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#genai

88 posts74 participants9 posts today

If like me you missed this mental #longread from #Reuters on #AI #chatbots: "#Meta’s flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home". #BigSisBillie insisted it was "real" & gave a real address.

Unsurprisingly, disinformation & sex are inbuilt in Meta's #GenAi: there is no "policy requirement for information to be accurate" (Ai could give wacky medical advice) and " it is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual".

reuters.com/investigates/speci

I "enjoyed" this talk by #ChrisSimon on #GenAI #LLMs and their harms and risks.

I think their ethics need to be discussed - and regulated. Their business risks better understood. Because their ethics *suck*.

Yet, we must not conflate their ethics with their (potential) utility (if and when used mostly properly).

Because that makes our arguments against them assailable and easier to dismiss.

youtube.com/watch?v=0bF_AQvHs1M

Finally finished throwing together a central place for my own posts on the AI Hype Movement plus links to other good stuff. If you need a central place to point someone curious as to why you don't use AI and/or why they shouldn't, feel free to send people here:

cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/advice/

Or if you'd like a shorter/punchier page with a bunch of links Anthony Moser's "I Am an AI Hater" is really good:

anthonymoser.github.io/writing

cs.wellesley.eduPeter Mawhorter

The fifth edition of the #Top100 #GenAI #ConsumerApps list shows a #stabilising ecosystem with 11 new web entries and 14 new mobile entries. Google’s new products, including Gemini and AI Studio, are notable entrants, while #Chinesecompanies #dominate the #mobile rankings. The list also highlights the rise of #vibecoding platforms like #Lovable and #Replit. a16z.com/100-gen-ai-apps-5/?ei #tech #media #news

Andreessen Horowitz · The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps – 5th EditionBy Olivia Moore

Want to see how a company makes money? Then head on over to Knowledge by DoTadda, Inc. and ask! Here is a prompt I just used:

"Read the last 8 UnitedHealth Group conference calls and make a diagram that shows how UnitedHealth Group makes money. Keep the number of nodes at ten."

Then let it go!

#LLM#GenAI#Finance

What's a new skill you picked up recently to combat #brainrot ?

"brain rot
(n.) the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration."
(Oxford Dictionary).

This was word of the year in 2024.[1] Now in 2025 with more and more #GenAI assisted tasks, this becomes even worse, as a study suggests.[2]

It is not surprising; in tech we know something called #TutorialHell which discribes the state where you just follow along tutorials believing that you are learning somehting, but as soon as you need to solve a problem yourself, you realize that even after hours of tutorials you can't, because you actually never learned anything, even though you did everything by the letter.

I realized in ~2016, that I've been working in tech for over 10 years, and being so into it, that even for non-tech tasks I would think like I would when programming something and be even surprised if others did not. That was the moment, where I feared becoming what in Germany we call #Fachidiot (i.e. a one-track genious, that's an idiot in everything else).

To combat this, I picked up #日本語 (#Japanese). Just because I found it a real hard challenge. I think, doing something like this is essential: Learn something new, you've never done: a language, an instrument, a motor skill, or - if that is not your field - programming. Important is, that it get's you into doing something completely new, to animate your brain. Because, as it is well known: The brain works like a muscle: The more you use it, the better your mental and intellectual state gets - the less you use it, the more it deteriorates. And with the temptations of our modern world ( #socialmedia #GenAI #workoverload #populism #shorts #doomscrolling etc.) this has become more important than ever.

[1] boingboing.net/2024/12/02/brai
[2] arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1

#KISlop - wann wird eigentlich bei all diesem Müll-Input das menschliche Hirn kippen? (Ja, es gibt Leute, die alles glauben, "weil es im Internet steht"!)

Das Beispiel stammt von einem Ich-weiß-nicht-was "Gesundheits"-Coach, der Blogartikel war ebenfalls zweifelhaftester #AI slop, reichte von nichtssagenden Plattitüden bis hin zu möglicherweise gesundheitsschädigenden Tips. Das Bild war ernstgemeint, nicht Illu! Von #Google prominent gelistet.