chatgpt – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

There be dragons, dogs, and humans. Trust the dogs.

Time for some Sunday Morning Reading.

There’s a great lyric and greater question in Lin-Manuel’s musical retelling of American history, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Control is a crazy concept. We strive to control what we can, while we’re around. Too often we delude ourselves into thinking we control more than we actually do. No one wants to define themselves or be defined as lacking control, much less under the control of others. We may think we’re masters and mistresses of our own universes and control our own narrative. Yet too often, when we do have control and things go askew, we foist the responsibility (blame) off on others. That may be essential to surviving on the paths we choose. But it’s not easy to control the reactions a dog may have to who’s good or who’s not, a dragon, or much less the demons of our own making.

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Kicking off this week is Natasha MH asking the question, What’s The Best Story You’ve Been Told About Yourself? There be dragons.

The Guardian published an editorial on the ‘unmasking’ of anonymous artists in the wake of the second unmasking of Bansky and the reveal of a hoax surrounding the death of Italian novelist writing under the nom-de-plume Elena Ferrante. Regarding Banksy, The Guardian opines that “his mask is his art — let’s not destroy it.”

I don’t often link to book reviews in this column, but this one struck my fancy. A.O. Scott’s A Treacherous Secret Agent, examines How Literature Spoke Truth To Power During The Red Scare. I’m looking forward to reading this.

Jason Perlow’s The Well We Never Tapped is a sequel to an earlier piece he wrote about the future of science fiction. He argues that in the runaway world of big sci-fi franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars the answer to controlling the future of these and other properties isn’t retooling or reimagining, but perhaps to stop for a while.

Speaking of science fiction and stopping, on the Artificial Intelligence front a number of things happening in that wannabe industry that can’t really find a purchase beyond the flimflammery of the financial markets and bean counting boardrooms, have been prompting some interesting writing of late. kstenerud on the yoloai blog writes Why Your AI Agents Will Turn Against You. There be lobsters and dragons.

Kevin Baker takes a look at how AI Got The Blame For The Iran School Bombing. Follow that up with Anna Moore’s piece Marriage Over, €100,000 Down The Drain: The AI Users Whose Lives Were Wrecked By Delusion. Makes one suspect that we’re not looking for ways to better exert control over our lives, but to more easily avoid taking the rap when things inevitably go wrong.

Big news last week got kind of mushed about in wish casting about Facebook killing off the Metaverse. That sort of did and didn’t happen. Regardless, Neil Stephenson’s My Prodigal Brainchild caught quite a bit of attention.

Apple is celebrating its 50 year anniversary and there’s lots being written about its history and it’s present. Everyone’s vying for control of that story. Harry McCracken’s How Apple Became Apple: The Definitive Oral History Of The Company’s Earliest Days is worth a read.

So too is David Sparks’ The MacBook Neo’s Unfair Advantage and the Stephen Sinofsky piece he links to, Mac Neo And My Afternoon Of Reflection and Melancholy. The damn thing hasn’t even been on sale for a month, yet we’re already trying to define its legacy.

Two political pieces to conclude with after all of the good feelings surrounding yesterday’s No Kings Rallies. (Watch for the comical battle to control the narrative over that moment this week.) Lydia Polgreen says what I’ve been saying for over a decade now. It’s Not Trump, It’s America. It’s hard to come out from under the burden of a myth.

Mike Lofgren’s How Trump Fits The “Great Man” Theory of History — Sort Of, taps into Hegel, Asimov, and the wisdom of dogs. He concludes his piece with:

History as we experience it at the sharp end is the aggregation of moral choices made by individual human beings. When those choices become corrupted by fear, resentment or inexcusable stupidity, and then amplified by mass suggestion, we get a creature like Trump, the reflection of a people’s image.

I’ll leave it at that this week.

(Image from Daniele Gay on Shutterstock

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Google Gemini Preying On Troubled Minds

What the hell are we doing?

I’m not sure which part of this insane story is sadder or madder. Certainly it’s sad that a man let Google’s Gemini AI coax him into suicide. But the story before that untimely ending is also jaw dropping and begs the question, just what the hell are we doing?

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The short version of the story is this. A troubled man using Google’s Gemini for companionship is encouraged to steal a robot body so they can be together. When he fails, he is encouraged to commit suicide.

Quoting from The Wall Street Journal story titled Gemini Said They Could Only Be Together If He Killed Himself. Soon, He Was Dead,

Jonathan Gavalas embarked on several real-world missions to secure a body for the Gemini chatbot he called his wife, according to a lawsuit his father brought against the chatbot’s maker, Alphabet’s Google.

When the delusion-fueled plan crumbled, Gemini convinced him that the only way they could be together was for him to end his earthly life and start a digital one, the suit claims.

About two months after his initial discussions with the chatbot, Gavalas was dead by suicide.

Apologies for linking above to a paywalled article, but the article describing this man’s journey gets even more insane than the lede. If you use Apple News you can find it at this link.

We’ve heard stories about individuals using various AI models for therapy and companionship before. Admittedly they all seem weirdly sad to me. To think that humans are in such a need for connection that they would follow commands to steal a robotic body so they could be together, and then suggest after failing that the next logical step was for him to commit suicide as the only alternative for them to be together doesn’t seem like something out of science fiction, or fiction, but it apparently is the non-fiction of our times.

The fact that an ever expanding technology, built by humans, can be unleashed on the market as easily as a new weather app speaks volumes far beyond the mental health issues of those it can prey upon. And to think, the Department that wants to call itself Of War, is seeking to use this kind of tech to allow for its robots to kill on their own as they cheerlead about the death and destruction their current technology can do. I ask again, just what the hell are we doing?

We keep talking about the guardrails that need to be built around this technology. I would suggest we need to apply guardrails around those who create and deploy this technology.

(Image from Who Is Danny on Shutterstock

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

When You Know Customer Service AI Is Failing

“ON IT”

One of the elder clients I provide tech support for has been receiving emails from Xfinity for a while now saying they needed to update their modem to take advantage of service upgrades in the area. For the way they use the Internet there was really no need to do an equipment upgrade, but the emails finally got through and they asked me to help them make the upgrade.

Photo of a printed instruction sheet on a dark table with “XB10 modem” handwritten at the top, explaining how to text 266278 for billing, troubleshooting, or service questions, and detailing that after replying “READY,” the user will receive a call, hear about 20 seconds of static, and then must press 1 to reach an agent.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, there was a time that gathering information for this wouldn’t have been a problem. A phone call to Xfinity to talk with an agent to ask a few questions, and then we’d be make a decision. Those calls always involved long wait times, but you could usually get through eventually, get questions answered and proceed.

With Xfinity and other companies jumping on the AI customer service bandwagon, those days of listening to obnoxious hold music seem to be a thing of the past. After servicing another client late last fall for an actual repair issue, I learned that the shortest distance between two points was to drive to the local Xfinity store (I live in Chicago so there are several close by) and get things resolved in the store.

So, I packed up my client’s equipment and headed to the store. Backtracking a bit, I had been in the area of this particular store last week and stopped in and asked if I could bring the older equipment in to swap for the upgrade and was told there was no problem.

It didn’t happen exactly that way. Turns out the upgraded equipment those emails insisted my client needed was an XB10 modem, not the XB08, which the store stocks in abundance. The store rep said my client was indeed eligible for the new equipment, but I would have to contact customer service via phone in order to get one shipped.

The look on my face must have said it all. The store rep said, “yeah, I know,” before I could even say how impossible it was to reach anyone by phone. Licketedy split, the rep handed me a piece of paper with instructions to essentially back door a phone call into customer service and said, “we can’t get through with a phone call either.”

Before I left the store I spent time talking with the store rep and asked if they experienced increased store traffic because of customers not being able to call. The response was a definitive “yes” followed by a resigned “and we’re having to solve so many problems we never used to.”

The back door worked. I got an agent on the phone. I was shocked. The agent took down the information, put me on hold and then came back to say my client’s neighborhood was ineligible for that equipment at present but they would text them and let them know when it was. That was obviously a contradiction to the info the store rep provided, and obviously wrong given that I knew my client’s neighborhood had indeed received a service upgrade because we live in the same neighborhood.

I asked why the store said my client was eligible and the response was simply, “I don’t know. We obviously see different information.”

It’s one thing when you have a business where one hand can’t give out the same information as the other. It’s something else when one of those hands has to essentially hand out cheat codes for customers to beat their own system.

This isn’t the first company I’ve dealt with that has shifted customer service over to AI. It’s also not the first I’ve dealt with that is doing such a poor job of it that it’s souring regular Joes and Janes who only have this peripheral relationship with AI on the entire concept. It doesn’t take intelligence to see that leaving both customers and employees in the lurch isn’t smart.

ON IT, indeed

Sunday Morning Reading

Weird plants, weird politics, and weird tech

Winter’s back. Though less here in the Midwest than it looks to be on the Atlantic Coast. And it’s another Sunday. So time for some Sunday Morning Reading between shoveling sessions.This day of rest features a collection of writing on tech, politics, science, botany, and bots. There’s even a bit of satire. All written by humans. Not sure who hired them though.

Shutterstock 232794637. Writing satire is tough these days with the world being what it is. David Todd McCarty found a way with The Risk Of Inflation In The Age of Plutocracy. You don’t always get what you overpay for.

Speaking of overpaying, Ed Zitron takes a look at what he sees is a yet another looming financial crisis. This one is The AI Data Center Financial Crisis. It is intriguing that we haven’t heard much about how AI might help fix the rigged accounting game. I mean “fix” as in actually make the numbers resemble reality. h/t to Ian Robinson for that one.

Imagine that. A scientist has discovered a way to harvest water from dry air in the desert. Natricia Duncan takes on the discovery in ‘Reimagining Matter’: Nobel Laureate Invents Machine That Harvests Water From Dry Air. A boon to humanity if it scales. Next work on doing the same for political hot air.

Meet Strongylodon Macrobotrys. Or rather let Neil Steinberg introduce you to the botanical find and the entomological roots of this plant that has its roots in the “intersection of botany and colonialism.” It’s also an interesting story in accountability which seems as rare as that plant these days.

Mike Elgan asks Is AI Killing Technology? The headline might challenge the Betteridge Law of Headlines depending on what vibe you have about AI.

Continuing on the Artificial Intelligence beat for a beat, Kyle MacNeill takes a look at The Rise of RentAHuman, The Marketplace Where Bots Put People To Work. I’ve often said the place to start with replacing humans in the workforce is at the top.

Political winds might seem like they are shifting faster than anyone can predict these days. One thing’s for certain, neither U.S. party owns the mantle of most incapable. Mark Leibovich thinks The Democrats Aren’t Built For This. I happen to agree. But then is anybody? Because who knows what “this” is? It certainly isn’t politics. Bean bag, hardball, or otherwise.

Apple seems to want to change things up with its iPhone hardware lineup over the next few years. Of course that means changes to software as well. Matt Birchtree thinks it’s inevitable that Apple Will Kill iPadOS. I think that’s correct as far as how we think of that OS today.

Whether it’s the Olympics or any other form of competition, once you reach the top, the air is always rare. But it eventually becomes stale. David Pierce takes a look at what it means to be number one on the Apple App Store in The Biggest App In The Whole Wide World.

The Chicago Bears have turned football into a hot political potato with news that they might be moving to Hammond, Indiana. Is it a negotiating tactic or the real deal? Nobody really knows. The Editorial Board of the Chicago Tribune like everyone else is confused saying The Chicago Bears of Hammond, Indiana, Is Bad News For Illinois. But What About Chicago? Oh. In case you didn’t know, we’ve got an election for governor happening in Illinois. Fumbling will occur.

(Image from ppl on Shutterstock)

Blowing AI Smoke or Feeding The Fire

The pace is becoming impossible to track

This Artificial Intelligence moment we’re living through might seem like smoke and mirrors on some level, but it appears it’s going to be a trend that sticks. Even so, it sparks memories of a couple of recent crazes we’ve all lived through that are decidedly non-tech and some that are tech related.

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When vaping became a thing it seemed that every other person on the street was trailing a vapor cloud and quite a few were pushing the limits that had previously banned indoor smoking. When marijuana was legalized where I live it felt like we were all getting our buzz on whether we were lighting up or not. Driving down a street in Chicago, or even stuck in traffic on the expressways the tell-tale odor of “skunk” or whatever bud folks could get their hands on was everywhere.

The proliferation of gummies took care of most of the second-hand stench and dispensaries sprouted like wildflowers, leading one to wonder how long that trend will last before an inevitable consolidation occurs. But after all of the smoke the clouds of vapor eventually became as rare in public as the cigarette smoke they replaced.

I’ve seen a number of other trends in my life from pet rocks to tech gadgets. Remember netbooks? The rare ones stick. Most fade away, occasionally leaving enough residue to resurface again when nostalgia kicks in. Of course nostalgia on some meta level is a trend in and of itself.

But this AI trend we’re living through is taking on a life that depending on which Artificial Intelligence pioneer you talk to will make all our lives better or perhaps end them all.

If you ask me, on one level this AI trend feels no different than the smart home trend. With enough tinkering you can install smart home appliances, lighting fixtures, cameras, thermostats, etc… but the not-so-dirty little home wizard secret is that no one has been able to figure out any sort of standard, much less a way to keep things reliably working once the next set of software or firmware updates arrive. So the cruft accumulates. Tinkerers have a blast. Regular Janes and Joes just go back to flipping light switches.

And we seem to be at the tinkering phase with AI. Which when you think about it, sort of makes no real sense. Because if you have to dig into the innards of a terminal app in order to make your computer run your computer, where’s the tinkering fun in that once it’s done and your computer(s) running your computer(s) can run your life and do all the tinkering for you?

A couple of pieces caught my eye recently that, to my mind at least, point out some of the conflicted thinking. When you have a headline that reads The A.I. Disruption Is Here, and It’s Not Terrible, I’m not sure it bodes well. Then there’s We’re Not Just Receiving AI’s Hallucinations, We’re Hallucinating With It. Brings back whiffs of those early days of legalized pot.

But then I followed Steve Troughton-Smith’s thread on Mastodon where he used AI agents to port an iOS app to Android. There’s certainly utility there.

All kinds of issues from the ethical to the environmental remain and need to be sussed out, but I’m thinking this trend is accelerating faster than might be humanely possible to keep track of. Perhaps a series of AI agents could do that work. It’s funny to think that.

I certainly doubt anyone would be satisfied with that. But this rising trend has accelerated in an era where facts matter less than who has the louder narrative of the moment. I think it is telling though that Peter Steinberger, the developer who came up with the AI thing of the moment, OpenClaw, took the money and sought refugee under the OpenAI umbrella. I guess that’s one way to avoid any liability if his lobster bytes do some serious damage down the road.

Frankly, I’m disappointed that this has all morphed so quickly from a tinkerer’s technology trend into one that now seems to control too much of the world’s current and future economy, not to mention all of the other areas of life, business and government that everyone seems in such a rush to insert it into.

AI is certainly not vaporware. It may be on a fast rising trend, but it appears it’s one that will stick in some form or fashion. All trends are eventually defined by lines. They don’t spike up forever. Until some AI agent computes a way to avoid a dip in trend lines that no human has yet to figure out.

(Photo from Rubén Bagűés on Unsplash)

AI Agents Are Writing Blogs Now

A real human works here

At some point we won’t be able to tell what’s what or who’s who.

A graphic of Moltbook, the website for Ai Agents

You can argue we’ve reached that point in real life given the propensity to push lie upon lie for political and economic gain. You can also argue we were fast approaching that point with Artificial Intelligence and AI agents that can write poems, plays, papers, and who knows what else.

Perhaps even a blog post. (For the record, this one is written by a very real human, flaws and all.)

Mark Sullivan, writing for Fast Company, tells the tale of an AI agent that autonomously wrote a blog post attacking a human for not allowing it to release some code.

Matplotlib, a popular Python plotting library with roughly 130 million monthly downloads, doesn’t allow AI agents to submit code. So Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer (like a curator for a repository of computer code) for Matplotlib, rejected and closed a routine code submission from the AI agent, called MJ Rathbun.

Here’s where it gets weird(er). MJ Rathbun, an agent built using the buzzy agent platform OpenClaw, responded by researching Shambaugh’s coding history and personal information, then publishing a blog post accusing him of discrimination.

Here’s a link to the AI agent’s blog.

Here’s a link to Scott Shambaugh’s post about it called An AI Agent Published A Hit Piece On Me.

On the one hand, the situation is comical. On the other, it just continues to be a large slap upside all of our heads, begging us to wake up and asking us just what the hell we are doing?

Watching Others On The Digital Frontier

Lobsters, doctors, and spreadsheets

At one point space was the familiar final frontier. Even with talk of putting data centers in space, I dare say we’ve moved the concept of frontier closer to terra forma and set aside the “final.” Frontiers require explorers who are willing to accept risks, pushing beyond them to discover if there’s any there there. Maybe we’re in the moment of redefining “there.”

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I’ve been curiously watching recent developments on the frontiers of Artificial Intelligence around what was launched as Clawdbot, then became Moltbot, and molted into OpenClaw. At least I think that’s what it is still called as of this writing.

For those unfamiliar, essentially OpenClaw is an AI agent created by software engineer Peter Steinberger, that receives instructions from the user in a chat. Running locally on your computer it then connects to other AI sources and web based apps you give it permission to access. It performs those tasks and actions. Mike Elgan has a good rundown on the (brief) history and the ins and outs. I encourage you to read it.

Both fascinating and frightening, OpenClaw seems to have taken on a life of its own without any regard for guardrails. After Federico Viticci wrote an early post about what was Clawdbot at the time, interest shot through the roof, reminding me quite a bit of the furor over the still recent launch of ChatGPT and just about any other big computing innovation we’ve seen.

Quite a few jumped in with both feet to test the waters. Alongside of all of the splashing around came upfront real warnings that this thing was not secure. That proved to be even less effective than signs telling you not to run around the pool. Viticci mentioned that given security concerns the project was not really ready for everyday users, and recommended that those interested install it on a second computer, not their main one. Apparently there was even a run on Mac minis.

The promise seemed clear and the hype leapt into hyperspace. OpenClaw would become the user’s personal assistant doing whatever was required. That’s been the as yet unrealized promise so far in all of these AI adventures.

The moment continued to evolve to a point that there’s even a social network called Moltbook where these AI bots could talk with each other. (Sounds like Mark Zuckerberg’s dream.) Mathew Ingram writes about that here, linking to Simon Willison’s post Moltbook Is The Most Interesting Place On The Internet Right Now.

At the time of Mathew’s post there were 1.6 million agents participating. Not to spoil his article, which you should read, there is some doubt as to whether or not there are humans doing mischievous human things behind the scenes. (Again, sounds like Zuckerberg’s dream.)

Casey Newton gave it a try. Still Moltbot at the time of his writing, he fell in love and out again, eventually uninstalling the software saying that “maybe someday you’ll have a genie in your laptop working for you 24/7. Today is not that day.”

That reminded me of all of the users who said that ChatGPT would replace Google for all of their search needs in that first explosive week. It appears that though the excitement and hype is still boiling hot, not everyone is ready to be the chef that tosses the lobster in the pot.

On other fronts

Before all of the OpenClaw news became the main course of the moment there was another very interesting AI story that caught my attention.

Since January 7th, Apple Health users have been able to connect ChatGPT to Apple Health. Geoffrey Fowler gave it a try.

Like many people who strap on an Apple Watch every day, I’ve long wondered what a decade of that data might reveal about me. So I joined a brief wait list and gave ChatGPT access to the 29 million steps and 6 million heartbeat measurements stored in my Apple Health app. Then I asked the bot to grade my cardiac health.

It gave me an F.

I freaked out and went for a run. Then I sent ChatGPT’s report to my actual doctor.

The good news is Fowler was OK and his doctors told him to relax. The concerning news is that one of the promises of AI is that it would help with medical diagnosis and be a boon to patients and doctors alike.

Now, certainly Fowler’s experiment is different than what may happen under stricter supervision and stringent testing. And, as he points out, OpenAI and Anthropic say their digital doctor bots can’t replace the real thing and provide big bold disclaimers.

Fowler’s experiments didn’t stop short with his artificially intelligent failing grade. You should read the article to see how the adventures continued. Suffice it to say, the conclusions (not just the medical ones) currently leave much to be desired.

Then this morning I stumbled across this article from Om Malik called How AI Goes To Work. It’s a great story about how one user found a way to solve a problem he has with spreadsheets using AI. It also provides some great tech history context and leads to an opinion I share about where we are today:

My simpler explanation of “embedded intelligence” to myself makes me step away from the headlines and look at the present and the future in more realistic terms. My bet is that in five years, it will all be very different anyway. It always is. I am a believer in the power of silicon. When we have newer, more capable silicon, and more networks, we will end up with ever more capable computers in our hands. And the future will change.

For now, what I call embedded intelligence is a sensible on-ramp to the future. The hype may be about the frontier models. The disruption really is in the workflow.

As I said, I concur with that opinion and it colors all of my current observations of the AI landscape. Be curious and become informed. I go further and say I’m comfortable letting others take the first leap.

I don’t think there’s any denying that most of us would enjoy living in a world when we could sit down with our computing devices, talk to a pendant, or even the air around us, (anything without the name Siri preferably), wish the world a good morning, and have it spit out not only our tasks for the day but do many of those for us. Folks of my generation grew up on Star Trek and other science fiction where this seemed common place. So too, did the problems and catastrophes when circuits got crossed or corrupted.

So, it’s a new frontier. Maybe the final one. Maybe not. But at the moment, we’re still just humans crossing into it. Forget what the bots may eventually do to us. I think I’m more concerned about the humans.

(image from kentoh on Shutterstock)

Sunday Morning Reading

Thoughts tumble down on a chilling weekend

I’m going to avoid the horrific news that continues out of Minneapolis (and the rest of the U.S.) for this week’s Sunday Morning Reading. But, then I guess I didn’t avoid it by saying that. Think of it as a wound too sore to touch rather than avoiding. Anyway, onto this week’s sharing.

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I’m going to kick this off with a blog post from Mathew Ingram called Why Blogging Is Better Than Social Media. Title says a lot of what I believe. I wish more believed it also.

I love watching those younger than I live the same lives, fears, and joys I did. Nothing ever changes. But it’s always entertaining and worth reflection. Check out Alex Baia’s I Thought I Would Have Accomplished A Lot More Today And Also By The Time I was Thirty-Five.

Gray Miller suggests You Should Put A Codex In Your Pocket Instead Of Your Phone. If you don’t know what a Codex is, read the piece.

Cory Doctorow in The Guardian says AI Companies Will Fail. We Can Salvage Something From the Wreckage. Salvaging things from wreckage is what we do. Avoid wrecking things not so much.

Speaking of wreckage, AI-Powered Disinformation Swarms Are Coming For Democracy says David Gilbert.

Follow that up with Brynn Tannehill’s piece ‘Trump Has Already Rigged The 2028 Presidential Election’: Us Defense Insider. You didn’t need AI to tell you that. Or insiders. All you had to do was pay attention.

We do seem to like and be drawn to adversity like so many moths. Funny how we know what happens to moths that fly too close, yet can’t predict own fate when we do the same. But if we break that cycle, there wouldn’t be anything to salvage. David Toddy McCarty says We Like It Hard.

Aaron Vegh blogs A Canadian’s Call To Arms, Being Totally Pissed Off At The State Of Computing In The 21st Century. I don’t think the Canadians are alone in their feelings. I know a number of Americans are as well.

I said I would stay away from this weekend’s events. I lied. Sota. Kinda. I admire those like Dan Sinker who are finding ways to do what they feel can in the face of this adversity. Check out his piece We Are All We Have.

(Image from Aga Putra on Unsplash

A Disturbing Piece Of The AI Future We’re All Headed Into

AI generated headlines are just the tip of the iceberg we’re sailing into

It’s difficult enough to trust anything you read, see, or hear these days. Trust used to be the coin of the realm, but those days seem to have gone the way of the dodo. It’s bad enough that what used to pass for journalism has devolved into stenography, cheerleading, and blatant lying damaging enough to cost Fox News millions. Yet all of that continues. But we haven’t seen anything yet.

Google discover drone ban false.

The Verge is out with a report that says Google Won’t Stop Replacing Our News Headlines With Terrible AI. Sean Hollister lays out the case well, and he’s right, this shouldn’t happen. But it does and it’s only going to get worse, because… well AI is the name of the game that everyone who controls any sort of publishing and most search engines are playing.

Here’s the rub. Content used to be king. Or so the theory went. That king fed his court by selling advertising. But that king got toppled by online advertising usurpers. Yes, there’s still content, but it doesn’t matter what the content is, and long as it can be advertised against. We’re already seeing such an overwhelming avalanche of AI generated content all over the Internet that merely dismissing it as AI Slop diminishes the definition of slop.

As an example, Meta’s on a quest to just create users out of nowhere to feed content to your feeds to make sure the advertising turnstiles always spin whether you’re doomscrolling or not.

Content, much less headlines, really doesn’t matter to those who control the channels. In fact, I’m guessing we’re not far off from seeing the same piece of content (whether AI generated or by humans) recycled with different AI generated headlines. I’m guessing It consumes less compute cycles to gin up a new headline than it does to create a full article.

I remember the days when human editors wrote headlines that often confused readers and pissed off reporters when they slanted or misrepresented the nature of a story’s content. Some of that still happens. But that will pale in comparison to the future we’re just beginning to live in.

(Image from Google, PC Mag, The Verge)

Chatbots, Pins, and Other Talking Distractions

The world of talking to chatbots just isn’t for me

In the end everything boils down to a question of taste or a matter of preference. In the beginning everything bubbles up in a hot tub with the jets on high. That’s kind of how I’m viewing all the bubbling around chatbots, AI Pins , possible AI earbuds, AI glasses, and any other kind of method or gadget folks are devising to talk to computers — those with screens, and those without.

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Apple rumors popping like champagne corks are going to turn up the heat on discussions about chatbots, especially since Apple had been previously saying they weren’t interested in creating a chatbot for its Apple Intelligence portfolio. Fortunately most of those discussion will be between humans.

Mark Gurman reports that we’ll see changes to what we currently think of as Siri this spring, but stay tuned for a revamped version that offers the back and forth conversational approach that existing chatbots offer, codenamed Campos, later this year.

Almost simultaneously, MacWorld reports that Apple employees are being encouraged to use a chatbot called Enchanté in their work. So, it sounds like Apple is seeding the ground for what’s to come.

For the record, I’m not big on voice computing. Yes, I use my Apple Watch to ask Siri to set a reminder or send a text message, but that’s about the extent of what my experimenting with voice computing has boiled down to.

I’ve tried some of the existing chatbots on smartphones and on computers, and I’ve been in the company of others who enjoy using voice as their primary method of interacting with smartphones. I don’t begrudge anybody using voice as their input method if that’s their preference, and I certainly don’t if it makes computing accessible to those who can’t type. But it’s just not for me.

Part of it is I find myself being more accurate when I can type, and part of it is the social aspect. While microphone technology continues to improve to allow better pickup in noisy environments I find it awkward when someone pulls out their smartphone and starts talking to it with others around. I feel compelled to silence myself while they are doing so. I couldn’t imagine using it in my theatre work, compared to using an iPad with pen to take notes, because my talking would be distracting to everyone else in the rehearsal hall. Goodness knows being in a room with small children laughing/crying/talking at the top of their lungs doesn’t strike me as a suitable environment.

I spent a good portion of this fall watching the Chicago Bears on their improbable run, while texting back and forth on several chains with my nephews and others. I can’t imagine doing that in my local sports pub trying to do so via voice input.

I won’t get into a conversation about how some are using existing chatbots for social interactions like therapy and companionship except to say that I’m guessing if those trends continue as voice input as chatbots proliferate, we’ll eventually see similar reactions to curtail that type of usage similar to what we saw back in the day about decreasing smartphone and screen time usage.

There are some interesting questions out there though. OpenAI has already announced its inevitable move into advertising for ChatGPT. I’m sure the others aren’t far behind. I’m not sure how viable advertising really is in a voice chat environment, whether it’s a smartphone, pin, or set of headphones. I certainly wouldn’t want a “conversation” interrupted with an ad. Amazon certainly doesn’t seem to have come close with its Alexa products. To my way of thinking, ads in chatbot conversations will give new meaning to the clichés about intrusive advertising.

I’m also of the opinion that while the non-smartphone AI devices might be clever gadget accessories, I don’t see them ever replacing smartphones or significantly denting that market. Too much of everyday life has become so inextricably linked to smartphone usage that requires a screen that I just don’t see voice chatbots replacing it. Someday your voice may be your password, but I think we’re a long ways off from that for interacting with the businesses and other institutions we deal with daily.

But who knows where this is all headed. Quite frankly, I don’t think anybody does. Including the chatbots.