the latest horrible updates from our new robot overlords

“microsoft paid $13 billion for this technology” (A bunch of Bing Chatbot goofs. These specific ones have already been patched…but the staff has to do separate after-the-fact fixes for every individual wrong answer, and there will always be more of those. They can’t fix the underlying problem of “ChatGPT generates answers to statistically-likely questions, whether or not those are the questions you asked.”)

“PetaPixel has put together a bias comparison of the three major text-to-image generators. […] All the results below are straight out of the respective generative AI tools with no tweaking.” You can probably predict what most of the biases are, but it’s fascinating and instructive to see how they look in practice. (Also fascinating: Midjourney’s results are dramatic and fantastical, Stable Diffusion’s look like middle-of-the-road stock photos, and DALL-E’s are stock photos with bad cropping.)

“AI was asked to create images of Black African docs treating white kids. How’d it go?” (Again, I bet you can guess!)

“UnitedHealthcare, the largest health insurance company in the US, is allegedly using a deeply flawed AI algorithm to override doctors’ judgments and wrongfully deny critical health coverage to elderly patients.”

“A sleepy town in southern Spain is in shock after it emerged that AI-generated naked images of young local girls had been circulating on social media without their knowledge. […] So far more than 20 girls, aged between 11 and 17, have come forward as victims of the app’s use in or near Almendralejo.”

This last article isn’t as acutely horrifying as most of the rest, but I can’t stop thinking about what it reveals about our soulless corporate dystopia:

“Everyone involved openly jokes—or perhaps secretly fears—that no one reads the responses before tapping the Buy button anyway. […] Bonney, at the startup Vendorful, still has nightmares about a 700-question RFP that he filled out several years ago, stuffed with queries that were outdated in the cloud computing era. Halfway in, Bonney’s cofounder turned to him looking deflated and said, ‘We’re not going to win this, but we’re too far in to stop.'”

I want to yell at all these people. Your jobs are nonsense BS! You all openly know that your jobs are an arms race of who can produce the most nonsense BS! Why are you celebrating that you’ve trained a chatbot to do the nonsense BS, instead of just calling a ceasefire? You’re congratulating each other for teaching ChatGPT to sew more of the emperor’s new clothes — when you already know the emperor is naked! Please, please, put down the chatbot, go outside, and think about what you could be doing with your lives if you stopped trying to produce nonsense BS.