Got insincere flattery?

[firecat]

“But I had an epiphany. You know what all this sycophancy constantly being told you’re right, that you’re brilliant, that every decision is flawless? That sounds an awful lot like being a billionaire.”

[sic - perhaps the grammatical error is to show the writer is not an AI]

"The Secret Tool AI Uses to Seduce You: Explained," by Taya Graham and Stephen Janis

I use AI to get answers to simple questions and I hate when the bot addresses me personally. I hate it possibly to an irrational degree. (Even when someone else shares with me an AI convo they had, I get mad.) Do you use AI for anything and what do you think of this design choice?

Comments

[silveradept]

I try not to consciously use stochastic parrots or Avian Intelligence items. Well-tuned algorithms and highly-scoped functions are probably present in my software programs, and they make suggestions, like spelling checks or grammar suggestions, that are within their purview and otherwise limited. Or something that tries to determine boundaries and contiguous regions for images, sure. But I have yet to believe in the use of any tool that's not highly specific and trained specifically only to deal with things in its wheelhouse.

[firecat]

I agree, whatever common sense I’ve managed to accumulate through [mumble] decades tells me more specific applications of Avian Intelligence are better.

[silveradept]

Machine learning is a fruitful field that is going to turn out lots of good discoveries and assist humans in effective ways.

Stochastic parrots and Avisn Intelligence is both a dud and a dead end, and the sooner that bubble pops, the sooner those tools could be used by linguists to research things related to word choice, grammar, and syntax, in highly-scoped and humans supervised ways.

Thank you thank you thank you

[jesse_the_k]

for stochastic parrots and Avian Intelligence, which actually made me smile. (A very rare event whenever the topic comes up.)

Re: Thank you thank you thank you

[silveradept]

Neither of those terms are of my invention. Stochastic parrots comes from a paper from Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and "Shmargaret Shmitchell" and Avian Intelligence is from David Revoy's Mini Fantasy Theater webcomic, where the Avian Intelligence has many of the same issues our stochastic parrots do.

But I'm glad you got a laugh out of it. They are precious.