@lauren To be fair it said according to "a" calendar, not "the" calendar. Could be last year's.

@gollyhatch I didn't ask if it ever was 2024, or if some random calendar somewhere said it was 2024. I asked a question any child could answer: IS it 2025. It's a binary question, answerable by 99.999% of the people on this planet, I would suspect. No excuses.

@lauren @gollyhatch It is not an excuse but it is a possible explanation. "According to a calendar" is technically not a lie, that can indeed be 'any' calendar. LLM's are based on mathematics, it just spits out words according to a bunch of complicated formulas. It does not understand anything, there is no #actualIntelligence in there.

@alterelefant @gollyhatch I don't need a tutorial on LLMs. The point is that this garbage is being forced down the throat of users and the amount of misinformation is vast and apparently growing, nor is Big Tech willing to take responsibility for any damage done to users who assume that Google is giving them accurate information like it used to.

@lauren @gollyhatch it is indeed very worrying. Let's hope people are able to pick up on the fact that all of this LLM stuff is too much of a distraction and not improving their life in any significant way. It is only adding noise.

@alterelefant @gollyhatch Big Tech isn't giving them a choice. They're stuffing it into everything. It's all about trying to recover their enormous investment that they fear might never pay off unless everyone is forced to use these systems.

@lauren @alterelefant There's always a choice, the problem is the average person not caring enough to educate themselves and make the right one.

@gollyhatch @alterelefant NO. That is an attitude from techies (and I'm obviously one), that I've detested my long career, reaching all the way back to the early ARPANET days at UCLA. It is NOT the responsibility of busy, nontechnical people to have to "educate" themselves to not be abused by Big Tech hype and manipulation. Most only know enough tech to do what they absolutely have to do online, and may wish they didn't have to even do that much online -- but the alternative options have been vanishing. BLAMING THEM for these abuses is WRONG.

@lauren @alterelefant I'm not blaming them, but I do expect people to make conscious choices and not just accept whatever big tech is presenting to them. And you don't need to be a techie for that. People make these choices already. Netflix is shit? Let's check out other streaming services then. That's not a techie choice. Google AI is bollocks and their search results are 99% ads? Use an alternative then. There's always gonna be greedy bastards taking advantage of clueless people. Fighting one of them bastards won't solve the problem, educating the people will.

@gollyhatch @alterelefant I stand by my statement. I deal with nontechnical people who are abused by Big Tech pretty much all the time. They are NOT in a position to understand these systems, which even many experts don't understand. This isn't like deciding a streaming service isn't showing the movies you prefer!

@lauren @alterelefant Well and I stand by my position. You don't need to technically understand these systems to see that they're shit, like 2024 is not 2025, you made the best example there. Once you realize it's shit you should switch, or you really absolutely don't care, then that's fine too, but it's your choice.

@gollyhatch @alterelefant That's an easy example because it's so obvious. The most dangerous parts of these systems are the responses that seem authoritative but are wrong, or even worse, partly correct and partly wrong. The mixed response like that is absolutely devastating, likely to fool most people who aren't experts on the topic, and in general is one of the most potent spreaders of misinformation including of the most dangerous kind. This is a well studied area in terms of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda in the offline world.