tarknassus

When AI assistants eulogise their work in this fashion, it is no wonder that students find it hard to eschew their support, even when, deep down, they must know that this amounts to cheating. AI will never tell you that your work is subpar, your thinking shoddy, your analysis naive. Instead, it will suggest “a polish”, a deeper edit, a sense check for grammar and accuracy. It will offer more ways to get involved and help – as with social media platforms, it wants users hooked and jonesing for their next fix. Like The Terminator, it won’t stop until you’ve killed it, or shut your laptop.

No wonder people are hooked onto this - it’s a saccharine dopamine machine eroding our critical thinking and cognitive processing. It’s designed to be that way.

Speaking of dependence on AI:

Rohan found his summer internship in the finance department of a multinational conglomerate with the help of Chat, but, with one more year of university to go, he thinks it may be time to reduce his reliance on AI. “I’ve always known in my head that it was probably better for me to do the work on my own,” he says. “I’m just a bit worried that using ChatGPT will make my brain kind of atrophy because I’m not using it to its fullest extent.”

Of course, it’s not all about cheating or using the easiest possible methods to submit essays or papers -

For many, talking to a computer is easier than laying one’s soul bare in front of another human, however qualified they may be, and a recent study showed that people actually preferred the therapy offered by ChatGPT to that provided by human counsellors. In March, there were 16.7m posts on TikTok about using ChatGPT as a therapist.

Reminds me of the OMM 0000 from the excellent THX-1138 - “My time is yours.” And not in a good way. I’d rather talk to a professional human being, and have found it somewhat beneficial in the past. They had a knowledge of local support groups or events that I doubt would have been offered by AI.

Finally, it seems that Google’s Gemini adverts may not be far off the mark for seeing how little common sense and logic processing people have these days:

As I read through the thousands of prompts, there are essay plan requests, and domestic crises solved: “How to unblock bathroom sink after I have vomited in it and then filled it up with water?”, “Preventive Tips for Next Time – Avoid using sinks for vomiting when possible. A toilet is easier to clean and less prone to clogging.” Relationship advice is sought, “Write me a text message about ending a casual relationship”, alongside tech queries, “Why is there such an emphasis on not eating near your laptop to maintain laptop health?”. And, then, there are the nonsense prompts: “Can you get drunk if you put alcohol in a humidifier and turn it on?” “Yes, using a humidifier to vaporise alcohol can result in intoxication, but it is extremely dangerous.” I wonder if we’re asking more questions simply because there are more places to ask them. Or, perhaps, as grownups, we feel that we can’t ask other people certain things without our questions being judged. Would anyone ever really need to ask another person to give them “ a list of all kitchen appliances”? I hope that in a server room somewhere ChatGPT had a good chuckle at that one, though its answer shows no hint of pity or condescension.

Gah. Puke in a sink? Get some rubber gloves and push the gunk out or extract it and throw it in the toilet to flush it. This is not rocket science.

“I’m sorry to say I cannot accept any more money from disinformation groups political parties, particularly from certain regions* because another region won’t let me put your ads out there for the plebs users to be manipulated informed.”

^{* - Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and other associated places.}

My wife only asked me to ‘follow’ her with location sharing because there was a creepy dude in the area who was approaching women. Otherwise we trust each other enough and actually communicate about the things we do. Plus we don’t cheat on each other - there’s enough stress in life without adding to it lol.

“People can no longer remember passwords good enough to reliably defend against dictionary attacks, and are much more secure if they choose a password too complicated to remember and then write it down.

We’re all good at securing small pieces of paper. I recommend that people write their valuable passwords down on a small piece of paper, and keep it with their other valuable small pieces of paper: in their wallet.

Obscure it somehow if you want added security: write “bank” instead of the URL of your bank, transpose some of the characters, leave off your userid. This will give you a little bit of time if you lose your wallet and have to change your passwords. But even if you don’t do any of this, writing down your impossible-to-memorize password is more secure than making your password easy to memorize.”

Bruce Schneier - 2005.

I was intrigued by this point:

We replied saying that there’s a lot of scam apps on the App Store, and that there isn’t an easy report scam button. We should have clarified that the relevant button only shows after installing an app, as well as being located at the bottom of the page - a text link saying “report a problem”.

And Apples reply?

Gary … replied with what sounded like, and hallucinated like, a Gen AI answer: “it’s on every single product page for every single app that’s available on the App Store, very prominently”.

No it’s not. The button does indeed only appear on installed apps, which is a problem if you’re already aware of issues with the app.

And it’s not prominent - it’s placed right at the bottom and in the small text like the privacy of policy link above it. You could easily miss it as you could just perceive it be part of the privacy/terms links - and who has time to read those??

Whilst that’s true, it’s a good opportunity to push Linux as a potential alternative in a few different ways - reduction of e-waste, free and private oriented alternative, simple (in some situations/distro) for certain basic users, or even someone who wants to get a little more technical. It’s good to promote the idea that there is more to computers than a monolithic monopoly called Microsoft.

All our clients use it. It’s bloody annoying. I have dozens who use WhatsApp, and like three who use Signal. Ironically, the three that use Signal also use WhatsApp and guess which one they use to contact us?

It’s a problem when it’s got mass market traction to get people to switch. I’m still trying to get off Messenger but some people insist on it… Going to have to get firm about that.

The enshittification process in a nutshell.

To the surprise of nobody… 😆

They will probably use the YouTube model - “you’re wrong and that’s it”.