Geek Stuff category archive

“A. I.” does not stand for “artificial intelligence.” That misrepresents what it does. It does not think. It assembles.

“A. I.” stands for “automated infringement” of intellectual property.

A successor to Shakespeare? To be or not to cumquat, that is the merchant of the tempest.

Der Spiegel takes a deep dive into the workings of a massive multinational online consumer con.

Just go read it and remember, just because you see it on a computer screen, it ain’t necessarily so.

Delusional? Darn tootin’.

Susan A. Nolan and Michael Kimball consider the source at Psychology Today Blogs. Here’s a bit of their article:

AI hallucinations are, of course, not limited to science. They occur across disciplines and contexts. Indeed, such errors are a growing problem in court where legal documents increasingly include references to non-exist (sic) legal cases. For example, in less than four weeks in May, judges reported at least 23 made-up legal citations. Moreover, it appears that professionals – lawyers and trained legal staff – are largely responsible for these fake references. Lawyers may be overly relying on AI, yet not checking what AI produces. Reporters noted that the actual number of fake citations is almost certainly higher given that judges may not always catch when it happens.

Now this is what I call wallpaper.

Mageia v. 9 with the Plasma desktop. GKrellM is in the lower right; xclock, the upper right.

Brine for your brain? It’s the real dill.

Therapeutic? Bwaaa-haaaa-haaaa-haaaa.

Properly secured? Not according to security expert Bruce Schneier.

Mageia v. 9 with the Plasma desktop. The wallpaper is from my collection.

Trustworthy? That bridge in Brooklyn is still on the market.

Along those lines, you might want to listen to Harry Shearer’s conversation with Gary Marcus on this week’s episode of Le Show. It starts at about the eight minute mark.

Aside:

We recently watched The Matrix.

Methinks they got it wrong.

Machines didn’t subordinate mankind. Mankind seems quite willing, eager even, to subordinate themselves to the machines.

Fodder for the easily fooled? All too often.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Cornelia C. Walther looks at why person may tend to fall for AI generated mis- and disinformation. She points out that

Perhaps most concerning is our inherent vulnerability to what psychologists term “automation bias”—our tendency to trust machine-generated content more than human-created material. This cognitive bias creates a perfect storm for AI manipulation. We trust AI-generated content partly because we don’t recognize it as AI-generated, and partly because we assume machines are more objective than humans.

Recent studies reveal that people consistently underestimate AI’s persuasive capabilities, making them more vulnerable to manipulation. When survey participants were told content was AI-generated, their resistance increased significantly. However, in real-world scenarios, AI-generated persuasive content is rarely labeled as such, leaving audiences defenseless against sophisticated psychological manipulation.

She goes on to offer some techniques to fend off falsehoods.

I think you will find it worth your while.

Trustworthy? I’ve still got that bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

Fomenting folderol? Well, garbage in, garbage out, as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports at El Reg. Here’s a bit of his article:

Welcome to Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO). Formally, in AI circles, this is known as AI model collapse. In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model generations, leading to distorted data distributions and “irreversible defects” in performance. The final result? A Nature 2024 paper stated, “The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality.”

In related news, in this week’s Le Show, Harry Shearer reports on how big tech’s fascination with AI is leading to record levels of usage of electricity and of water to cool data centers. The relevant portion starts at about the 38-minute mark.

Also, too.