Nobody cares about "AI" (Chatbot: I disagree.)

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/copernican

 

[Noodles]

Last year I self published an ebook. Of everything, my worry was people would assume it was AI.

 

[Khamon]

Last year I self published an ebook. Of everything, my worry was people would assume it was AI.

Yes I've been dogged to hell on Reddit for being an AI agent because my posts are "too perfect" and "informative." Dropped a few groups rather than argue I have. Socialization has lately suffered the loss of Trumpublicans, vicious sworn enemies of my AI persona, and now most of the Baptists I know. Not to mention social media feeds being uselessly full of people I don't know, products I'm not interested in, and news items that I don't trust. Thank Heaven for SLUWATBBQVVO because one would be lost without y'all.

/me continues ranting that I also hate feeds resetting every few minutes. Queue something that I actually want to read, get coffee, pee, answer the phone, whatever, come back and find that it's automatically gone! Aggravates me to no end. /r

 

[Noodles]

Yeah, i still lurk like 3 subs still on another another another alt, but getting banned from Reddit has honestly been kind of nice. Also, going back and looking, especially since they killed /r/all, it's REALLY obvious they are trying to hide how much everyone fucking hates all the terrible shit going on in the world.

 

[Free]

There' a hole in my bucket,
Elias, Elias...

Why Do Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Someone Named 'Elias Thorne'?

Chatbots just aren't very creative.

gizmodo.com

Who in the world is Elias Thorne? He’s a regular fixture in stories told by chatbots, as first spotted by software engineer Daniel May, but no one knows why… until now. According to a new preprint research paper first reported by 404 Media, the proliferation of the legend of Elias might be related to guardrails put in place for AI models during safety and alignment training.

If you need to catch up on the Elias Thorne of it all, the paper published by researchers Sil Hamilton and David Mimno at Cornell University is a good place to start. They gave several AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 Mini, Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5, and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, five different prompts to generate stories. They looked at about 20,000 stories generated by the models and found a shocking amount of repetition: 11 words—Lighthouse, Keeper, Baker, Mayor, Clockmaker, Fisherman, Librarian, Conductor, and the names Mara, Elias, and Elara—appeared in a whopping 88% of all stories.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Ooops! (Evernote link because of FT paywall):

KPMG report contained AI hallucinations on benefits of . . . AI

A KPMG report on how AI is being used by businesses across the world exaggerated adoption of the technology with bogus case studies that appear to have been based on AI hallucinations.

The October report, “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI”, made numerous false claims about the use of AI by organisations including the Swiss bank UBS, the UK’s National Health Service and the public transit groups Swiss Federal Railways and Transport for London.

The inaccuracies were identified as AI hallucinations by the research group GPTZero and verified by the FT. After being alerted to the issue, UBS said it would ask KPMG to remove the false claims, and the Big Four firm on Thursday pulled the report from some of its websites.

Also


Judge Learns Lawyers on Both Sides of Case Used AI, Cancels Trial, Kicks Everyone Off the Case

Evernote Link

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Dutch far-right party pays damages to court artist after changing image with AI

“There are three things that upset me,” she said. “One is that my work was used without asking my permission. Secondly, this was done for a political party, when I want to work as neutrally and independently as possible. And thirdly – and this makes it really strange – the distortion was done with AI.”

Under Dutch law, creators are not only protected by copyright but also have moral rights to object to any distortion of their work that could harm their reputation. There was widespread shock in May after Urban shared the images with fellow court reporters, and the case had widespread press coverage.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Anthropic spent a few days a couple of weeks ago engaging (as typical) in a BS advertising campaign proclaiming that its newest LLM, "Mythos", was "extremely dangerous", maybe even too dangerous to release publicly, because it was soooo good at finding exploitable bugs in software code that they had to rig tests and spin the results in order to show how good and dangerous it was. They then...released it publicly anyway, via subscription.

Except yesterday the federal government, which has for the most part drunk the LLM Flavor-Aid, sent Anthropic an order banning them from allowing foreign nationals to use the Mythos LLM as well as another LLM called Fable, because it was too dangerous. Any and all foreign nationals, including, specifically and hilariously, foreign nationals that work for Anthropic as developers on these very LLMs. Because it is impossible for Anthropic to determine whether any particular customer is a US citizen or not, they have had to shut Mythos and Fable down entirely.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

UK police officer under criminal investigation over alleged use of AI

Derbyshire police told the Financial Times: “A criminal investigation has been launched into an allegation of perverting the course of justice after the alleged use of AI systems by an officer to create evidential material in a number of cases.

It said: “The officer involved has been removed from frontline duties, pending the outcome of the investigation. No arrests have been made.”

The officer’s role or the exact nature of the suspected misconduct has not been disclosed.

 

[Noodles]

I honestly don't even understand what people use AI for so much. And I use AI pretty regularly.

But then I don't use it at all, for weeks. Because I literally can't come up with something I would want AI to do for me, especially that I couodn't just, do myself.

 

[Pancake]

I honestly don't even understand what people use AI for so much. And I use AI pretty regularly.

But then I don't use it at all, for weeks. Because I literally can't come up with something I would want AI to do for me, especially that I couodn't just, do myself.

I almost never use it outside of work, but I use it almost daily at work. I use Rovo in Jira to summarize sprints and do release notes, which I could do myself but it saves a lot of time to have Rovo spit something out then edit it. I use NotebookLM a fair bit for projects, it’s a great way to organize myself and all the materials I have on especially long running projects and I like that it then only uses content I provide to do the tasks as it greatly reduces hallucinations and errors. I’ve been experimenting with Cowork to automate some of the tedious parts of my job that aren’t difficult but always take more time than I would like, especially organizing my emails and summarizing action items. I have it send me an email every Monday morning summarizing the previous week and giving me links to prep for the coming week. Nothing groundbreaking but definitely leaning into the assistant part of virtual assistants since I don’t have staff.

The one thing I do appreciate that I cannot do myself is creating visuals and infographics. I do a lot of presentations, lectures and training and have always struggled to communicate with visual learners as I am a text heavy communicator. AI has been able to take my content and create an alternate way to represent it for audiences I haven’t always been able to connect with. I work with a lot of “draw me a picture” and “give me three bullets” people who need information quickly and I don’t have the skills to do that well. I’ve never been good at editing myself or expressing information visually, though I’m told I am an excellent speaker, I feel like the information I am sharing always lacked good visuals.

I don’t personally do the complex work but I oversee and engage with some projects related to modeling, remote sensing, image analysis and predictive analytics which are kind of exciting.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I almost never use it outside of work, but I use it almost daily at work. I use Rovo in Jira to summarize sprints and do release notes, which I could do myself but it saves a lot of time to have Rovo spit something out then edit it. I use NotebookLM a fair bit for projects, it’s a great way to organize myself and all the materials I have on especially long running projects and I like that it then only uses content I provide to do the tasks as it greatly reduces hallucinations and errors. I’ve been experimenting with Cowork to automate some of the tedious parts of my job that aren’t difficult but always take more time than I would like, especially organizing my emails and summarizing action items. I have it send me an email every Monday morning summarizing the previous week and giving me links to prep for the coming week. Nothing groundbreaking but definitely leaning into the assistant part of virtual assistants since I don’t have staff.

The one thing I do appreciate that I cannot do myself is creating visuals and infographics. I do a lot of presentations, lectures and training and have always struggled to communicate with visual learners as I am a text heavy communicator. AI has been able to take my content and create an alternate way to represent it for audiences I haven’t always been able to connect with. I work with a lot of “draw me a picture” and “give me three bullets” people who need information quickly and I don’t have the skills to do that well. I’ve never been good at editing myself or expressing information visually, though I’m told I am an excellent speaker, I feel like the information I am sharing always lacked good visuals.

I don’t personally do the complex work but I oversee and engage with some projects related to modeling, remote sensing, image analysis and predictive analytics which are kind of exciting.

Great to see you back, Pancake.

I find ChatGPT very helpful for writing code, whether it's complex LSL scripts or HTML/CSS/Javascript. It's particularly good at boilerplate tasks -- e.g. turn text into JSON objects inside LSL, send them to CloudFlare to turn into a pretty HTML web page, and serve that back to the LSL script to display as shared media. It's also extremely good at debugging my scripts most of the time (sometimes it goes off down a rabbit-hole, but in general it's a huge time saver). I also find it useful to chat with about ideas for approaching particular tasks -- whether with LSL or something else -- and planning out the project before I start asking for any code. Quite often it comes up with approaches I hadn't thought of, and I find it a great help in planning out the project and spotting issues before they arise.

In general, it's a huge time-saver.

Other than that, I use it for recipe ideas and for satisfying my idle curiosity about things that I could probably find out by googling or checking Wikipedia but can't be bothered.

 

[Free]

Meanwhile, efforts to fuck up the already bad store shopping experience are in the works.

Instacart and Weis Markets Launch AI-Powered Caper Carts to Transform In-Store Shopping

/PRNewswire/ -- Instacart (Nasdaq: CART), the leading grocery technology company in North America, and Weis Markets, a Mid-Atlantic food retailer, today...

www.prnewswire.com

Instacart, the leading grocery technology company in North America, and Weis Markets, a Mid-Atlantic food retailer, today announced the launch of Caper Carts at select Weis locations in Pennsylvania with additional rollouts planned throughout the year. Powered by Instacart's AI-driven Connected Stores technology, Caper Carts transform the in-store experience with a smart, digital-first cart that puts convenience, savings, and personalization directly in the hands of customers.

In other words, it provides another way to shove advertising at you.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I Let Siri AI Show Me Around San Francisco

The new Siri AI is conversational, omnipresent, and actually helpful.

www.wired.com

Evernote Link

 

[Free]

Business moral: Don't go spouting in public that your premier product is going to destroy the world.

How Anthropic may have talked itself into an AI export ban

The company warned about dangers of advanced AI far more than rival OpenAI.

arstechnica.com

Anthropic has warned about the dangers of advanced AI far more often than rival OpenAI this year, according to FT analysis, as critics accuse the company of helping to trigger a US ban on foreign access to its newest models.

Five in every 1,000 words used by Anthropic in 2026 related to risk, regulation or restrictions, according to FT research that analysed official statements, social media posts and articles written by the company or its chief Dario Amodei. The equivalent figure for OpenAI and Sam Altman was eight times lower at 0.6 words per 1,000.

The comparison has become politically charged after Washington last week barred foreign nationals from using Anthropic’s latest models, Mythos and Fable. Some technologists have blamed the decision on the $965 billion AI group’s repeated warnings about AI’s risk to society—particularly in relation to Mythos.

Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief AI scientist and one of AI’s pioneers, said this week the export ban showed that Amodei’s “ridiculous fear-mongering” about AI had finally paid off. “One reaps what one sows,” he wrote in a social media post a week ago.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Anyone else finding that the panic about AI-assisted content is affecting the way they write?

I'm now very conscious when I use em-dashes, which I've always used, and the "It's not X. It's Y." formulation, which I don't use as frequently, but which certainly has its place.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

I don't think my writing style fits well with current AI patterns so I have not made any real changes. If they start using digressive footnotes I will reconsider. I do know that my dissertation has had more access requests per month in the last 3 years than it had in the previous 10 years total, so a small part of the training data is me, but it is not appreciable in LLM outputs.

 

[Noodles]

Mostly its had me.consider just ignoring typos so people.knownits all genuine human created garbage.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I wonder how long before people start including instructions like "make a few credible typographical errors, misspelled words, and inappropriate punctuation."