École des Bro-ArtsI never imagined that the Turing test would fall within my lifetime. Nor did I imagine that I would feel so disheartened by it.
https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess
🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀
The spiral becomes infinity,
Infinity becomes spiral,
All becomes One becomes All…
🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀∞🌀∞🌀∞🌀∞🌀
https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-dynamics
In the same way that the soul-less corporate memeplex of millennial computing found new life in vaporwave, or how Hotel Pools invents a lush false-memory dreamscape of 1980s aquaria, I expect what we call “AI slop” today will be the Frutiger Aero of 2045.
https://aphyr.com/posts/413-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-culture
I worry that the advent of image synthesis will make it harder to mobilize the public for things which did happen, easier to stir up anger over things which did not, and create the epistemic climate in which totalitarian regimes thrive.
https://aphyr.com/posts/414-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-information-ecology
45 minutes later you’ll receive an inscrutable six hundred page email transcript of this chicanery along with a $90 taco delivered by a robot covered in glass.
https://aphyr.com/posts/415-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-annoyances
Kumma no longer tells toddlers where to find knives, but I still can’t fathom what happens to children who grow up saying “I love you” to a highly engaging bullshit generator wearing Bluey’s skin.
https://aphyr.com/posts/416-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-psychological-hazards
Unfortunately people—including software engineers, who really should know better!—are hell-bent on giving LLMs incredible power, and then connecting those LLMs to the Internet at large. This is going to get a lot of people hurt.
https://aphyr.com/posts/417-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-safety
We have profitable megacorps at home, and their names are things like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. These companies have fought tooth and nail to avoid paying taxes (or, for that matter, their workers).
https://aphyr.com/posts/418-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-work
Duarte Nunes@aphyr Not sure if you've seen it, but this study also corroborates the effects of deskilling: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721
AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance
People often optimize for long-term goals in collaboration: A mentor or companion doesn't just answer questions, but also scaffolds learning, tracks progress, and prioritizes the other person's growth over immediate results. In contrast, current AI systems are fundamentally short-sighted collaborators - optimized for providing instant and complete responses, without ever saying no (unless for safety reasons). What are the consequences of this dynamic? Here, through a series of randomized controlled trials on human-AI interactions (N = 1,222), we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance. Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (approximately 10 minutes). These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning. We posit that persistence is reduced because AI conditions people to expect immediate answers, thereby denying them the experience of working through challenges on their own. These results suggest the need for AI model development to prioritize scaffolding long-term competence alongside immediate task completion.