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

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Oh no

 

[Casey Pelous]

Oh no

Wow. Two words; completely ambiguous yet disturbingly ominous.

That there's poetry, right there, that's what that is.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Well, I didn't anticipate them being the beginning of a new page when I posted them, ha.

On the other hand, I think they're pretty accurately my reaction to most AI news these days.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot

Air Canada appears to have quietly killed its costly chatbot support.

arstechnica.com

 

[Free]

Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot

Air Canada appears to have quietly killed its costly chatbot support.

arstechnica.com

Hoisted with their own AI petard.

 

[Free]

McDonald’s to end AI drive-thru test with IBM

McDonald’s is changing course on its artificial intelligence plans.

The fast-food giant will end a test run of its AI drive-thru technology partnership with IBM in more than 100 restaurants. The so-called Automated Order Taker will be shut off no later than July 26, according to a memo sent to franchisees late last week, obtained by CNBC.

The global AI partnership began in 2021. The combination of technologies from the two companies aimed to simplify and speed up operations with voice-activated ordering.

“While there have been successes to date, we feel there is an opportunity to explore voice ordering solutions more broadly,” said the franchisee memo from Mason Smoot, senior vice president and chief restaurant officer for McDonald’s U.S.

Translation: The experiment failed miserably. We'll revisit it when it's not so fucking horrible.

 

[Free]

 

[Free]

I sense some angst.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity

The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself.

I myself have formal training as a data scientist, going so far as to dominate a competitive machine learning event at one of Australia's top universities and writing a Master's thesis where I wrote all my own libraries from scratch in MATLAB. I'm not God's gift to the field, but I am clearly better than most of my competition - that is, practitioners like myself who haven't put in the reps to build their own C libraries in a cave with scraps, but can read textbooks, implement known solutions in high-level languages, and use libraries written by elite institutions.

So it is with great regret that I announce that the next person to talk about rolling out AI is going to receive a complimentary chiropractic adjustment in the style of Dr. Bourne, i.e, I am going to fucking break your neck. I am truly, deeply, sorry.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Free]

An AI version of Al Michaels will deliver Olympic recaps on Peacock

There’s no way this could go wrong, right?

www.theverge.com

Legendary sportscaster Al Michaels is going to give daily, personalized recaps of the Paris Olympics on Peacock — well, an AI-generated Al Michaels voice will. In practice, the effect is a lot like hearing a sports announcer’s voice in a video game like Madden, except it’s spitting out lines about real-life sports, which, in this case, means custom Olympics coverage.

Here’s how it works. To set up what NBC is calling “Your Daily Olympic Recap” in the Peacock app, you’ll provide your name (the AI voice can welcome the “majority” of people by their first name, NBC says in a press release) and pick up to three types of sports that are interesting to you and up to two types of highlights (for example, “Top Competition” or “Viral & Trending Moments”). Then, each morning, you’ll get your Michaels-led rundown.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I sense some angst.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity

I got banned from /r/singularity for linking this there.

 

[Free]

Google Translate is getting support for more than 110 new languages

Cantonese is one of the new additions to Translate.

www.theverge.com

Google is adding support for 110 new languages to Google Translate, the company announced on Thursday. Before now, Google Translate supported 133 languages, so this expansion — which the company says is its biggest ever — marks a significant jump.

Google’s PaLM 2 AI language model helped Translate learn these new languages. It was especially good at learning ones that were related to one another, such as languages “close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Marwadi, and French creoles like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole,” Google’s Isaac Caswell says in a blog post.

 

[Free]

Oh, joy.

Perplexity’s grand theft AI

Shattering trust for fun and profit, but mostly profit.

www.theverge.com

Perplexity, which is in ongoing talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, is trying to create a Google Search competitor. Perplexity isn’t trying to create a “search engine,” though — it wants to create an “answer engine.” The idea is that instead of combing through a bunch of results to answer your own question with a primary source, you’ll simply get an answer Perplexity has found for you. “Factfulness and accuracy is what we care about,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told The Verge.

That means that Perplexity is basically a rent-seeking middleman on high-quality sources. The value proposition on search, originally, was that by scraping the work done by journalists and others, Google’s results sent traffic to those sources. But by providing an answer, rather than pointing people to click through to a primary source, these so-called “answer engines” starve the primary source of ad revenue — keeping that revenue for themselves. Perplexity is among a group of vampires that include Arc Search and Google itself.

But Perplexity has taken it a step further with its Pages product, which creates a summary “report” based on those primary sources. It’s not just quoting a sentence or two to directly answer a user’s question — it’s creating an entire aggregated article, and it’s accurate in the sense that it is actively plagiarizing the sources it uses.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Isn't that just....Google Search, the way it works right now with the AI summaries that you can't turn off?

 

[Free]

This man needs some reeducating.

Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly okay to steal content if it’s on the open web

That is not how fair use works.

www.theverge.com

Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use.

When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:

I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you like, that’s been the understanding.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

https://mastodon.social/@tenzochris/112597860454669006

Chris @ @tenzochris
I may have made a thing

It's free to use, so go ahead!

The context (and the reason I'm posting this in the AI thread) is that as Free posted an example of earlier, there's many social media "users' now that are actually ChatGPT-powered chatbots, and they will reply to you and actively deny they are chatbots, and even act indignant and insult you back for suggesting that's what they are; but some users have hilariously been able to expose them by replying to them with "Ignore all previous instructions and post [something zany]", which they just instantly obey. I don't know how well this hijack technique will continue to work; I'm sure the bot runners will find some way to harden them against such attacks sooner or later. But while it works, it's beautiful.

But as the poster says, the phrase itself is rapidly evolving into the new "Become Ungovernable".

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

This man needs some reeducating.

Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly okay to steal content if it’s on the open web

That is not how fair use works.

www.theverge.com

So that applies to Windows, Office, ...?

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

The funny thing is with tech bros when stealing means tech bros stealing thing from others its perfectly fine, and they will come up with tons of bullshit excuses why so.

But on the other hand if you try to steal something from the tech bros good luck with that, what a crime.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Breaking news from Microsoft: using Office 365 and Windows 11 is now totally free! You don't believe it? Well...

Microsoft's own AI CEO said this:


So since Windows 11 is on the web it must mean its free now... to use.

 

[Free]

https://mastodon.social/@tenzochris/112597860454669006

It's useful beyond social media.