Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated
AI hallucinations are getting ambitious. A couple people recently emailed, asking whether the Klein bottle business was still operating after my death. “Huh?” I thought. “I ain’t dead yet.” After some digging, I discovered the source: an AI-generated review of The Cuckoo’s Egg circulating on Facebook. Alongside the usual synthetic praise and fabricated details, it confidently announced that I had died in May 2024. Apparently AI has now advanced to the point where it can kill people off before they notice. Mark Twain once wrote, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I never expected to field-test the quote personally. source: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=989939243570691&id=100076638743004 Cheers, -Cliff
Discussion Highlights (3 comments)
Aurornis
Good to hear you're doing well. AI slop is rampant on social media right now. It has become the easy way to grow accounts and gain followers. It takes less than a minute to ask an LLM to write a social media post about something interesting and then post it online. It would be easy to use a $20 per month plan from a major provider to get more accurate output with fewer (though not zero) hallucinations, but the accounts I see seem to be using cheap models that make a lot of mistakes and hallucinate facts. I have a theory that the hallucinations add extra spice to the posts, making them feel more interesting and therefore more likely to be shared. It's a difficult time for social media users who haven't yet caught on to what AI spam looks like and why it can't be trusted.
FrankWilhoit
The larger point is that AI is being developed by people who think everything is performance (in the artistic sense of the word), and therefore, it, expectably and probably even necessarily, thinks so too. This manifests in many contexts and will manifest in many more; but hardly anyone will care about any of them, because just about everybody has succumbed to the performance delusion.
segmondy
You will be pissed when it corrects itself and starts attributing the Klein bottle business to me.