Cory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

On Hallowe'en 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his son with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he'd get away with it. He was wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

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Ronald Clark O'Bryan - Wikipedia

Show threadCory Doctorow

The stories of Hallowe'en poisonings were just that - stories. No one was poisoning kids on Hallowe'en - except this monstrous murderer, who mistook rampant scare stories for truth and assumed (incorrectly) that his murder would blend in with the crowd.

Last week, the dudes behind the "comedy" podcast #Dudesy released a "George Carlin" comedy special that they claimed had been created, *holus bolus*, by an #AI trained on the comedian's routines. This was a lie.

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Jan 29, 2024 at 9:05amWeb
Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

After the Carlin estate sued, the dudes admitted that they had written the (remarkably unfunny) "comedy" special:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

As I've written, we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that *fails* at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

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Following lawsuit, rep admits “AI” George Carlin was human-written

Creators still face "name and likeness" complaints; lawyer says suit will continue.

Ars Technica
Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

AI systems can do some cool party tricks, but there's a huge difference between outputting a plausible sentence and a *good* one. After the initial astonishment, the stench of #botshit is unmistakable:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

Some botshit comes from people who are sold a bill of goods: they're convinced they can make a George Carlin special without any human intervention and when the bot fails, they manufacture their own botshit, assuming they must be bad at prompting the AI.

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Beware the ‘botshit’: why generative AI is such a real and imminent threat to the way we live

Unless checks are put in place, citizens and voters may soon face AI-generated content that bears no relation to reality, says author André Spicer

The Guardian
Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

This is an old technology story: I had a friend who was contracted to livestream a Canadian awards show in the earliest days of the web. They booked in multiple ISDN lines from Bell Canada and set up an impressive Mbone encoding station on the wings of the stage. Only one problem: the ISDNs flaked (this was a common problem with ISDNs!). There was no way to livecast the show.

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

Nevertheless, my friend's boss's ordered him to go on *pretending* to livestream the show. They made a big deal of it, with all kinds of cool visualizers showing the progress of this futuristic marvel, which the cameras frequently lingered on, accompanied by overheated narration from the show's hosts.

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

The weirdest part? The next day, my friend - and many others - heard from satisfied viewers who boasted about how amazing it had been to watch this show on their computers, rather than their TVs. Remember: there had been no stream.

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

These people had just assumed that the problem was on their end - that they had failed to correctly install and configure the multiple browser plugins required. Not wanting to admit their technical incompetence, they instead boasted about how great the show had been. It was the Emperor's New Livestream.

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

Perhaps that's what happened to the Dudesy bros. But there's another possibility: maybe they were captured by their own imaginations.

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

In "Genesis," an essay in the 2007 collection *The Creationists*, EL Doctorow's (no relation) describes how the ancient Babylonians were so poleaxed by the strange wonder of the story they made up about the origin of the universe that they assumed that it *must* be true. They themselves weren't *nearly* imaginative enough to have come up with this super-cool tale, so *God* must have put it in their minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply

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Pluralistic: The seductive, science fictional power of spreadsheets (29 Apr 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

That seems to have been what happened to the Air Force colonel who falsely claimed that a "rogue AI-powered drone" had spontaneously evolved the strategy of killing its operator as a way of clearing the obstacle to its main objective, which was killing the enemy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

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Ayyyyyy Eyeeeee – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

This never happened. It was - in the chagrined colonel's words - a "thought experiment." In other words, this guy - who is the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations - was so excited about his own made up story that he forgot it wasn't true and told a whole conference-room full of people that it had actually happened.

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

Maybe that's what happened with the George Carlinbot 3000: the Dudesy dudes fell in love with their own vision for a fully automated luxury Carlinbot and forgot that they had made it up, so they just cheated, assuming they would *eventually* be able to make a fully operational Battle Carlibot.

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

That's basically the #Theranos story: a teenaged "entrepreneur" was convinced that she was just about to produce a seemingly impossible, revolutionary diagnostic machine, so she faked its results, abetted by investors, customers and others who *wanted to believe*:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

The thing about stories of AI miracles is that they are peddled by both AI's boosters *and* its critics.

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Theranos - Wikipedia

Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

For boosters, the value of these tall tales is obvious: if normies can be convinced that AI is capable of performing miracles, they'll invest in it. They'll even integrate it into their product offerings and then quietly hire legions of humans to pick up the botshit it leaves behind. These abettors can be relied upon to keep the defects in these products a secret, because they'll assume that they've committed an operator error.

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

After all, everyone knows that AI can do *anything*, so if it's not performing for them, the problem must exist between the keyboard and the chair.

But this would only take AI so far. It's one thing to hear implausible stories of AI's triumph from the people invested in it - but what about when AI's *critics* repeat those stories?

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

If your *boss* thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really *can* do your job?

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

There's a name for this kind of criticism: #CritiHype, coined by #LeeVinsel, who points to many reasons for its persistence, including the fact that it constitutes an "academic business-model":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

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Cory Doctorow: Full Employment

I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t. I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ”machine learning” field that leads to…

Locus Online
Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

That's four reasons: for AI hype:

I. to win investors and customers;

II. to cover customers' and users' embarrassment when the AI doesn't perform;

III. AI dreamers so high on their own supply that they can't tell truth from fantasy;

IV. A business-model for doomsayers who form an unholy alliance with AI companies by parroting their silliest hype in warning form.

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

But there's a fifth motivation for criti-hype: to simplify otherwise tedious and complex situations. As @jwz writes, this is the motivation behind the obvious lie that the "autonomous cars" on the streets of San Francisco have no driver:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/

GM's Cruise division was forced to shutter its SF operations after one of its "self-driving" cars dragged an injured pedestrian for 20 feet:

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-robotaxi-self-driving-permit-revoked-california/

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"Driverless" cars always have a driver

For some time now, SFPD Chief Bill Scott and SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin have been peddling the line of bullshit that autonomous vehicle are immune to being cited for moving violations. "Gosh, nothing we can do", they say. "What a pickle." This is bullshit on its face because the law already deals with no-driver-present crimes. There is no get-out-of-jail-free card for fleeing-the-scene or ...

Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

One of the widely discussed revelations in the wake of the incident was that Cruise employed 1.5 skilled technical remote overseers for every one of its "self-driving" cars. In other words, they had replaced a single low-waged cab driver with 1.5 higher-paid remote operators.

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

As Zawinski writes, SFPD is well aware that there's a human (or more than one human) responsible for every one of these cars - someone who is formally at fault when the cars injure people or damage property. Nevertheless, SFPD and SFMTA maintain that these cars can't be cited for moving violations because "no one is driving them."

But figuring out who which person is responsible for a moving violation is "complicated and annoying to deal with," so the fiction persists.

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Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024

(Zawinski notes that even when these people *are* held responsible, they're a "moral crumple zone" for the company that decided to enroll whole cities in nonconsensual #murderbot experiments.)

Automation hype has *always* involved hidden humans. The most famous of these was the #MechanicalTurk hoax: a supposed chess-playing robot that was just a puppet operated by a concealed human operator wedged awkwardly into its carapace.

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Show threadAviJan 29, 2024
@pluralistic the second hyperlink is broken here and on pluralistic blog. I think this is the correct hyperlink https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype

Maybe more people are writing about the real and potential problems of technology today than ever before. That is mostly a good thing. The list of books and articles from the last few years that have…

Medium
Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024
@avi Thanks!
Show threadAdam R. WoodJan 29, 2024
@pluralistic I have another theory, borne from having watched a couple episodes of their podcast (before I knew better and/or so you didn't have to): kayfabe. In the style of professional "wrestling" (which they are obvious and unapologetic fans of), Kultgen and Sasso use the *concept* of an AI running their show as a basic conceit (pun intended) to tie it together and control the pacing. I'm pretty sure the AI they call "Dudesy" doesn't actually exist, nor would they want it to.
Show threadAdam R. WoodJan 29, 2024
@pluralistic I'm certainly not excusing them, but when they say Dudesy is just a fictional character and isn't actually an AI - training data or none - I believe them. I doubt getting sued was even remotely in their radar (although it clearly should have been) and so they promptly broke kayfabe to not get bankrupted by this, but in the world of their podcast and among their fans, my guess is Dudesy is supposed to be an agreed-upon lie everyone believes in for the sake of the show.
Show threadAndrew Jon ThomsonJan 29, 2024
@pluralistic oops! I always assumed EL was you dad or something! My mistake.Thanks for the clarification!
Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024
@HelloAndrew Nope, it's just one of those surnames assigned by the Tsar's tax-collectors for record-keeping, "Doctorovitch" ("son of a doctor").
Show threadAndrew Jon ThomsonJan 29, 2024
@pluralistic better than Thomson, I mean, what is a Thom anyway?
Show threadAndrew Jon ThomsonJan 29, 2024
@pluralistic another amusing thought reflecting on this is that I have often thought of your work as related to E.L.’s work on some deeper thematic level as if your ideas are the more modern version of his which obviously is just a post facto construction of my mind. 🤦‍♂️
Show threadCory DoctorowJan 29, 2024
@HelloAndrew Well, I do enjoy his books! And also I was hugely influenced by Abbie Hoffman's books as a teen, and Doctorow edited those.
Show threadAndrew Jon ThomsonFeb 2, 2024
@pluralistic wow, I did not know that! What a delightful historical tidbit! You are always chock full of interesting nuggets!