The use of parody to illustrate how language sidesteps the Constitution.
https://philosophics.blog/2026/03/08/psa-is-it-war/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

#philosophy #parody #satire #humour #comedy #gameshow #video #youtube #short #war #politics #statement #morality #trump #weaselwords

I've long had an issue with the English 'why'. Dan Dennett had similar misgivings.

https://philosophics.blog/2026/01/18/the-metaphysics-of-why-a-scavengers-guide-to-the-accident/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

The term in English carries a lot of metaphysical baggage – more than necessary.

#language #semantics #metaphysics #philosophy #perception #weaselwords #intent #causation #truth #meaning #notebooklm #claude #chatgpt #genai

@janhoglund

There's a funny example in their arxiv paper too (where "IDK" = "I don't know")

" However, a non-hallucinating model could be easily created, using a question-answer database and a calculator, which answers a fixed set of questions such as “What is the chemical symbol for gold?” and well-formed mathematical calculations such as “3 + 8”, and otherwise outputs IDK. "

So a non-hallucinating AI model is just a non-AI model. I think that has some significance to the problem.

#AI #emperorsclothes #weaselwords

@janhoglund

I suppose we should be suitably skeptical of anything written on that website, but this statement alone is a weasel word statement:

"Hallucinations are plausible but false statements generated by language models."

So here's the thing:

"Hallucinations" is a word designed to capture an unacceptable situation and make it seem okay. Like engineering faults that are given a "within acceptable failure" description. But to whom?

The word plausible is also doing a lot of work. In some areas, like legal claims, it could be replaced by "misrepresentation" or "incomplete" or "misleading and deceptive".

The laughable thing about that page is how it starts referring to probabilistic certainties and so on. We are now in the domain of something like Bayesian analysis to guide business and consumer use. This is business trying to pass off risks (inherent) to the consumer. No thanks.

#ai #weaselwords

So, three (3) months ago, I got an unexpected letter from my credit card company. They notified me that my account "may" [1] have been compromised, and that "out of an abundance of caution", they were preemptively cancelling my credit card, and issued me a new one (with a different account/card number).

I'd had that card for 20 years. Changing the info held on file at all kinds of online stores and other financial services and various other things took a fair bit of time, spread over a couple of months as I ran into places I'd set up with the old one. But more critically, remembering the *new* number, and getting it into muscle memory, also took quite a while - I had to keep double-checking every time I needed the number, up until about 2 weeks ago, when I started feeling confident I had memorized it correctly.

So today, I get essentially the same letter, and *another* new card/number... 😢 [2]

So I get to do the whole dance again! Here's an idea, but maybe make your systems more secure?

[1] weasel words
[2] in case you're curious, the new one starts with a digit

#CreditCard #fraud #AbundanceOfCaution #WeaselWords #weasel #may #compromised #security #clueless #YourPrivacyIsImportantToUs #privacy #financial