birbs

The relevant passage, from the original n+1 article:

The CEO leaned an elbow on the podium. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. A woman wrote to VERA [an AI chatbot] about her elderly dog, who was having diarrhea. “Your dog is at the end of his life,” said VERA. “I recommend euthanasia.” The woman was beside herself. She told VERA she wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Her dog was her only companion. VERA knew the woman’s location. She sent a list of nearby clinics that could get the job done. Still, the woman was unconvinced. Euthanasia was so expensive. She’d never be able to afford it. VERA sent another list, this time of nearby shelters. “If you relinquish your dog to a shelter, they will euthanize him at no cost,” she said. The woman did not respond. But some days later she sent VERA a long and effusive message. She had taken VERA’s advice and euthanized her dog. She wanted to thank VERA for the support during the most difficult moment of her life. The CEO regarded us with satisfaction for his chatbot’s work: that, through a series of escalating tactics, it had convinced a woman to end her dog’s life, though she hadn’t wanted to at all. “The point of this story is that the woman forgot she was talking to a bot,” he said. “The experience was so human.”

Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/resea...

MIT: https://www.media.mit.edu/publication...

"The funniest possible outcome of the AI mandate era is about to be HR departments discovering that 'sincerely held religious belief' under Title VII has a much lower bar than they assumed, and Pope Leo handed every Catholic employee a written excuse," wrote Corey Quinn, a software-startup founder in San Francisco, on X.

Employers could wind up in court if they outright dismiss workers who request a faith-based exemption from using AI, said Ashley Herd, a former McKinsey counsel and head of North American HR who now advises managers and employers on workplace issues.

Hide stuff that would be seen as important like collab opportunities, business offers, etc.

Also to vandalize their stuff if spotted irl. Slap stickers that read “this is slop” “pick up a pencil hippy” or “just download blender already” onto their products or if a user is spotted irl.

Never go to their comment sections as they gives them traction.

Instead focus on the emails, DMs, and waste their time in other ways.

Cause time is money. And the more you allow them waste more of it the better.

Researchers tested NotebookLM's accuracy of its AI-generated translations by feeding it various PDFs then comparing the results.

They were surprised to discover translating a blank PDF worked:

Further, no matter the source material's language or century, the output generated was standard 21st century midwestern American english. All jokes, cultural idioms, and local context stripped from the output with no attempt at translation.

Wambalo and other digital workers spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching AI algorithms to recognize them. Human labelers tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities in CTs, MRIs and X-rays to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI gets smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that'll need labeling.

 Humans in the loop are found not only in Kenya, but also in India, the Philippines and Venezuela. They're often countries with low wages but large populations — well educated, but unemployed.

The pay for humans in the loop is $1.50-2 an hour.  "And that is gross, before tax," Wambalo said.  Wambalo, Nathan Nkunzimana and Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan were employed by SAMA, an American outsourcing company that hired for Meta and OpenAI. SAMA, based in the California Bay Area, employed over 3,000 workers in Kenya. Documents reviewed by 60 Minutes show OpenAI agreed to pay SAMA $12.50 an hour per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got, though SAMA says what it paid is a fair wage for the region.

It's destroying the environment. It's taking advantage of people who're desperate. It's traumatizing them for dollars an hour--if they're lucky and they aren't denied their pay for no reason. I think about this a lot, that these people were made to look at awful and disgusting and illegal things for the sake of training these stupid AI.

"I looked at people being slaughtered," Wambalo said. "People engaging in sexual activity with animals. People abusing children physically, sexually. People committing suicide." Berhane Gebrekidan thought she'd been hired for a translation job, but she said what she ended up doing was reviewing content featuring dismembered bodies and drone attack victims. 

[...]

SAMA says mental health counseling was provided by "fully-licensed professionals." Workers say it was woefully inadequate.

It's just absurd and disgusting and infuriating. Yes the good applications are worth humans working on. It's not a bad thing--if the people employed to do the work are compensated appropriately and cared for. But so many of the uses are just unnecessary.

HIS FUCKING. WEDDING VOWS.

I've spotted a huge decline over the last two years. What's upsetting is how so many of our current third years have declined since their first year. I did a seminar with them the other day, on the topic of the environmental impacts of different diets. One guy told me confidently that there would be no additional agricultural lands if we all went vegetarian.

"Cool," I said. "What's your source for that?"

"I'm sure I read it," he said.

"Fair," said I, "go and look it up. Find an academic source, let's assess it to see if it's robust."

The first thing he did was go to Google, and then read the AI summary.

"That's not a source," I said. "Find me a source."

Five minutes later, he happily tells me that a Guardian article says so, and mentions the World Economic Forum.

"Okay," I said. "Neither of those are academic sources, and the WEF is secondary anyway. Go to Google Scholar, and find a journal article."

Ten minutes later, he tells me he can only find articles that say it's a very complex issue in spite of pop cultural received wisdom, and we don't actually know.

A THIRD YEAR. This man has a dissertation due in THREE MONTHS. This is a skill we taught him in first year, and it's all dribbled out of his ears in the quest for easy summaries from an autocomplete algorithm. And I dearly wish I could say he's an exception, but Jesus Christ, that would be a lie.

I'm currently writing a lecture for the second years for their research methods module, and I normally wouldn't need to do this. But I'm having to re-introduce them to the basic concepts of how to actually analyse findings rather than lazily take whatever they seem to say at face value. I'm trying to find a good paper that had Surprising findings, because I want to show them a research question and a set of results and then get them to speculate and research on why they found something so different, but that's a difficult thing to search for.

This, as I said in the post, is a noticeable and significant problem in the last two years. It is affecting students who were fine three years ago, and now aren't. It is a very specific issue that is affecting very specific skills, including previously very intelligent people

This is already attested in the literature. Meanwhile, the for-profit education system has not changed in the last two years

Additionally, prior to the last 2-3 years, I had failed one student ever, and flagged one student ever for plagiarism. This year we've had to deal with five separate plagiarism cases on the Masters course alone, all of whom admitted to LLM use. Not one of them can analyse information worth a damn; all of them had excellent prior undergrad scores.

You cannot respect artists at a fundamental level and steal their work.