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Why your AI assistant is suddenly selling to you:
Chatbots are employed every day as teachers, counsellors, coders and escorts. Now they are taking on another role: salesmen. Advertisements are popping up ever more frequently in users’ conversations with large language models, punctuating chats with promotions. Consumers’ search queries, editing sessions and even intimate moments are increasingly at risk of interruption by sponsored messages.
Who could possibly have predicted this???
I believe the notebook provides a basically comprehensive model for information technology:
- Easy to manufacture anywhere on Earth
- Available in many configurations, from cheap to luxe
- Never runs out of power
- Never surprises you with an OS update
- Totally flexible interface: becomes whatever you imagine
- Totally private … yet never locks you out for lack of a password
- Can be shared when needed: as easy as tearing out a page
- Durable and reliable
- Data is sensibly partitioned: loss of a notebook is annoying, not life-ruining
- Compostable 😌
I know some of those sound a bit silly, even glib, but I think they’re all very serious, even the last one. I have purchased and trashed enough e-readers!! I don’t want any more plastic confections. I don’t want any more accounts.
I am so enjoying Robin’s metamorphoses.
You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education - The New York Times:
Besides, so the thinking goes, kids today are digital natives. Because they’ve grown up around screens, their brains must be fundamentally different from those of older generations. Teachers need to “meet them where they are” by catering to shorter attention spans and swapping books for multimedia lessons. The more that math and language assignments resemble a video game, the more students will learn.
Every step in this argument is wrong.
This is good news, but not quite as good as I thought it was after reading the first few words
Sober or blotto
This is your motto
Keep muddling through
A Manufacturing Town by L.S. Lowry (National Media Museum/Royal Photographic Society/SSPL/Getty Images), from an essay by Salford’s own Terry Eagleton.
When I look at the choices offered to Americans by their two chief political parties, I always remember a line from Woody Allen’s “My Speech to the Graduates”: “One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
I understand that this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I find Alec Goldfarb’s Indian classical music on guitar fascinating. ♫
My chatbot gives me
The gift my unsoul longs for:
Freedom from knowledge.
Ars Technica: “Meta is building an artificial intelligence version of Mark Zuckerberg that can engage with employees in his stead.” I wonder if anyone will be able to tell the difference.
After decades of business email, many people still default to Reply All when they’re talking only to the person who sent the original message. (I am also grieved by how many original senders fail to use BCC to deter the reply-allers.) You’d think people would have this sorted by now.
My ST:TNG posts continue with a reflection on powers of Q.
Currently reading: An Army at Dawn The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 by Rick Atkinson. A brilliantly pitiless account — pitiless in that Atkinson makes no attempt to disguise how radically incompetent the Allies were at this early stage of the war. Tactical planners who couldn’t plan, logisticians who couldn’t organize, officers who were reckless when circumstances called for caution and timid when they called for boldness, navigators who couldn’t navigate, helmsmen who couldn’t steer, drivers who couldn’t drive, communications officers who couldn’t communicate, artillerymen who couldn’t aim, infantrymen who ran brainlessly in any and all directions or went to sleep under hedges. If it weren’t so tragic it would be farcical. And if, as some wanted, the bosses had ignored North Africa and headed straight for France, I’d be writing this in German. 📚
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.
I’ve added a highly selective bibliography to Cosmos Malick.
The chatbot hopes for
Right-brain wisdom, but gets only
Hallucinations.
A point about the rise of LLMs that doesn’t get enough play: Millions of people turn to them because Google searches are so much worse than they used to be. I wonder how many people would never have bothered to try chatbots if their Google searches had turned up the most relevant results.
