AngelParanoid

this is the piece:

its very presence 20 metres away from a small independent Palestinian cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.

The night before it was due to open, Gail’s was daubed with red paint. Less than a week later, all its windows were smashed in.

[…] Does any of this move the dial in the occupied territories even one iota? Almost certainly not. But perhaps this is simply the nature of an increasingly disenfranchised age. Palestinian activism has arguably never been less capable of exerting a meaningful influence on global events, and so is increasingly defined by small acts of petty symbolism. A smashed window. A provocative sticker. You can’t lay a glove on the US-Israeli military-industrial complex, and you can’t get your local council to boycott Israeli goods, and you couldn’t stand with Palestine Action and the protest march on Sunday has been banned by the Metropolitan police. So some people then direct their ire at the bakery with distant links to Israeli security funding.

sure, it’s not meaningful activism, and it’s not changing or helping anything, but don’t worry, some smashed windows and targeted harassment of Jews and Jewish businesses (however tenuous the connection - the Jewish founder sold the company in 2021), is simply a justified grievance.

Not sometimes. Not until the next update. Always. They proved it with math.

Even with perfect training data and unlimited computing power, AI models will still confidently tell you things that are completely false. This isn't a bug they're working on. It's baked into how these systems work at a fundamental level.

And their own numbers are brutal. OpenAI's o1 reasoning model hallucinates 16% of the time. Their newer o3 model? 33%. Their newest o4-mini? 48%. Nearly half of what their most recent model tells you could be fabricated. The "smarter" models are actually getting worse at telling the truth.

Here's why it can't be fixed. Language models work by predicting the next word based on probability. When they hit something uncertain, they don't pause. They don't flag it. They guess. And they guess with complete confidence, because that's exactly what they were trained to do.

The researchers looked at the 10 biggest AI benchmarks used to measure how good these models are. 9 out of 10 give the same score for saying "I don't know" as for giving a completely wrong answer: zero points. The entire testing system literally punishes honesty and rewards guessing.

So the AI learned the optimal strategy: always guess. Never admit uncertainty. Sound confident even when you're making it up.

OpenAI's proposed fix? Have ChatGPT say "I don't know" when it's unsure. Their own math shows this would mean roughly 30% of your questions get no answer. Imagine asking ChatGPT something three times out of ten and getting "I'm not confident enough to respond." Users would leave overnight. So the fix exists, but it would kill the product.

This isn't just OpenAI's problem. DeepMind and Tsinghua University independently reached the same conclusion. Three of the world's top AI labs, working separately, all agree: this is permanent.

Bonus:

This is an antisemitism pandemic.

Terrorist attack in Michigan thankfully stopped by security.

Could have been another Sandy Hook.

for some background, and to show that she's been interested in characters' heritages and histories since before she was writing nightwing, here is an excerpt from her 1999 interview with roytoys where grayson describes her main concern in writing characters:

What interests me more than anything is where people experience themselves as being and what they experience themselves as belonging to.

and to clarify that grayson has never been interested in dick sexually or romantically, in her 2014 the batman universe interview, grayson says:

For the record, I have never wanted to be romantically involved with Dick Grayson. Like most of the readers following his exploits, I wanted to be him, not do him.

the game of fandom telephone that has been played for 15 years now about grayson's decision to make dick romani being based on her having a fetish about romani people revolves around a quote from her interview in dick grayson, boy wonder: scholars and creators on 75 years of robin, nightwing, and batman (2011). here is the full excerpt this quote is pulled from, in context:

Q: How did you make the decision to retcon [retroactively change] Dick’s ethnicity? Did you need to get approval for the decision? In your opinion, how could him being Romani be used to inform his characterization? Why is having a Romani superhero important? How much research did you do on Romani history/culture in order to write Dick? A: Maybe I’m wrong, but I never thought of that as a retcon. As far as I know, there had never been any discussion of or verdict on Dick’s race—that’s not the kind of material comic writers normally walked up to in the forties. But if you look at his history and his coloring … I didn’t feel like I was changing anything so much as clarifying it. And then yes, I made some decisions about the specifics of his ethnicity (like that the Romani heritage came from his dad’s side and that they were Kalderasha), but that was also based on what felt to me like fictional evidence. It just made sense, and it was interesting and it felt authentic to the character. In any case, I did a lot of research into both circus and Romani culture (which is how I came across that connection in the first place). And I don’t know that I’d say having a Romani superhero is important as much as I’d say that not assuming that all superheroes are white Europeans is important … I guess that’s why I’m bristling at the term “retcon”; I didn’t change his ethnicity from one thing to another, he had no ethnicity. The truth is, we never talk about that stuff, we just make assumptions, and in this case those assumptions are based on a really boring, banal and in many ways harmful representation of America. So how does it inform his character? Well, it presents a narrative for his family’s history that makes sense in light of their occupation. It reinforces his “otherness” where Bruce is concerned in what I think is a useful, interesting way (economically, for instance), and in my mind it enhances his early childhood adventures. If his family was initially connected to a kumpania, it means that Dick didn’t necessarily spend the circus off-seasons in Gibtown—he could have been traveling the world, which seems likely given the poise and self-possession he showed as an eight-year-old. It also presents the opportunity for there to be a slight chip on his shoulder, which maybe speaks to his scrappiness. It also maybe gives him a slightly deeper way to relate to someone like Helena—someone who is white but other—and gives the people who love (or lust after) him a potential cultural excuse for feeling as bewitched as they sometimes do. I also just love the idea of Bruce occasionally calling him “hot blooded,” just to mess with him, because Dick would of course deny being so in an extremely hot-blooded manner. Also, you know, when you talk about decisions … I’m a writer. Characters present themselves to me and tell me who they are. Obviously I’m responsible for those interpretations on some deep, unconscious level, but the experience isn’t an intellectual one, it’s one of discovery. Oh, and no, I don’t remember needing or getting special permission, because I think my editors agreed with me that it wasn’t a change so much as a clarification or enhancement.

the line that is taken out of context is specifically:

It also maybe gives him a slightly deeper way to relate to someone like Helena—someone who is white but other—and gives the people who love (or lust after) him a potential cultural excuse for feeling as bewitched as they sometimes do.

what she's saying is that other characters would find themselves able to justify their attraction to dick (and their unasked-for sexual advances, which were already long canon by the time grayson started at dc) by pointing at him being romani. it's not that grayson thinks being romani is sexy, it's that she is familiar with the ways people exoticize racially "other" individuals and what effect that has on the person being sexualized/exoticized. she consistently describes herself as looking at existing material and trying to find a reading of stories and characters that made that material make real sense, and she thought that an element of romani dick that made sense was how often he was sexualized by other characters against his will.

it's not my place to comment on whether or not this reading (or her writing choice) was appropriate for her personally to make as a non-romani person, whether she should have been handling this material to begin with, etc., but it is clearly a reading grounded in the text of the comics and in a lot of thought about the character on the writer's part. again, this doesn't mean it's good, but it means we know what the original intent was. we don't have to speculate or guess or infer; grayson has described that intent (and her interests/motivations as a writer that back up that intent) for 15+ years.

another description of grayson's intent around making dick romani can be found in the following transcript of part of devin grayson's interview with the gotham outsiders podcast in 2021 (i transcribed this and edited it slightly to remove some filler words; any errors are mine):

Interviewer: In the past there's been a lot of controversy around Dick Grayson's heritage as a Roma person. Reflecting back, how do you feel about this depiction? Grayson: Well, somebody told me that I started it. I kind of doubt that. Is that true? Interviewer: As far as we know, that's true. Grayson: Okay, maybe it is. To me, it just made sense. You know, I looked, I love sort of putting together fictional clues and trying to, you know, if all of these absolutely insane things happened, what does it mean about who these people are? And so if we look at his background and what we knew about Haley's Circus and, just even the coloring that was used, to me it seemed obvious that that would be the roots of at least his father's side of the family. And that was way more interesting, both in terms of better representing that itinerant circus culture, you know, that's sort of an interesting way to look at that, but also then the sort of socioeconomic dynamic that creates between him and Bruce becomes even more charged. These characters, I guess we're making things up and deciding things, but it really feels like you're just meeting someone and they're telling you about themselves. And that was my experience with that. It just seemed undeniably true and I ran with it and nobody stopped me. And if since then people sort of whitewashed it, that seems really sad and a loss, and I would question why that was done. Interviewer: In the most recent issue of Tom Taylor's Nightwing, it got mentioned, so it is still popping up here and there. And according to Wiki, you were the first one to introduce this. So it's cool that you introduced such a big major part of that character. Grayson: I guess that could be true because now that I'm thinking about it, what I went and did was a bunch of research on contemporary circuses and 1940s circuses. That's the other fun thing about these characters, right? They're saddling these very different eras and you have to sort of make sense of all of that. But that's where that took me and I read a fascinating book on the Kalderasha and it really spoke to me and I thought, yeah, that's gotta be part of Dick's story.

again, i am NOT commenting on how "good" or "bad" any of grayson's decisions here are and i strongly encourage you to read commentary from romani/gtrsb readers on the subject.

but there is a very long history of people who dislike grayson spreading misinformation about her and her motives as a writer to make her look like a sexual deviant, and a handful of non-romani tumblr users have been actively pushing that perspective for over a decade now. you have probably read some of their posts on the matter if you've ever googled "devin grayson romani fetishization" or something similar. i don't like seeing this claim spread further as part of this game of fandom telephone that always happens around grayson.

final comments via @searchforahero re: why i care about this:

Over the past year or so I have become incredibly critical of the way Grayson (and other women in the comic book industry) are discussed online, and it isn’t just because I’m a huge fan of her work. I think it’s important to consider why Grayson and many others are discussed the way they are. Why are people so eager to paint Grayson, an openly bisexual woman who has spoken frankly about sexual violence, as a mindlessly horny sexual deviant (and why is her deeply serious and empathetic depiction of a male rape victim all the way back in 2004 when that was practically unheard of dismissed as fetish content or an “accident”)? Why do people talk about Grayson like she’s uniquely “evil” when men like Chuck Dixon and Marv Wolfman were writing similar things in poorer taste for longer? Not only are women in this industry held to a wildly different standard than the men they work with, but the critique they receive is often deeply personal, obsessive, and vitriolic in a way critique of men in the same roles typically is not. Someone who is critiquing Tom Taylor’s Nightwing (2016) might point out that it lacks weight and seems out of step with the characters. Someone who is critiquing Devin Grayson’s Nightwing (1996) might say she wants to rape Dick Grayson.

tom taylor also wrote dick as romani, and he used weird/racist/exoticizing language around dick being romani. denny o'neil approved of grayson's original decision to make him romani. why do we as a fandom only ever talk about grayson in this way, then? why don't we talk about taylor or o'neil this way when taylor is substantially more popular and powerful (and still working at dc) and o'neil had ultimate creative control over whether or not that material made it into grayson's text to begin with? why is the extensive information we have available in grayson's own words consistently taken out of context to reframe her intent in the worst light possible?