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

[Argent Stonecutter]

Oh no, China's cloning Anthropic's hoax!

 

[Free]

Oh no, China's cloning Anthropic's hoax!

Uh huh...

 

[Noodles]

T

Uh huh...

This feels extra relevant because from what I can tell, the China clones tend to be smaller and often more easily run locally.

 

[Free]

What maroons.

Ford had to hire back former engineers to fix mistakes made by its automated systems

Ford’s back on top in quality.

www.theverge.com

In Ford’s view, AI is both powerful and prone to pitfalls. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the quality of the data used to train the AI models. In addition, the automaker underestimated the value of the institutional knowledge accumulated by its more veteran engineers who had worked through multiple vehicle-development cycles. And this combination of phenomena led to a drop in quality in Ford’s vehicles.

“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” said Charles Poon, VP of vehicle hardware engineering, in a briefing this week with reporters.

Basically, they thought that by replacing experienced workers with new, untested wavy-hands technology would let them make cool stuff for almost no money. Surprise, surprise, the magic is a scam.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

"Peppa Pig" owners Hasbro now requiring child actors to sign away all rights to their voices for AI generation

Hasbro, the U.S. entertainment giant that acquired the Peppa Pig brand in 2019, is asking child actors on the animated series to sign over their voices to artificial intelligence under new contract terms, Deadline can reveal.

AYPA members are increasingly concerned about children being asked to effectively surrender their voice and image rights. Agents frequently ask the body for advice on AI clauses without naming specific projects.

The AYPA’s open letter said these clauses are often presented as a “take it or leave it” ultimatum, meaning children can lose out on work if their parents or guardians refuse to agree to the terms.

What an overreaction. The rights to their own voice for the entire rest of their lives (and beyond) is such a small price to pay for those poor unfortunate souls.

 

[Free]

This...is...hilarious.

People training new AI models admit they just get chatbots to do it

People who are paid to train new AI models by supplying them with high-quality conversation and tests are cheating and using chatbots like ChatGPT to do the job instead, multiple whistleblowers have told New Scientist. The seemingly widespread practice risks undermining the future of AI, as it could lead to the “collapse” of more advanced models.

Most AI models operating today were trained on text and data scraped from the internet. But as models have scaled up, requiring yet more training data, AI firms have begun using workers who carry out conversations and tests with AI, in the hope that the resulting high-quality data can improve the power and usefulness of future large language models (LLMs).

These workers are normally employed by third parties, rather than AI companies directly, and are often working without full-time contracts and for low pay. That can incentivise them to take shortcuts like using chatbots to complete tasks faster, according to a worker called Alice*, despite this being against company policies.

“It’s very widespread; every company I’ve worked for has had explicit guidelines around it and they clearly do try to catch people out, so I think they do care. But I don’t think they can stop it,” says Alice.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I decided I wanted a robot mop/vacuum and looked at a couple blogs with reviews. Popups. "Click for price!" Sigh.

So I took the blogs to ChatGPT and said, 'summarize these pages, seek prices, show me ones best for 'list of requirements', link sources'.

Magical experience again. Internet de-enshittified.

 

[Cristiano]

I have become incredibly impressed with ChatGPT's ability to help me solve obscure technical issues. I recently ran into one on this site regarding attachments, and it helped me track down a config file setting to use. It also recently helped me fix a weird Firestorm issue that came up when I bought a new gaming monitor. I may have to ChatGPT I love it.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

It did an alright job. It left a few dust bunnies out where I could reach them easily. It also makes me evaluate the crap I have on the floor.

 

[Free]

The continuing efforts by Metas employees in the A.I. cinematic universe get more hilarious.

Meta Reportedly Got Too Addicted to Google AI Tokens and Had to Be Cut Off

That's enough AI for you.

gizmodo.com

Meta was reportedly minding its own business this past March, just trying to gorge itself on Gemini tokens, and all of a sudden Google said it was cut off. This is according to an anonymously sourced story in the Financial Times.

In March, it emerged that Meta was one of the largest companies taking part in the Tokenmaxxing trend—literally evaluating employees by how many AI tokens they were using at work. This moment coincided with another fad: the one for token-hungry agentic AI platforms like OpenClaw, which were being used by anxious software engineers to achieve ostensibly unprecedented new levels of workplace efficiency.

Citing “three people familiar with the matter,” the Financial Times now says Google informed Meta that it wasn’t able to keep up with its AI use, and imposed limits on the company’s use of Gemini models.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Claude Code came out last year.

 

[Free]

Time travel job postings.

 

[Khamon]

I have become incredibly impressed with ChatGPT's ability to help me solve obscure technical issues. I recently ran into one on this site regarding attachments, and it helped me track down a config file setting to use. It also recently helped me fix a weird Firestorm issue that came up when I bought a new gaming monitor. I may have to ChatGPT I love it.

This is true. The chats do an excellent job of scraping and tokenizing tech issues to serve remarkably valid support. This is the killer application for me.

 

[Noodles]

Oh yeah, Claude has been great for just general trouble shooting. Optimizing my webserver, setting up the Hugo Blog on Cloudflare, even trying to make SL run better on my shitty laptop by feeding it log files.

 

[Erich Templar]

Similar to the Political Compass. Answer 29 questions, and it places you on the "Attitude towards AI" chart.
The AI Compass

Me:

The Shrug
patron saint: Matt Levine
AI is a thing that exists and you regard it with detached amusement, like everything else. It's overhyped, sure, but so is most stuff. You'll use it when it's useful and ignore it when it isn't, and you find the discourse more interesting than the technology. You are unbothered.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Similar to the Political Compass. Answer 29 questions, and it places you on the "Attitude towards AI" chart.
The AI Compass

Me:

The Shrug
patron saint: Matt Levine
AI is a thing that exists and you regard it with detached amusement, like everything else. It's overhyped, sure, but so is most stuff. You'll use it when it's useful and ignore it when it isn't, and you find the discourse more interesting than the technology. You are unbothered.

You are...
The B2B SaaS Consultant
patron saint: Matt Yglesias
AI will quietly boost total factor productivity by some single-digit percentage and you think that's actually a huge deal, wonkily speaking. You're bullish in a spreadsheet way, not a singularity way. You've explained the Jevons paradox to someone who didn't ask.

 

[Lori Claremont]

You are...
The Skeptic
patron saint: Ed Zitron
It's oversold, it's losing staggering amounts of money, and the harms are arriving faster than the value. You've done the math on the unit economics and it doesn't close. You are loud about this, prolific about this, and you suspect history will vindicate you.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

You are...
The Conscientious Objector
patron saint: Holly Herndon
It doesn't work well, it's doing real harm, and you've opted out on principle. You're not a technophobe — you just think this specific technology is overhyped and corrosive, and you're tired of being told you just don't understand it. You understand it fine. That's the problem.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Similar to the Political Compass. Answer 29 questions, and it places you on the "Attitude towards AI" chart.
The AI Compass

Me:

The Shrug
patron saint: Matt Levine
AI is a thing that exists and you regard it with detached amusement, like everything else. It's overhyped, sure, but so is most stuff. You'll use it when it's useful and ignore it when it isn't, and you find the discourse more interesting than the technology. You are unbothered.

I got the same.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Skeptic. Which tracks with most things.