Fuck AI

One thing everyone should do before asking a serious question to AI is to ask a question that you know is false just to get a reminder that what you are seeing may sound plausible it may absolutely be false.

Example:

I told ChatGPT that I was researching old railway lines on the Roslagsbanan network and that I wanted more information about the stations on the Åkersberga to Rimbo line.

The response I got was polite and friendly and even gave me a description of each station.

Too bad it made up half of them along with the line itself, and kept the lie going until I confronted it.

Do tests like that to see how easy it is for AI to invent the truth.

Eroding critical thinking skills linked to increased AI use.

Hmm... Yeah, so my oldest little brother from my dad's side (Yes, I have a large and complicated family) is entirely sold on billionaire philanthropy and AI. He does a lot of AI vibe crap, down to having ChatGPT recommend him what dinner to eat or videogame to play.

He has zero critical thinking skills. I mean zero. And he actually gets offended if I apply critical thinking to anything.

Working as intended, sadly.

More stupidity incoming

Someone on my local Nextdoor needed to know how much her tree was leaning. She took a photo and overlaid a protractor and it was actually pretty resourceful.

Then she asked people to check the angle. You see, the protector was aligned with the ground, so a perfectly upright tree would be 90°. The tree was at the 65° mark. Damn near everyone said it was a 65° lean, when it was really 25° off from the 90° it should be.

I can't remember how it came up exactly, but she said she looked up if a tree should be 90° on Google, and Google said that would mean it's fallen over. I reminded her that Google's AI suggested glue to get cheese to stick to pizza and encouraged an ounce of critical thinking, asking where the tree would sit in her picture if it were at 90°. She went off about how math isn't her strength, that I'm being condescending (ok, maybe a little but holy crap don't take Google's word for this stuff!) and I think eventually blocked me after a few attempts to explain that she did not have a 65° lean and a tree would be 90° from the ground if everything were perfect.

The future sucks, and it's only going to get worse.

It's part of why Republicans want to deregulate it. People who lack critical thinking skills tend to statistically vote red.

It also becomes a tool to control.

Critical Thinking skills are obsolete... for the briefest of moments preceding a collapse back into meaning that the tiny men made ironically inveitable.

A mix of quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews was used with 666 participants in the United Kingdom. They were distributed across three age groups (17–25, 26–45, 46 and older) and had varying educational backgrounds.

im all for the defenestration of ai, but these numbers do not promise much significance. i would welcome a more comprehensive study conducted over a larger geographical region.

remember, 346 of those 666 voted to leave. their critical thinking skills were already suspect to begin with.