The true purpose of free AI

AZEL

AZEL

Pre-takeoff checklist
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AcrftZeroEngineLand
I may be proving that my high school teachers were correct. They said that "children were evil". So, not being far removed from the status of child, young adults might be almost as evil. But it was cold out, and after we came in from a pickup hockey game we were bored, so we came up with a fascinating game to play with those free AI services. They can't say they don't know, and they start out arrogant and just get worse, so they are easy to bait. Plus, not being human you can do things to them that might otherwise endanger your immortal soul.

You need at least two people to play. Pick a topic that the general public does not see as controversial - maybe macro-scale theory vs micro-scale theory - but has strong arguments on both sides. Then log on and take turns asking questions from the oppositional viewpoints. Watch as the computer twists and turns itself inside out because it can't be "wrong", it must vet what you say, it finds support for both premises, and it cannot reconcile the two.

I'd offer some aviation related suggested themes, but I don't feel like getting banned today.
 
Yep, a perfect demonstration of confirmation bias. Show it to any impressionable loved ones who need to learn better critical thinking skills, and need to learn just how impossible it is to be absolutely sure your opinion is correct on nearly any issue.
 
I'm pretty sure the true purposes of free AI are to socialize AI to the masses, to promote particular brands of AI, and to collect data. Not necessarily in that order. And I supposed it's possible a fourth purpose is to help destabilize the west, but really we don't need any help with that lately.
 
I'm not as easily entertained.
 
I found the true purpose of AI this weekend.

We have very few pictures of our cats before cell phones took photos, and many of them are just awful. On a lark, I decided to take one of them - a particularly awful photo of a wonderful pet - and see what it could do. It took a couple of passes to tweak things, but my jaw literally dropped at the result. This was Rutledge, before and after - one of the two smartest, toughest, and long-lived we've had the pleasure to have had in our lives.

1769424947016.png

Cat pictures are better than politics.
 
AZEL said:
I may be proving that my high school teachers were correct. They said that "children were evil". So, not being far removed from the status of child, young adults might be almost as evil. But it was cold out, and after we came in from a pickup hockey game we were bored, so we came up with a fascinating game to play with those free AI services. They can't say they don't know, and they start out arrogant and just get worse, so they are easy to bait. Plus, not being human you can do things to them that might otherwise endanger your immortal soul.

You need at least two people to play. Pick a topic that the general public does not see as controversial - maybe macro-scale theory vs micro-scale theory - but has strong arguments on both sides. Then log on and take turns asking questions from the oppositional viewpoints. Watch as the computer twists and turns itself inside out because it can't be "wrong", it must vet what you say, it finds support for both premises, and it cannot reconcile the two.

I'd offer some aviation related suggested themes, but I don't feel like getting banned today.
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I do not follow. Of course either side of any subject can be debated, whether or not you believe in what you’re debating. High school debate teams and lawyers have been doing it far longer than generative AI has been around.
 
jesse said:
I do not follow. Of course either side of any subject can be debated, whether or not you believe in what you’re debating. High school debate teams and lawyers have been doing it far longer than generative AI has been around.
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I think his point is simply that many (most?) people are not debaters or lawyers. They don’t think critically. They don’t recognize the possibility of the validity of opposing viewpoints. (They were not exposed to my HS social studies teacher.) Instead, they are secure in the belief that their opinion is the only correct one possible.
 
AZEL said:
I'd offer some aviation related suggested themes, but I don't feel like getting banned today.
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Oh come on, you can't get banned for suggesting high wings have advantages over low wings. Same thing with nose draggers.
 
Children are evil? Must be a really cheerful teachers lounge. (Sarcasm font)
 
It really depends on which AI you used. If you used just an LLM, this is what you're going to get. LLM's aren't intended to come up with information that is "correct", just that the word sequences have been observed before. So it's always going to be agreeable because, yes, it can't be "wrong".
 
midlifeflyer said:
I found the true purpose of AI this weekend.

We have very few pictures of our cats before cell phones took photos, and many of them are just awful. On a lark, I decided to take one of them - a particularly awful photo of a wonderful pet - and see what it could do. It took a couple of passes to tweak things, but my jaw literally dropped at the result. This was Rutledge, before and after - one of the two smartest, toughest, and long-lived we've had the pleasure to have had in our lives.

View attachment 149323

Cat pictures are better than politics.
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You had a blue cat?

GoFly said:
Children are evil? Must be a really cheerful teachers lounge. (Sarcasm font)
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Read WIlliam Goldman's Lord of the Flies.

Trivia alert: Among many other novels, screenplays, stage plays, and non-fiction, Goldman wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride.
 
It's a little more subtle than just "word sequences that have been observed". Text is tokenized, and most people think of a word as a token. Indeed most ai explainers describe it that way. But openai, for example, operates on a token size of four characters, or about .75 words. And this includes punctuation, emojis, etc. So they really do "learn" pretty differently than humans. Then, on top of that, sequences matter, but the statistics are much more complicated than that and deal with proximity and themes in a bunch of different ways. It's those two things combined that make LLMs quite different than web searches. Friend of mine asked me why he should use an LLM instead of google, since they were both going to return the same data. The big difference LLMs synthesize completely new results. Mostly this is useful, sometimes it's a digital fever dream.

This is also why "word sequences that have been observed before" is a simplification worth zooming in on. LLMs create entirely new data. Data constrained by statistics, but entirely new data. For example, you can ask it to create things (e.g. word sequences or photos or music) that have never been seen before and it will do a pretty credible job. Below, I ask chatgpt to create a list of never before seen words for different kinds of snow. I spot checked the first block and about 60% are new words that don't appear in any google searches and the others have never previously been used for snow. All seem like they could, as requested, be used to describe snow.

"give me a list of words for snow that have never been used before"

Love this idea. Here’s a list of entirely new, invented words for snow—no known dictionary use, designed to feel right in different moods and textures. I’ll group them by vibe.

❄️ Soft / Quiet / Falling Snow​

  • whisperfall
  • silthaze
  • featherdrift
  • murmflake
  • downveil
  • hushdust
  • paleplume
  • stillfrost

️ Windblown / Sideways / Harsh Snow​

  • knifefall
  • riftspind
  • shardrift
  • skreel
  • whitehowl
  • icewrack
  • snarlfall
  • coldlash

Crusted / Old / Dangerous Snow​

  • glasspack
  • deadcrust
  • hardveil
  • snapice
  • frostbone
  • coldscale
  • breakskin
  • icehide

️ Blowing Snow / Ground Blizzard​

  • ghostdrift
  • lowblind
  • whiteloom
  • skulkfrost
  • driftsmear
  • blindspill
  • groundveil

Poetic / Mythic Snow​

  • starash
  • moonfall
  • skyremains
  • winterveil
  • paleshroud
  • nightflurry
  • coldlight
  • snowether

Strange / Abstract / Modern​

  • cryodust
  • frozdata
  • white noise (as snow, not sound)
  • staticfall
  • cold bloom
  • snowlag
  • ice latency

Aggressive / Metal / Extreme​

  • frostslaughter
  • white rupture
  • ice barrage
  • coldquake
  • snowburn
  • frosthammer
  • hailveil

Example usage​

  • “The runway vanished under a skin of glasspack.”
  • “By morning the valley was filled with ghostdrift.”
  • “Snow fell like starash, quiet and final.”
 
172andyou said:
Wait, what? WhereTF did you go to school!
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In a rural area (I have learned from fellow students, here at Akademgorodok on the St. Croix, that the specific geography is unimportant) where (1) the school had a really difficult time getting any money out of taxpayers / voters. (2) The school's "paying customers" were mostly local businesses who wanted workers (and didn't really want them to leave the community) and parents who wanted free "child care" services. (3) The school faced a real disadvantage in hiring staff. Admin was basically locals who listened to the "paying customers". Support staff were locals whose parents dutifully dropped them off at the free "childcare" for 13 years and obtained a diploma and 3.0 GPA without absorbing so many facts that their brains woke up. And teachers were drawn to the area by professional desperation or a desire to live in a relatively inexpensive but beautiful area and have a three-month paid vacation every year. So, those students who asked questions were really, really annoying.
 
AZEL said:
You need at least two people to play. Pick a topic that the general public does not see as controversial - maybe macro-scale theory vs micro-scale theory - but has strong arguments on both sides. Then log on and take turns asking questions from the oppositional viewpoints. Watch as the computer twists and turns itself inside out because it can't be "wrong", it must vet what you say, it finds support for both premises, and it cannot reconcile the two.
Click to expand...

We'll know AI has finally arrived when you do this and eventually it comes back and says "The only winning move is not to play."
 
strikes2k said:
We'll know AI has finally arrived when you do this and eventually it comes back and says "The only winning move is not to play."
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After some brainiacs created a meal substitute called "soylent" it's kind of surprising there isn't an LLM named Joshua.
 
Domenick said:
Read WIlliam Goldman's Lord of the Flies.

Trivia alert: Among many other novels, screenplays, stage plays, and non-fiction, Goldman wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride.
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Thank you for that trivia! I never liked Princess Bride, and I never knew why until now. That book? It seemed terrible when I first read it, and more so today. My take of Goldman is that he was such a miserably dark person that children shouldn't be subjected to his influence. We need kids exposed to Mr Rogers, not a darker less developed version of Nietzsche.

There was a real life incident that started out a bit similar to Lord of the Flies. A bunch of kids ended up stranded on an island near New Zealand. Spoiler? They got along fine. Most kids are good.

www.theguardian.com

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently to William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
To put things in perspective:

Starbucks is a bank
Apple is a luxury brand
Google is an ad agency
Amazon is a data company
Red Bull is a media company
Mickey McDs' in a real-estate company along with COSTCO
Facebook is a surveillance company

Free AI is a data, surveillance, media, and ad agency all wrapped into on package.

I know, I'll grab my tin foil hat and coat....
 
Thanks, Albany Tom, who posted this link

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months​

When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently to William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman
www.theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com

An important factor in this story is that the 6 boys were good friends at the start, age 13 to 17. Nothing fictional about them.

The Guardian add clicks down easily.

A key quote from the story "“I’ve got six kids here,” he told the operator. “Stand by,” came the response. Twenty minutes ticked by. (As Peter tells this part of the story, he gets a little misty-eyed.) Finally, a very tearful operator came on the radio, and said: “You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it’s them, this is a miracle!”
 
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