#too good to fact-check

[mostlysignssomeportents]

I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine

There are only TWO MORE DAYS left in the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

On Hallowe'en 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his son with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he'd get away with it. He was wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan

The stories of Hallowe'en poisonings were just that – stories. No one was poisoning kids on Hallowe'en – except this monstrous murderer, who mistook rampant scare stories for truth and assumed (incorrectly) that his murder would blend in with the crowd.

Last week, the dudes behind the "comedy" podcast Dudesy released a "George Carlin" comedy special that they claimed had been created, holus bolus, by an AI trained on the comedian's routines. This was a lie. After the Carlin estate sued, the dudes admitted that they had written the (remarkably unfunny) "comedy" special:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

As I've written, we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

AI systems can do some remarkable party tricks, but there's a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence and a good one. After the initial rush of astonishment, the stench of botshit becomes unmistakable:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

Some of this botshit comes from people who are sold a bill of goods: they're convinced that they can make a George Carlin special without any human intervention and when the bot fails, they manufacture their own botshit, assuming they must be bad at prompting the AI.

This is an old technology story: I had a friend who was contracted to livestream a Canadian awards show in the earliest days of the web. They booked in multiple ISDN lines from Bell Canada and set up an impressive Mbone encoding station on the wings of the stage. Only one problem: the ISDNs flaked (this was a common problem with ISDNs!). There was no way to livecast the show.

Nevertheless, my friend's boss's ordered him to go on pretending to livestream the show. They made a big deal of it, with all kinds of cool visualizers showing the progress of this futuristic marvel, which the cameras frequently lingered on, accompanied by overheated narration from the show's hosts.

The weirdest part? The next day, my friend – and many others – heard from satisfied viewers who boasted about how amazing it had been to watch this show on their computers, rather than their TVs. Remember: there had been no stream. These people had just assumed that the problem was on their end – that they had failed to correctly install and configure the multiple browser plugins required. Not wanting to admit their technical incompetence, they instead boasted about how great the show had been. It was the Emperor's New Livestream.

Perhaps that's what happened to the Dudesy bros. But there's another possibility: maybe they were captured by their own imaginations. In "Genesis," an essay in the 2007 collection The Creationists, EL Doctorow (no relation) describes how the ancient Babylonians were so poleaxed by the strange wonder of the story they made up about the origin of the universe that they assumed that it must be true. They themselves weren't nearly imaginative enough to have come up with this super-cool tale, so God must have put it in their minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply

That seems to have been what happened to the Air Force colonel who falsely claimed that a "rogue AI-powered drone" had spontaneously evolved the strategy of killing its operator as a way of clearing the obstacle to its main objective, which was killing the enemy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

This never happened. It was – in the chagrined colonel's words – a "thought experiment." In other words, this guy – who is the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations – was so excited about his own made up story that he forgot it wasn't true and told a whole conference-room full of people that it had actually happened.

Maybe that's what happened with the George Carlinbot 3000: the Dudesy dudes fell in love with their own vision for a fully automated luxury Carlinbot and forgot that they had made it up, so they just cheated, assuming they would eventually be able to make a fully operational Battle Carlinbot.

That's basically the Theranos story: a teenaged "entrepreneur" was convinced that she was just about to produce a seemingly impossible, revolutionary diagnostic machine, so she faked its results, abetted by investors, customers and others who wanted to believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

The thing about stories of AI miracles is that they are peddled by both AI's boosters and its critics. For boosters, the value of these tall tales is obvious: if normies can be convinced that AI is capable of performing miracles, they'll invest in it. They'll even integrate it into their product offerings and then quietly hire legions of humans to pick up the botshit it leaves behind. These abettors can be relied upon to keep the defects in these products a secret, because they'll assume that they've committed an operator error. After all, everyone knows that AI can do anything, so if it's not performing for them, the problem must exist between the keyboard and the chair.

But this would only take AI so far. It's one thing to hear implausible stories of AI's triumph from the people invested in it – but what about when AI's critics repeat those stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

There's a name for this kind of criticism: "criti-hype," coined by Lee Vinsel, who points to many reasons for its persistence, including the fact that it constitutes an "academic business-model":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

That's four reasons for AI hype:

to win investors and customers;

to cover customers' and users' embarrassment when the AI doesn't perform;

AI dreamers so high on their own supply that they can't tell truth from fantasy;

A business-model for doomsayers who form an unholy alliance with AI companies by parroting their silliest hype in warning form.

But there's a fifth motivation for criti-hype: to simplify otherwise tedious and complex situations. As Jamie Zawinski writes, this is the motivation behind the obvious lie that the "autonomous cars" on the streets of San Francisco have no driver:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/

GM's Cruise division was forced to shutter its SF operations after one of its "self-driving" cars dragged an injured pedestrian for 20 feet:

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-robotaxi-self-driving-permit-revoked-california/

One of the widely discussed revelations in the wake of the incident was that Cruise employed 1.5 skilled technical remote overseers for every one of its "self-driving" cars. In other words, they had replaced a single low-waged cab driver with 1.5 higher-paid remote operators.

As Zawinski writes, SFPD is well aware that there's a human being (or more than one human being) responsible for every one of these cars – someone who is formally at fault when the cars injure people or damage property. Nevertheless, SFPD and SFMTA maintain that these cars can't be cited for moving violations because "no one is driving them."

But figuring out who which person is responsible for a moving violation is "complicated and annoying to deal with," so the fiction persists.

(Zawinski notes that even when these people are held responsible, they're a "moral crumple zone" for the company that decided to enroll whole cities in nonconsensual murderbot experiments.)

Automation hype has always involved hidden humans. The most famous of these was the "mechanical Turk" hoax: a supposed chess-playing robot that was just a puppet operated by a concealed human operator wedged awkwardly into its carapace.

This pattern repeats itself through the ages. Thomas Jefferson "replaced his slaves" with dumbwaiters – but of course, dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, they hide slaves:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

The modern Mechanical Turk – a division of Amazon that employs low-waged "clickworkers," many of them overseas – modernizes the dumbwaiter by hiding low-waged workforces behind a veneer of automation. The MTurk is an abstract "cloud" of human intelligence (the tasks MTurks perform are called "HITs," which stands for "Human Intelligence Tasks").

This is such a truism that techies in India joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians." Or, to use Jathan Sadowski's wonderful term: "Potemkin AI":

https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/

This Potemkin AI is everywhere you look. When Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot Optimus, they made a big flashy show of it, promising a $20,000 automaton was just on the horizon. They failed to mention that Optimus was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Likewise with the famous demo of a "full self-driving" Tesla, which turned out to be a canned fake:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

The most shocking and terrifying and enraging AI demos keep turning out to be "Just A Guy" (in Molly White's excellent parlance):

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1751670561606971895

And yet, we keep falling for it. It's no wonder, really: criti-hype rewards so many different people in so many different ways that it truly offers something for everyone.

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/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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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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Ross Breadmore (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/rossbreadmore/5169298162/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[inkskinned]

you're in the habit of denying yourself things.

if someone asked you directly, you would say that you love a little treat. you like iced coffee and getting the cookie. you drink juice out of a fancy cup sometimes, and often do use your candles until they gutter out helplessly.

but you hesitate about buying the 20 dollar hand mixer because, like. you could just use your arms. you weren't raised rich. you don't get to just spend the 20 dollars (remember when that could cover lunch?), at least - you don't spend that without agonizing over it first, trying to figure out the cost-benefits like you are defending yourself in front of a jury. yes, this rice cooker could seriously help you. but you do know how to make stovetop rice and it really isn't that hard. how many pies or brownies would you actually make, in order to make that hand mixer worthwhile?

what's wild is that if the money was for a friend, it would already be spent. you'd fork over 40 without blinking an eye, just to make them happy. the difference is that it's for you, so you need to justify it.

and it sneaks in. you ration yourself without meaning to - you don't finish the pint of ice cream, even though you want to. the next time you go to the store, you say ah, i really shouldn't, and then you walk away. you save little bits of your precious things - just in case. sometimes you even go so far as putting that one thing in your shopping cart. and then just leaving it there, because maybe-one-day, but not right now, there's other stuff going on.

you do self-care, of course. but you don't do it more than like, 3 days in a row. after that it just feels a little bit over-the-edge. like. you can't live in decadence, the economy is so bad right now, kid.

so you don't buy the rice cooker. you can-and-will spend the time over the stove. you can withstand the little sorrows. denial and discipline are practically synonyms. and you're not spoiled.

it's just - it's not always a rice cooker. sometimes it is a person or a job or a hug. sometimes it is asking for help. sometimes it is the summer and your college degree. sometimes it is looking down at scabbed knees and feeling a strange kind of falling, like you can't even recognize the girl you used to be. sometimes it is your handprint looking unsteady.

sometimes it is tuesday, and you didn't get fired, and you want to celebrate. but what is it you like, even? you search around your little heart and come up empty. you're so used to denying that all your desires draw a blank.

oh fuck. see, this is the perfect opportunity. if you had a mixer, you'd make a cake.

[excali8ur]

So there's this AU,

[bacchuschucklefuck]

they tried to rebrand as The Criminals but riz is literally the city council's treasurer and also turns out people in their late 20s don't really name their friend groups. so now they're The Intrepid Heroes

[racewinnerlandonorris]

he may not realistically be in the battle for the drivers championship anymore, however that doesn’t at all minimise just how proud i am of all lando has achieved this season. 3 wins (including his maiden), 7 poles, 12 podiums, leading his team to first place in the constructors championship, securing the most points of any mclaren driver in history. and that’s just on track, off it i am immensely proud of his growth too, from being someone who always saw everything as glass half full and was always so hard on himself, to the way he now talks in interviews you can see his confidence and belief in his own abilities has come on so far (as it should). it’s so nice to see how far he’s come from the little boy who started out in f1 so many years ago. maybe this year wasn’t his for the championship but mark my words, his time will come.

[ivyithink]

posting this little thing, while I’m neck-deep in iwtv wips…

[milkbreadtoast]

christelle phone doodle... I DID NOT USE ANY REFERENCE AT ALL FOR THIS...surprised it didnt turn out too bad...?!

[zer0point5ive]

it’s the picture of diana in lawrence’s wallet with her arms wrapped around a dog, it’s the horse riding awards in her bedroom and and the snake toy she has draped over her headboard .. it’s adam who wanted so badly to be a vet, adam who loves cats and brings them saucers of milk despite there being barely anything in his fridge .. it’s them bonding over their love of animals, diana showing adam her amazing animal facts book and adam asking for one every time he sees her, it’s adam saving up his own money so he can surprise her with a trip to the zoo for their next adam-and-diana day when lawrence and alison are at work and need someone to watch her, it’s him taking his camera, getting pictures of her with her favorite animals and developing them, it’s diana telling adam she wants to be a vet when she grows up and him getting excited, grabbing lawrence’s stethoscope when diana says she wants to play vets and taking his job oh so seriously when diana says that he’s gotta be her assistant, it’s .. its ..

[askchilchuck]

Where do you suggest getting used lockpicking tools and such? And locks?

Usually pawn shops are a good place to find cheap equipment to practice with. They’ve already been used, and probably won’t be picked up to be put back in the field, so it’s a good send off if you end up braking them.

[thegreatyin]

giggling kicking my feet blushing madly

[andoutofharm]

Just wanted to share this article that was posted earlier today! Just seeing these women from different generations talk together about their experiences in music and in the world in general was very cool to read.

[xxplastic-cubexx]

reading Krakoa era out of order bc reading lists online make it confusing and my local library only has so many books

just as god intended right on my friend you're doing everything right and don't let anyone tell you otherwise

[grahamcarmen]

And my thing STILL is that as carmen gets a stronger sense of her past and better connections with her friends and allies the need/desire for Gray in her life doesn't decrease and dissapate, it INCREASES and is refined. All while constantly being more sincerely layered in romantic tones as the show goes on.

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

my strongest take is that if you have more than 5-10 items (range depends on size and ease of scanning) you should not use the self-checkout when there is a perfectly good cashier line already.

If you bring alcohol or other age restricted items to the self checkout I will kill you in the middle of the Walmart and everyone behind me in line will be cheering.

[timetravellingkitty]

peeks out cause it's safe now you guys were really weird about Depp v Heard

[purpleshadow-star]

Here's a reminder that ANDREW DOES HEAL AND LEARN TO FEEL. Nora never said that Andrew never heals or that he doesn't get less apathetic. She said the opposite, actually. If you don't like the extra content, that's fine, but please actually read it before deciding to spread the incorrect assumptions people have made up about it. Just because Andrew never gets to the point where he smiles and laughs all the time doesn't mean he doesn't heal.

(Also, Nora never said Andrew never smiles, just that it's hard to imagine, and if he did, it'd be with only Neil around)