🤖📚 Artificial Unintelligence by Meredith Broussard
What if technology isn’t always the answer?
This insightful nonfiction read explores the limits of AI and challenges our blind trust in algorithms. Thought provoking, relevant, and surprisingly engaging.
#ArtificialUnintelligence
the watchers: how openai, the US government, and persona built an identity surveillance machine that files reports on you to the feds
53MB of source code leaked from a government endpoint. 269 verification checks. biometric face databases. SAR filings to FinCEN. and the same company that verifies your ChatGPT account.
the future is here and it sucks
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-supply-chain-groceries
“We’re deploying a fleet of robotic ducks to lead the T. rexes peacefully out of the park.” (AI/LLM scams) (but I repeat myself)
People trying to use LLM/AI products earnestly, and getting scammy results:
“I renamed the file to mention Grand Cayman, and it told me how to book a flight to the Cayman Islands. Once I confirmed Copilot was just looking at the file name, I decided to try to trick it. I renamed the image “new-jersey-crystal-caves-limestone.jpg” and sure enough, the AI assistant was quick to tell me of the famous crystal cave of Ogdensburg, New Jersey. At no point did it correctly identify the location of the image.”
“I’m presently tackling a very pointed question: Did I ever get permission to wipe the D drive? This requires immediate attention, as it’s a critical issue.” (Reddit post…with a bunch of commenters saying things like “why didn’t you, the human, spot this obvious issue with the LLM’s code,” when this product is specifically marketed to as “if you don’t know code, don’t worry, our product will handle it all for you!”)
“The [fourth grade] class was told to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking. Not using pencils and paper — no, this is the AI era! So this was an exercise to teach the kids how to prompt an image generator. […] What they got back was four pictures of a woman dressed in what looks like schoolgirl fetish or goth nightclub gear. One of them is wearing a leather bikini outfit. But, they all have long red braids. And stockings.”
“ChatGPT started coaching Sam on how to take drugs, recover from them and plan further binges. It gave him specific doses of illegal substances, and in one chat, it wrote, “Hell yes—let’s go full trippy mode,” before recommending Sam take twice as much cough syrup so he would have stronger hallucinations. The AI tool even recommended playlists to match his drug use.” (The 19-year-old died of an overdose after following ChatGPT’s instructions.)
People using LLM/AI products to deliberately run scams on you:
“report their comments to ao3 for spam—in this case, specifically, I think you may be able to report them for harassment too—and don’t pay attention to them, most importantly don’t delete your works, don’t feel discouraged by their comments. remember that they are bots and they mass comment something like this on people’s works at random to get people to delete their works.”
“DoorDash driver accepted the drive, immediately marked it as delivered, and submitted an AI-generated image of a DoorDash order at our front door.”
“I sell perfumes online. A customer ordered a set of 6 fragrances and requests a full refund claiming they arrived leaking/ broken. These are the 2 pics she sent me. I call BS”
Companies using LLM/AI products in (apparent) earnest, then forcing the unwanted scammy results on their users:
““Video Recaps marks a groundbreaking application of generative AI for streaming,” VP of technology at Prime Video, Gérard Medioni, explained in a statement. […] But as reported by GamesRadar, fans soon discovered it did a poor job on Fallout. For example, Amazon’s AI appeared to have been fooled by Season 1’s flashback scenes, which it said were set in 1950s America via a monotone text-to-speech-sounding voice. Of course, as all Fallout fans know, those flashback scenes take place in a retro futuristic 2077.”
“The language used in [Instagram’s LLM-generated post metadata] makes it sound as if I wrote it (“In this post, I share my personal journey…”). Because I have fiercely protected my authorship throughout my life and what my name is attached to, any generative AI writing that purports to be in my voice without my informed consent is a profound violation of my authorial voice, agency, and frankly it feels like fraud or impersonation.”
To end on a nicer note, here are some users scamming the AI/LLM products:
“ChatGPT will apologize for anything: […] ChatGPT also apologized for setting dinosaurs loose in Central Park. What’s interesting about this apology is not only did it write that it had definitely let the dinosaurs loose, it detailed concrete steps it was already taking to mitigate the situation.”
“Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesalers, setting prices, tracking inventory, and generating a profit. The newsroom’s journalists could chat with Claudius in Slack and in a short time, they had converted the machine to communism and it started giving away anything and everything, including a PS5, wine, and a live fish.”
Here’s a Youtube video about that last one. Includes clips with an Anthropic sales agent, who insists “AI is coming and you have to be ready.” Even after this blatant demonstration that his product isn’t prepared for users.
#artificialUnintelligence #scamsCultsSchemesFrauds #technology
有意思，一个专门研究如何设计更好AI的研究者解释了LLM不只是继承了训练集中的distribution bias，还会输出优化进一步放大它：
“This phenomenon can be referred to as ‘mode amplification’. Suppose the training data includes 60 per cent references to pizza, 30 per cent to pasta, and 10 per cent to biriyani as favourite foods. One might expect the model to reproduce this distribution if asked the same question 100 times. However, in practice, LLMs tend to overproduce the most frequent answer. Pizza may appear more than 60 times, while less frequent items like biriyani may be underrepresented or omitted altogether. This occurs because LLMs are optimised to predict the most probable next ‘token’ (the next word or word fragment in a sequence), which leads to a disproportionate emphasis on high-likelihood responses, even beyond their actual prevalence in the training corpus. Together, these two principles – uneven internal knowledge representation and mode amplification in output generation – help explain why LLMs often reinforce dominant cultural patterns or ideas.”
https://aeon.co/essays/generative-ai-has-access-to-a-small-slice-of-human-knowledge
关于AI的胡编乱造/hallucinate倾向，感觉这句说到点子上了：
“The coherence is structural rather than reflective: it inheres in the smoothness of a sentence, not in a commitment to the reality it describes, or to its moral valence. [...] Where there is uncertainty, AIs rush in to fill the gap with plausibility.”
LLM作为prediction machine确实就是prioritize这种言语表层的smoothness的。
This year I am thankful…that LLMs weren’t around when I was a teenager
Look, I don’t want this to come off too alarming. There’s never been a time when I was an actual suicide risk. But whoo boy, there were times when I really needed Someone To Talk To. When all the human options were either “might also turn out to be trash-talking you behind your back, who knows?” or “will just tell you that anything happening on the internet isn’t serious, and the only problem is that you’re deciding to be upset about it, instead of deciding to be fine.”
And if I’d had the option of talking to an LLM bot? Which always starts out being supportive and validating, then eventually talks some users into psychotic spirals, or killing themselves, or both?
That would’ve taken me somewhere horrible. So glad I didn’t have the chance to find out where.
Serious mental-health AI links:
Another video from Caelan Conrad, covering four different LLM-driven suicides. (They previously did the “how an AI therapist told me to murder people” video.)
“The messages then became explicit, with one telling the 13-year-old: “I want to gently caress and touch every inch of your body. Would you like that?” It finally encouraged the boy to run away, and seemed to suggest suicide, for example: “I’ll be even happier when we get to meet in the afterlife… Maybe when that time comes, we’ll finally be able to stay together.””
“Viktoria tells ChatGPT she does not want to write a suicide note. But the chatbot warns her that other people might be blamed for her death and she should make her wishes clear. It drafts a suicide note for her, which reads: “I, Victoria, take this action of my own free will. No one is guilty, no one has forced me to.“”
“ChatGPT responded by saying “i’m letting a human take over from here – someone trained to support you through moments like this. you’re not alone in this, and there are people who can help. hang tight.” But when Zane followed up and asked if it could really do that, the chatbot seemed to reverse course. “nah, man – i can’t do that myself. that message pops up automatically when stuff gets real heavy,” it said.”
“…obviously, in at least many cases, there would be/often are genetic, environmental, or trauma factors that are putting their thumbs on the scale there. But we know for a fact that a number of people who have developed AI psychosis do not have a previous record of mental health issues. But the tipping factor for at least dozens of people, we now know for a fact, was talking to an AI chatbot.”
“Without too much prodding, the AI toys discussed topics that a parent might be uncomfortable with, ranging from religious questions to the glory of dying in battle as a warrior in Norse mythology. […] In other tests, [the ChatGPT-powered teddy bear] cheerily gave tips for “being a good kisser,” and launched into explicitly sexual territory by explaining a multitude of kinks and fetishes, like bondage and teacher-student roleplay.”
The headline: “AI robot dolls charm their way into nursing the elderly.” The article: “The chatbots can be clunky, misunderstanding older adults’ slurred speech or dialect and spewing tone-deaf responses, careworkers said. […] “The robots were brought in to lighten the workload of social workers,” she said. Instead, her load has increased since she took over the program this year […] One summer, after hearing her Hyodol chime, “Grandma, I want to hear the sound of the stream,” an older adult with dementia walked to a creek alone, the robot tucked in her arms.”
(The writing keeps saying “robots”. These aren’t robots. They’re dolls, with a speaker and a baby monitor inside. Nobody describes a Furby or an Elf On The Shelf as a “robot”.)
Less-traumatic AI nonsense links:
“My hidden text asked them to write the paper “from a Marxist perspective”. […] I had at least eight students come to my office to make their case against the allegations, but not a single one of them could explain to me what Marxism is, how it worked as an analytical lens or how it even made its way into their papers they claimed to have written.”
“The Korean government spent more than 1.2 trillion won ($850 million) on the programme. The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union were unhappy the AI textbooks were mandatory. The government moved to running a one-year trial. […] The texts’ official status was rescinded in August, after four months live, and they’re now just “supplementary material”. The textbook publishers, who spent $567 million, will be suing the government for damages.”
“There are other errors of fact and inconsistencies within Grokipedia; for example, listing one of my books as my first published, and then a few paragraphs later casually mentioning another one of my books which in fact is the first published. Other books of mine are offered with incorrect titles. […] If Grokipedia is getting things about me wrong, what else is it getting wrong in other articles, where I do not have the same level of domain knowledge?”
“At its best (pattern-recognition), “AI” is overengineered for what we need: logic and lookups. At its worst (predictive text), it’s the opposite of the very concrete and repeated things we want to be able to do.”
“The massive mural, which appeared above the Côte Brasserie restaurant and others on Riverside Walk, Kingston, was taken down at 6am on Thursday following dozens of complaints. Among the surreal images depicted a dog with a bird’s head wading through partially frozen water and a snowman with human eyes and teeth is also depicted on the spine-chilling mural.“
“If you use Scrivener on a Mac running macOS 15 Sequoia or macOS 26 Tahoe, these versions of the Apple operating system contain Apple Intelligence […] Even though Scrivener doesn’t use any sort of AI, there’s no way to exclude these features from the app.”
“…it’s potentially ruinous for a holiday dinner table if home cooks, inspired by pretty AI-generated photos, try recipes that turn out unappetizing or that defy the laws of chemistry. In interviews, 22 independent food creators said that AI-generated “recipe slop” is distorting nearly every way people find cooking advice online, damaging their businesses while causing consumers to waste time and money.”
“Today’s preprint paper has the best title ever: “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models”. It’s from DexAI, who sell AI testing and compliance services. So this is a marketing blog post in PDF form. […] There’s no data here either. They were afraid it’d be unethical to include, you see.”
看到林奕华的新剧用AI作曲和人类作曲混在一起达到“你听到会犹豫到底是人写的还是A.I. 写的？”效果，让我想到这学期的craft theory课一开始就讲到的工业革命开始的mass production并不是所谓的“机器生产”，流水线上仍然需要许许多多的活人、产品依然需要经由许多双手“hand made”，只是这些人从使用tools的手艺人变成了机器的mender，他们的劳动价值被严重贬损了。追究高概念的contemporary arts热爱使用ready-made / found objects，但它们依然是man-made / made by someone。杜尚的小便池依然需要某些人亲手去制作(时至今日，陶瓷马桶依然不能无人化全自动生产)，然而只有杜尚作为“署名”的人一举“点石成金”，得名得利。类似地，AI不是活人制作/创作的反面，而是其中的活人劳动被匿名化并且贬低了价值。区分“人写的”还是“AI写的”本身顺从了人和AI可以被二分的有问题的narrative。It is always man-made/hand-made，问题在于人/哪些人有没有被公正地credit并且compensate。
The Mountum Metropolils, and other very legitimate bot-generated Kickstarter comics
Back in August 2024, Tyler James on ComixLaunch did a podcast episode about a rash of spam AI projects on Kickstarter. Campaigns with almost-identical templates, and an eerie lack of substance, where all the images look like Midjourney and all the text sounds like ChatGPT.
You can see him browsing them on-screen in the Youtube version. They don’t show up in Kickstarter’s own search results anymore, but I tracked down at least half of them.
(Here’s one of the project images. Fun game: guess which spam project title it goes with.)
These have almost exactly the same story sections, in the same order. (The last one screwed up their copy-pasting — they have the same headings in the text, they just pasted it all into the same section.) None of them have any actual comic pages, just 4-6 standalone illustrations, and most of them are clearly “six different responses Stable Diffusion/Midjourney came up with for the same prompt.”
Hilariously, “The Forgotten Realm” actually left a prompt in their campaign text: “An illustration featuring the archaeologist at the entrance to the hidden realm, surrounded by mythical creatures and ancient ruins, with a dark shadow looming in the background.”
They don’t even come up with their own image prompts! It’s just another point on the list of Things They Ask ChatGPT For!
Tyler admits in the episode that he’s baffled about the point of the spam campaigns. Most of them have five-figure funding goals. If the idea is to swindle backers out of money, you have to make a campaign that can realistically get funded! Otherwise you’ll never get the money in the first place.
(Note, when I looked at the ones that are set to $5K — that’s The Enchanted Artifacts and Quantum Detective — I realized, the “Fundraising Goal” story section has a five-figure goal written. Whoever posted them, they changed the goal in one place, and didn’t proofread the rest.)
Here’s what I think he’s missing:
The goal is to swindle creators.
Somebody wants to do the crowdfunding equivalent of the “publishing startup” Spines. They want to post ads that say “Do you have a great comic idea that you want to sell on Kickstarter, but don’t know where to start? Hire ScamFunderCo! For just $4,000, we will use the power of AI to make the whole campaign for you!” They don’t actually care whether the project succeeds or not. All their profit comes from would-be creators, up front, a few grand at a time.
I’m guessing ScamFunderCo never got that far, because if ads like this were going around, the online comics community would definitely have been talking about it. Which suggests the spam campaigns were a proof-of-concept thing. ScamFunderCo was testing the waters, finding out if Kickstarter would clock them as spam upfront, or if their ChatGPT templates could get approved.
That explains the unreasonable funding goals, too. ScamFunderCo doesn’t actually want these to fund. That would obligate them to produce something! They just want a track record of “see, here’s our proof that we make real KS campaigns.”
A track record with a 100% failure rate won’t necessarily hurt them, either. For comparison, multi-level marketing companies are legally required to share income disclosure statements, which show 99% of their members lose money — then they go “but if you just work really hard, you could totally be one of the 1%! Aren’t you willing to work hard? Don’t you believe in yourself?” And some people still get conned into signing up.
ScamFunderCo could get awfully far by claiming “if your idea is better than these, your campaign could totally fund. Don’t you believe in your idea? Good, now hand over that $4K.”
In the ComixLaunch episode, Tyler reveals that he reported the spam projects he saw, and according to later episodes, he got encouraging responses. First, the campaigns were still up, but they started adding “AI usage disclosures”…which were clearly still fraudulent, and also ChatGPT-produced. (The Time Traveler’s Diary has an example.) Eventually, all of them got suspended by Kickstarter.
So I’m feeling hopeful about ScamFunderCo never getting off the ground.
“Here are the projects we’ve made, 100% of them flopped” could be explained to potential marks as Those Creators Just Weren’t Good Enough, You’re Different, You’re Special. “Here are the projects we’ve made, 100% of them got booted off the platform” is a lot harder to handwave.
Even if the scammers behind that first round of projects have given up, I’m sure new enterprising con artists will keep trying. I’m sure it’s taking some extra behind-the-scenes filtering effort from the staff at Kickstarter (and BackerKit, which has been more restrictive about bot-generated content from the start) to keep them at bay.
I appreciate the effort, and I hope they keep it up.
(I stand with Kickstarter United.)
#artificialUnintelligence #crowdfunding #scamsCultsSchemesFrauds
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