So, you're interested in my opinions.

None of the signup methods require a password. It only takes email and birthday. Minimizing time on the signin or signup screen makes it harder for people quitting to avoid relapse.

"Characters" on the website will send messages "on their own" (prompted by the site) to try to invite inactive users back after as soon as 1 day of inactivity. This is likely to force FOMO, or make users feel more like they owe the bots a response. Unhealthy attachment stuff.

Account deletion is an essential part of every service that should go smoothly, right? Right? Wrong. It takes 1-2 weeks for a Character AI account deletion to be finalized, and account deletion requests have a high chance to not go through if you're not using the app.

Rephrasing: People leaving Character.AI are pushed to download the app in order to delete their accounts, if they haven't already. This makes it harder for people to quit and stay gone. Failing to quit an addiction makes it harder to quit successfully in the future, so this feels like a feature, not a bug. On top of that, the delete account menu reads like this:

that's why the "tick tick... boom!" movie was good. whatever else you can say about the man, lin manuel miranda gets musicals. he cares about them. he respected the hell out of the original work and sought to bring it to a new medium in a way that preserved what made it special. the "in the heights" and both "west side story" and "chicago" movies were good because they weren't ashamed of being musicals and clearly cared about the integrity of the original. even movie musicals that are significantly clunkier, like "the last 5 years" and "the prom", I still genuinely like to some degree because god dammit, they committed. did it always work? no. but at least they tried. at least they didn't disdain the source material for being what it fundamentally is.

and you'll notice those movies i mentioned didn't make a 1-1 replica of the original stage shows. all of those movies changed some shit- sometimes in ways i liked, sometimes in ways i didn't. but none of the changes felt like the director scrambling to save face or make the story seem less "silly" by virtue of its musical-ness. film is a different medium and a different language, and often by the time the movie comes along, audiences respond to different things; things have to change. sometimes that means doing what "chicago" did and making all the musical numbers either literal in-universe performances or dream sequences. sometimes that means doing what the remake of "west side story" did and adding new scenes to reframe some things and add new context. sometimes that means doing what "tick tick... boom!" did and expanding a minimalist 3 person show on a bare stage to a fully cast biographical journey of its writer, making full use of filming in new york, using the original staging as a framing device.

it does not mean trying to elevate the movie from being "just a musical". musicals don't need elevating any more than comic books do. and in both cases, i'm so frustrated with the movie adaptations being given to directors who clearly have zero respect for what the original is, who are so scared of looking silly that they cloak everything in self-awareness and irony and "realism" so no one will think they actually care.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

Day one of Linktober, "Knight"

the category winners at THE JELLICLE BALL

+ BONUS: category speed round!

#This show is a comedy 💀😭