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People think they're interacting with an "intelligence," when actually they're just getting a maximally optimized Weizenbaum feed. We're living through the slop
by jsrozner 6d ago
People think they're interacting with an "intelligence," when actually they're just getting a maximally optimized Weizenbaum feed. We're living through the sloppification of the human mind.
See e.g., https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-chatbots-are-becoming-experts-changing-people-s-minds-what-s-their-secret https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-chatbots-are-beco...
- ben_w 6d agoWhat's the old quote from WW2? I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo. Something like that. Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this "scam"/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence. Being highly convinving is one of the things on that list.
- mopsi 6d agoIt was Berlin and not Tokyo, I believe. Germany kept producing newsreels until the very end. Many of them are now on Youtube, a very interesting watch on how to frame things positively.
- fiu10 6d agoWe need a downfall parody: "Hitler uses Openclaw".
- ben_w 6d agoI've heard many variants; Paris in an earlier war, too. I try to keep an open mind about propaganda fooling me today; the people who were fooled in the past often were not fools themselves.
- godelski 6d ago> the people who were fooled in the past often were not fools themselves. I think this can't be said enough. Propaganda's greatest weapon is making you think you are immune to it. Maybe some, but so much is propaganda. We all fall for propaganda (and ads), constantly Being fooled doesn't make you a fool. But being unwilling to change your mind does. Being unable to admit you don't know or don't have enough information to make a strong opinion makes you a fool too. Propaganda wants to take shortcuts, to simplify things. To trivialize. "It's so easy, you just..." because the fool is the person who already knows, the person who has nothing to learn, the person who thinks they're better than everybody else.
- dylan604 6d agoIn the past, there were not the avenues of finding alternate sources for news. While those avenues are present today, it also allows for additional sources for propaganda. So are we any better today or not???
- ben_w 6d agoNot. A thousand cable channels all licensed by a government, is much the same as five broadcast channels licensed by the same government. A million YouTubers grinding The Algorithm while secretly sponsored by various world governments, isn't much different to a thousand well-placed gossipers secretly sponsored by various world governments.
- datsci_est_2015 6d agoWow, that quote goes hard. I’m reminded that almost no one beyond a select few knew high up in the military and around the emperor knew how badly the Japanese were defeated at Midway. Paternalistic. Arrogant. Shameful. And deeply engrained in the Japanese cultural zeitgeist (of the early-mid 20th century). Edit: I guess it’s commonly attributed to a German citizen, but their cultures mirrored each other. Fascism falling under the weight of its own propaganda.
- moth11 6d agoNobody is denying that it's effective. They're denying intelligence A programming contest has a problem where given N < 10000, do something hard like come up with the number of primes less than N You can come up with all sorts of algorithms that do intelligent things. But the most effective solution is to use metaprogramming to make a massive switch statement that contains all the answers
- fasterik 6d agoAre they denying intelligence, or are they redefining it in such a way that only humans can be intelligent? Can you come up with a definition of intelligence that would apply to crows and ant colonies, which are obviously intelligent to some degree, but not the current generation of AI systems?
- mitxela 6d agoNobody knows what intelligence is. We've recently discovered a lot of things that it isn't.
- fasterik 6d agoIntelligence is a word we invent to describe things we see in nature. We don't "discover" intelligence like it's some natural resource. To say we know nothing about it is also a bit strange. Cognitive science has been studying it for decades. Of course it's hard to give a precise definition, but it's related to capabilities like abstraction, reasoning, planning, problem solving, etc.
- infinite_spin 6d agoWhy would a set of dictionary definitions not suffice?
- mitxela 6d agoThose are distillations of existing knowledge. They are necessarily behind the status quo. "You can't call this newfangled contraption a computer, because a computer is a person!"
- gxs 6d agoOr both, you know. An intelligence that also spies on you Why is it so black and white?
- spying_lg_tv 6d ago[flagged]
- gxs 6d agoCreate a new account to be able to say what you just said Your kind is what makes the internet shit, not AI
- spying_lg_tv 6d ago[flagged]
- trial3 6d agohumorously, my regular iPhone on a residential home network failed the cloudflare AI bot detection and i can’t read that article
- mitxela 6d agoPeople don't believe me that Cloudflare blocks more humans than bots. They see in the dashboard "number of bots blocked" and it's like their brain turns off.
- brianleb 6d agoCould you define (or link) to what "Weizenbaum feed" means/references? Too obscure for me but I'm interested. Thanks.
- fweimer 6d agoLikely a reference to ELIZA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
- handoflixue 6d agoAre there really people that can't tell the difference between ELIZA and something that can solve open Millennium Prize Problems in math?
- joquarky 6d agoTheir ego doesn't let them see the difference.
- mapontosevenths 6d agoOr perhaps their wallets. There are a lot of programmers here. Some of them think that AI is the death of their profession, rather than a change in it. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
- jsrozner 6d agoI, uhm, think this idea would apply in both directions.
- abustamam 6d agoI was a programmer. AI is the evolution of my career. I'm in an interesting place. I've never been good at interviewing and I have certainly only gotten worse due to an admitted atrophy of thinking in "code." But I've been putting more effort in designing systems (agentic and otherwise) and building things at work as for fun. It's been an absolute boon to finally build out all of the fun side projects I had always dreamed of, and after showing one off to some people I might even be able to monetize. On the other hand I acknowledge that other people dont want to embrace LLM driven development for one reason or another, and I respect that. People got into the industry for different reasons , but code was always just a means to an ends for me.
- anigbrowl 6d agoYou're in for a big disappointment when you interact with People™