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

[Veritable Quandry]

I did have a microcassette with the tone from dropping a quarter recorded on it.

I also knew a diagnostic code that caused the system to ring back a phone after like a 30 second delay. Used to do it in a crowded mall and then walk a way and watch as somebody picked up a dead phone.

 

[Casey Pelous]

A few years ago I got really interested in this whole thing with hacking phones back when they were analog, read some articles and watched some videos about it. It was so fascinating! I read about this guy, and there was another guy nicknamed "Captain Crunch" because he discovered that a plastic whistle that came for a while as a kids' toy in a cereal box just happened to play the exact tone needed for the long-distance trick.

The Captain -- aka John Draper -- was, at last report, still around. He was connected into the commercial radio world through Wozniak (former Chief Engineer of some radio station in the San Jose area) so I knew a couple of people who had run into him. The majority opinion was he was really smart, and batshit nuts with no common sense at all. I've never seen this written, but the legend was he had been "paying off" his Wells Fargo Mastercard via his blue box tone generator, and had only been caught because he paid off the balance -- to the penny --- before the bill was sent out. This lack of judgment seems to be born out in the multiple accounts of sexual misbehavior. He's apparently very -- uhhhh --- fond of piggyback rides.

One of my friends owned a "blue" box*, which I assume he either got from Draper or those enterprising young lads, Woz and Jobs. If so, I imagine the thing would be worth quite a bit to some collector at this point. (Said owner long ago departed this mortal coil, so the blue box probably is at the bottom of some landfill.)

* It was black. Go figure.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Oh yes, I had a close friend in college who had had John Draper as a TA or advisor. He had stories.

 

[Free]

Oh hey, yet another thing AI can do with your search results. I myself am waiting for when it will convert my searches into chocolate snacks.

Google can now generate a fake AI podcast of your search results

Because you wanted this, right?

arstechnica.com

 

[Free]

So cringe watching this...

 

[Free]

What do you call a team of Minnesota lawyers suing Google because of their AI? A good start.

Solar Company Sues Google for Giving Damaging Information in AI Overviews

Google's shoddy AI Overviews allegedly spread damaging lies about a solar company, which is now suing the tech giant for defamation.

futurism.com

A solar firm in Minnesota is suing Google for defamation after the tech giant's shoddy AI Overviews feature allegedly made up wild lies about the company — and significantly hurt its business as a result.

"This lawsuit is not just about defending our company's reputation; it's about standing up for fairness, truth, and accountability in the age of artificial intelligence," Nicholas Kasprowicz, general counsel for the solar company, Wolf River Electric, said in a statement.

First filed in a state court in March, the lawsuit was transferred to a federal court this week after Google filed for a removal, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Free]

Jon Oliver's team shovel into the slop.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Jon Oliver's team shovel into the slop.

Thanks for posting. I love John Oliver. I also am very worried we can't do anything since regulation to stop this would end up being very draconian...

 

[Free]

I guess if anything was ripe for AI, it's ASMR videos.

AI Slop Is Coming for ASMR and I’m Finally at My Limit

That's it. I'm calling for a moratorium on slop—a slopitorium.

gizmodo.com

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I can't get it to generate an image for "a backhoe made of ice cream, it's starting to melt and someone has taken a scoop out of the side". I keep getting backhoes scooping ice-cream with their excavator.

 

[Free]

I would try a scoop of Backhoe Ice Cream. Except maybe the Rocky Road flavor.

 

[Noodles]

I can't get it to generate an image for "a backhoe made of ice cream, it's starting to melt and someone has taken a scoop out of the side". I keep getting backhoes scooping ice-cream with their excavator.

I just cut and pasted that prompt you wrote into ChatGPT

 

[Free]

I'm thinking we're already morons. AI will just help make us more so.

Multiple Studies Now Suggest That AI Will Make Us Morons

Are we on the road to Idiocracy?

gizmodo.com

 

[Free]

The poachings will be allowed to continue until morale improves.

OpenAI Reportedly Shuts Down for a Week as Zuck Poaches Its Top Talent

An employee's public lament over poached colleagues and a company-wide shutdown reveal a difficult truth: the human cost of building AI is reaching a breaking point.

gizmodo.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Wherein a man Googles for information to help clarify a time in the 90's in which he helped a hurt park ranger back to his car, and Google's AI Overview returns a detailed description of a dramatic plane crash incident that never happened

 

[Free]

I am not a fan of Cloudflare, but I don't see a problem with their efforts here.

Free Lunch Is Over for the AI That Broke the Web

Cloudflare, a company that runs 20% of the web, just flipped a switch that could end the open internet as we know it, forcing AI companies to pay for the content they’ve been taking for free.

gizmodo.com

On July 1, Cloudflare, one of the internet’s core infrastructure companies, declared “Content Independence Day.” In a landmark policy shift, the company announced it will now block AI crawlers from scraping sites hosted on its platform unless those bots pay content creators for the data they consume.

“Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content,” CEO Matthew Prince announced in a blog post. “That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it’s only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.”

Their numbers, if true, are damning:

Cloudflare claims it’s already 10 times harder to get traffic from Google than it was a decade ago due to features like the answer box. But the new AI models are far worse. According to Cloudflare’s internal metrics, OpenAI drives 750 times less traffic than traditional Google search, while Anthropic drives a staggering 30,000 times less. The reason is simple: people are asking ChatGPT instead of Googling. The content still gets used, but the creators have been completely cut out of the value chain.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Holy smoke Cloudflare is doing something sensible. A year or so too late, but better late than never.

And no, this move will not "end the open internet as we know it"; you and I wouldn't notice a difference at all.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

As long as AI companies continue to respect the web crawler settings that sites put in HTML headings and site files this will be extremely effective in shutting down unauthorized use of web pages. /sarcasm

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I Built The Torment Nexus (Political Podcast Edition)

Six years ago cartoonist Zach Weinersmith made a joke about a 24/7 AI podcast endlessly talking about polling numbers. I've made it a reality.

www.jamesrball.com