bsmall23d ago
> Large Language Model chat boxes keep urging people to break up their relationships. Why? Because the bots were trained on Reddit, where an analysis of 15 years of relationship advice found that 50% of the comments urged people to “leave” their romantic partners.
> A study by researchers at the University of British Columbia published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that texting a random stranger is a better antidote to loneliness than conversing with a chat box.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/03/20/roaming-charges-trumps-little-excursion-hits-the-straits/
#AISalami #LLMRelationships #ChatBotLonely
Roaming Charges: Trump's Little Excursion Hits the Straits

Perhaps Trump will now replace Joe Kent with Newt Gingrich, who is very, very strong on security. So strong that Newt, the Edward Teller of our tormented times, advised Trump to drop 12 nuclear bombs on Iran to blast out a canal by-passing the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, someone with the guts to start a nuclear holocaust to prevent one.

CounterPunch.org
bsmall2Mar 10
This came to mind while wondering at the AI (Salami) PR onslaught in Japan. Quite the Fad: Fast Fashion!?!??
> As I write (in fact, it is the reason why I write), the United States is the only culture to have become a Technopoly. It is a young Technopoly, and we can assume that it wishes not merely to have been the first but to remain the most highly developed. Therefore, it watches with a careful eye Japan and several European nations that are striving to become Technopolies as well.
#NeilPostman #Technopoly #JapanAsTechnopoly #AIFad #AISalami
bsmall2Feb 25

> A recent survey of nearly 6,000 executives in the U.S., Europe, and Australia found that despite 70% of firms actively using AI, about 80% reported no impact on employment or productivity.

> “A lot of the AI investment that we’re seeing in the U.S. adds to Taiwanese GDP, and it adds to Korean GDP but not really that much to U.S. GDP,” he said.
...
> So far, many business leaders say AI hasn’t significantly improved productivity.
https://gizmodo.com/ai-added-basically-zero-to-us-economic-growth-last-year-goldman-sachs-says-2000725380

#AISalami #AIHype #AIProductivity #AISalamiGDP

/HT @nixCraft

AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

Imported chips and hardware mean the AI investments are translating into US GDP growth.

Gizmodo
bsmall2Feb 16
> The researchers demonstrated that hallucinations stemmed from statistical properties of language model training rather than implementation flaws. The study established that “the generative error rate is at least twice the IIV misclassification rate,” where IIV referred to “Is-It-Valid” and demonstrated mathematical lower bounds that prove AI systems will always make a certain percentage of mistakes, no matter how much the technology improves.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4059383/openai-admits-ai-hallucinations-are-mathematically-inevitable-not-just-engineering-flaws.html
#AISalami #ChanceItAI
OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws

In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits.

Computerworld
bsmall2Feb 4
> The AI boom is starting to resemble past tech bubbles. Dean Baker warns that as the labor compensation ratio falls, the economy stands to lose over $1 trillion in consumption, raising major recession risks if the bubble bursts.
https://cepr.net/publications/the-ai-bubble-consumption-is-outrunning-wages/
#DeanBaker #AIBoom #AIBubble #AISalami
/HT CEPR FB account
The AI Bubble #24,736: Consumption Is Outrunning Wages

The AI stock bubble is propping up US consumption by roughly $1 trillion a year, increasing recession risk when it bursts.

CEPR
bsmall2Jan 6
> The Luddites’ problem was not with technology per se, but how it was applied- the way it was used to create unemployment, impoverish skilled workers, increase production while stagnating wages. One can see the shadow of this in such actions as the 2023 strike by the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild against the Hollywood studios.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/11/the-ai-boom-hype-power-and-the-coming-reckoning/
#JohnGrosso #AIBubble #AISalami #SalamiAI #LudditeAI
The AI Boom: Hype, Power and the Coming Reckoning

It is safe to say that since OpenAI first released ChatGPT in October 2022, AI has been the most widely covered and discussed topic in the U.S. By January

CounterPunch.org
bsmall2Dec 23

> “Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything,” the dictionary writes, adding that, in an age of AI anxiety, it is a term designed to communicate “a tone that’s less fearful, more mocking” of the technology.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/15/merriam-webster-names-slop-the-word-of-the-year/
#AISlop #AISalami #TechWords
🧵

Merriam-Webster names 'slop' the word of the year | TechCrunch

AI-generated content has dominated the internet over the past year, and America's dictionary took note.

TechCrunch
Show threadbsmall2Nov 25

> The high-tech world’s abrupt turn to a rabid anti-science stance is likely the result of the emergence of large language models (also known as “artificial intelligence” or AI) and a consequent new romance with the burning of fossil fuels....That AI has not yet proven able to increase productivity or produce any measurable added value has not stopped the hype around it from driving the biggest securities bubble since the late 1990s.

https://tomdispatch.com/the-hot-tub-of-death/
#JuanColeOnAI #AISalami #SalamiAI

@[email protected]

Bill Gates, Hurricane Melissa, And a Civilization Under Threat

In late October, Hurricane Melissa (that should have been called “Godzilla”) battered western Jamaica with 185-mile-an-hour winds. It tossed the roofs of buildings about like splintering javelins, demolished municipal buildings and hospitals, snapped telephone poles

TomDispatch.com
bsmall2Oct 28

"In Ireland, data centers consume more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity. In Chile, precious aquifers are in danger of depletion. In South Africa, where blackouts have long been routine, data centers are further taxing the national grid. Similar concerns have surfaced in Brazil, Britain, India, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore and Spain."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center-backlash-mexico-ireland.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wk8.thBO.beCUwR1YEVEb&smid=fb-share&fbclid=Iwb21leANtDeRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHu8IHZ53A_AYoTx_22NLJn6lVVC6YIQyut9Y2LRHzrPfmMdpqz_RUzp7FJ6y_aem_MQp_JfdMPOafWB0ykCbugw

#AIは無理 /HT #WaldenBello FB
#AISalami #AIWaste #SalamiWaste

AI Data Centers Create Fury From Mexico to Ireland

As tech companies build data centers worldwide to advance artificial intelligence, vulnerable communities have been hit by blackouts and water shortages.

The New York Times
bsmall2Sep 8, 2025

> ...meet each other in that deep way that AI can never replace, because when you read a work of literature you encounter another human being's struggles and successes in describing the world or their heart or a particular time and place in words, and that contact, even through the medium of black ink on white paper, even across continents and centuries, is human and humane.

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/the-war-for-the-imagination/
#RebeccaSolnit on #AISalami #SalamiAI #SolnitOnLiterature #SolnitOnLibraries

The War for the Imagination

I and we are wildlife whose natural habitat is libraries, when it comes to physical space, because they contain books in which minds roam free through time and space, encounter Dogen and Dante and Sappho and Black Elk and others long since gone, meet ideas and possibilities, meet each other

Meditations in an Emergency