU/future

lil ghostic au of mine!!! yuzuru and the rest of fine are long since trapped souls in an abandoned mansion of which rst come across while looking for shelter during a storm :] it doesnt um. particularly end well

[remindertoclick]

Reminder to Click for Palestine today!

Click for the other causes as well if you can!

[liminalweirdo]

In today's update of Canada Loves Eugenics, 10,064 people died in 2021 through medically assisted death in Canada, and while MAID supposedly exists to allow people with severe, incurable illnesses to die with dignity on their own terms, MAID is generally used because disabled and mentally ill people cannot access governmental assistance and are living in poverty.

The Canadian government is actively pushing poor, disabled people to death.

oh and by the way, Canada performs more organ transplants from MAID donors than any other country in the world.

"Six disability rights and religious advocates told Reuters that the pace of the planned changes to the assisted death framework in Canada brings additional risks of people opting for MAID because they are unable to access social services - the lack of which could exacerbate their suffering." - source

Anyway, it's basically like this: the USA has the Americans with Disabilities Act and Canada has MAID

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Humans are not perfectly vigilant

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

These "hallucinations" are a stubbornly persistent feature of large language models, because these models only give the illusion of understanding; in reality, they are just sophisticated forms of autocomplete, drawing on huge databases to make shrewd (but reliably fallible) guesses about which word comes next:

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

Guessing the next word without understanding the meaning of the resulting sentence makes unsupervised LLMs unsuitable for high-stakes tasks. The whole AI bubble is based on convincing investors that one or more of the following is true:

There are low-stakes, high-value tasks that will recoup the massive costs of AI training and operation;

There are high-stakes, high-value tasks that can be made cheaper by adding an AI to a human operator;

Adding more training data to an AI will make it stop hallucinating, so that it can take over high-stakes, high-value tasks without a "human in the loop."

These are dubious propositions. There's a universe of low-stakes, low-value tasks – political disinformation, spam, fraud, academic cheating, nonconsensual porn, dialog for video-game NPCs – but none of them seem likely to generate enough revenue for AI companies to justify the billions spent on models, nor the trillions in valuation attributed to AI companies:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

The proposition that increasing training data will decrease hallucinations is hotly contested among AI practitioners. I confess that I don't know enough about AI to evaluate opposing sides' claims, but even if you stipulate that adding lots of human-generated training data will make the software a better guesser, there's a serious problem. All those low-value, low-stakes applications are flooding the internet with botshit. After all, the one thing AI is unarguably very good at is producing bullshit at scale. As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

This means that adding another order of magnitude more training data to AI won't just add massive computational expense – the data will be many orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire, even without factoring in the additional liability arising from new legal theories about scraping:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

That leaves us with "humans in the loop" – the idea that an AI's business model is selling software to businesses that will pair it with human operators who will closely scrutinize the code's guesses. There's a version of this that sounds plausible – the one in which the human operator is in charge, and the AI acts as an eternally vigilant "sanity check" on the human's activities.

For example, my car has a system that notices when I activate my blinker while there's another car in my blind-spot. I'm pretty consistent about checking my blind spot, but I'm also a fallible human and there've been a couple times where the alert saved me from making a potentially dangerous maneuver. As disciplined as I am, I'm also sometimes forgetful about turning off lights, or waking up in time for work, or remembering someone's phone number (or birthday). I like having an automated system that does the robotically perfect trick of never forgetting something important.

There's a name for this in automation circles: a "centaur." I'm the human head, and I've fused with a powerful robot body that supports me, doing things that humans are innately bad at.

That's the good kind of automation, and we all benefit from it. But it only takes a small twist to turn this good automation into a nightmare. I'm speaking here of the reverse-centaur: automation in which the computer is in charge, bossing a human around so it can get its job done. Think of Amazon warehouse workers, who wear haptic bracelets and are continuously observed by AI cameras as autonomous shelves shuttle in front of them and demand that they pick and pack items at a pace that destroys their bodies and drives them mad:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

Automation centaurs are great: they relieve humans of drudgework and let them focus on the creative and satisfying parts of their jobs. That's how AI-assisted coding is pitched: rather than looking up tricky syntax and other tedious programming tasks, an AI "co-pilot" is billed as freeing up its human "pilot" to focus on the creative puzzle-solving that makes coding so satisfying.

But an hallucinating AI is a terrible co-pilot. It's just good enough to get the job done much of the time, but it also sneakily inserts booby-traps that are statistically guaranteed to look as plausible as the good code (that's what a next-word-guessing program does: guesses the statistically most likely word).

This turns AI-"assisted" coders into reverse centaurs. The AI can churn out code at superhuman speed, and you, the human in the loop, must maintain perfect vigilance and attention as you review that code, spotting the cleverly disguised hooks for malicious code that the AI can't be prevented from inserting into its code. As "Lena" writes, "code review [is] difficult relative to writing new code":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

Why is that? "Passively reading someone else's code just doesn't engage my brain in the same way. It's harder to do properly":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773780355708764665

There's a name for this phenomenon: "automation blindness." Humans are just not equipped for eternal vigilance. We get good at spotting patterns that occur frequently – so good that we miss the anomalies. That's why TSA agents are so good at spotting harmless shampoo bottles on X-rays, even as they miss nearly every gun and bomb that a red team smuggles through their checkpoints:

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

"Lena"'s thread points out that this is as true for AI-assisted driving as it is for AI-assisted coding: "self-driving cars replace the experience of driving with the experience of being a driving instructor":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773841546753831283

In other words, they turn you into a reverse-centaur. Whereas my blind-spot double-checking robot allows me to make maneuvers at human speed and points out the things I've missed, a "supervised" self-driving car makes maneuvers at a computer's frantic pace, and demands that its human supervisor tirelessly and perfectly assesses each of those maneuvers. No wonder Cruise's murderous "self-driving" taxis replaced each low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged technical robot supervisors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

AI radiology programs are said to be able to spot cancerous masses that human radiologists miss. A centaur-based AI-assisted radiology program would keep the same number of radiologists in the field, but they would get less done: every time they assessed an X-ray, the AI would give them a second opinion. If the human and the AI disagreed, the human would go back and re-assess the X-ray. We'd get better radiology, at a higher price (the price of the AI software, plus the additional hours the radiologist would work).

But back to making the AI bubble pay off: for AI to pay off, the human in the loop has to reduce the costs of the business buying an AI. No one who invests in an AI company believes that their returns will come from business customers to agree to increase their costs. The AI can't do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway – that pitch is the most successful form of AI disinformation in the world.

An AI that "hallucinates" bad advice to fliers can't replace human customer service reps, but airlines are firing reps and replacing them with chatbots:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

An AI that "hallucinates" bad legal advice to New Yorkers can't replace city services, but Mayor Adams still tells New Yorkers to get their legal advice from his chatbots:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/03/nycs-government-chatbot-is-lying-about-city-laws-and-regulations/

The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software – everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus. A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur – they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant.

But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit." They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed.

Reverse centaurism is brutal. That's not news: Charlie Chaplin documented the problems of reverse centaurs nearly 100 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)

As ever, the problem with a gadget isn't what it does: it's who it does it for and who it does it to. There are plenty of benefits from being a centaur – lots of ways that automation can help workers. But the only path to AI profitability lies in reverse centaurs, automation that turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot:

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

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/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

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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Jorge Royan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munich_-_Two_boys_playing_in_a_park_-_7328.jpg

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

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CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[yippee-optimistically]

mods r asleep post humanized 4x

finished catching up on tpot it was peakkkkkk but i am so scared of one. also working on little clay and felt dolls of 4 x and 2

[repugnantbeast]

Shoutout to the little gay people that live inside of bill Murray

[myceliacrochet]

Please reblog if you answer, tysm!!

NINE DAYS WITHOUT DONATIONS!!!!

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Please spread this campaign far and wide and try your best to donate.

Vetted by association by the Sidra Project (Omar #28's neighbor)

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