#ai search
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Dinkclump Linkdump
I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in LA (Saturday night, with Adam Conover), Seattle (Monday, with Neal Stephenson), then Portland, Phoenix and more!
Some Saturday mornings, I look at the week's blogging and realize I have a lot more links saved up than I managed to write about this week, and then I do a linkdump. There've been 14 of these, and this is number 15:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
Attentive readers will note that this isn't Saturday. You're right. But I'm on a book tour and every day is shatterday, because damn, it's grueling and I'm not the spry manchild who took Little Brother on the road in 2008 – I'm a 52 year old with two artificial hips. Hence: an out-of-cycle linkdump. Come see me on tour and marvel at my verticality!
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour
Best thing I read this week, hands down, was Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day piece, "AI search is a doomsday cult":
https://www.garbageday.email/p/ai-search-doomsday-cult
Broderick makes so many excellent points in this piece. First among them: AI search sucks, but that's OK, because no one is asking for AI search. This only got more true later in the week when everyone's favorite spicy autocomplete accidentally loaded the James Joyce module:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/chatgpt-alarms-users-by-spitting-out-shakespearean-nonsense-and-rambling/
(As Matt Webb noted, Chatbots have slid rapidly from Star Trek (computers give you useful information in a timely fashion) to Douglas Adams (computers spout hostile, impenetrable nonsense at you):
https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/21/adams
But beyond the unsuitability of AI for search results and beyond the public's yawning indifference to AI-infused search, Broderick makes a more important point: AI search is about summarizing web results so you don't have to click links and read the pages yourself.
If that's the future of the web, who the fuck is going to write those pages that the summarizer summarizes? What is the incentive, the business-model, the rational explanation for predicting a world in which millions of us go on writing web-pages, when the gatekeepers to the web have promised to rig the game so that no one will ever visit those pages, or read what we've written there, or even know it was us who wrote the underlying material the summarizer just summarized?
If we stop writing the web, AIs will have to summarize each other, forming an inhuman centipede of botshit-ingestion. This is bad news, because there's pretty solid mathematical evidence that training a bot on botshit makes it absolutely useless. Or, as the authors of the paper – including the eminent cryptographer Ross Anderson – put it, "using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects":
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493
This is the mathematical evidence for Jathan Sadowski's "Hapsburg AI," or, as the mathematicians call it, "The Curse of Recursion" (new band-name just dropped).
But if you really have your heart set on living in a ruined dystopia dominated by hostile artificial life-forms, have no fear. As Hamilton Nolan writes in "Radical Capital," a rogues gallery of worker-maiming corporations have asked a court to rule that the NLRB can't punish them for violating labor law:
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/radical-capital
Trader Joe’s, Amazon, Starbucks and SpaceX have all made this argument to various courts. If they prevail, then there will be no one in charge of enforcing federal labor law. Yes, this will let these companies go on ruining their workers' lives, but more importantly, it will give carte blanche to every other employer in the land. At one end of this process is a boss who doesn't want to recognize a union – and at the other end are farmers dying of heat-stroke.
The right wing coalition that has put this demand before the court has all sorts of demands, from forced birth to (I kid you not), the end of recreational sex:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/02/getting-rid-of-birth-control-is-a-key-gop-agenda-item-for-the-second-trump-term
That coalition is backed by ultra-rich monopolists who want wreck the nation that their rank-and-file useful idiots want to wreck your body. These are the monopoly cheerleaders who gave us the abomination that is the Pharmacy Benefit Manager – a useless intermediary that gets to screw patients and pharmacists – and then let PBMs consolidate and merge with pharmacy monopolists.
One such inbred colossus is Change Healthcare, a giant PBM that is, in turn, a mere tendril of United Healthcare, which merged the company with Optum. The resulting system – held together with spit and wishful thinking – has access to the health records of a third of Americans and processes 15 billion prescriptions per day.
Or rather, it did process that amount – until the all-your-eggs-in-one-badly-maintained basket strategy failed on Wednesday, and Change's systems went down due to an unspecified "cybersecurity incident." In the short term, this meant that tens of millions of Americans who tried to refill their prescriptions were told to either pay cash or come back later (if you don't die first). That was the first shoe dropping. The second shoe is the medical records of a third of the country.
Don't worry, I'm sure those records are fine. After all, nothing says security like "merging several disparate legacy IT systems together while simultaneously laying off half your IT staff as surplus to requirements and an impediment to extracting a special dividend for the private equity owners who are, of course, widely recognized as the world's greatest information security practitioners."
Look, not everything is terrible. Some computers are actually getting better. Framework's user-serviceable, super-rugged, easy-to-repair, powerful laptops are the most exciting computers I've ever owned – or broken:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame
Now you can get one for $500!
https://frame.work/blog/first-framework-laptop-16-shipments-and-a-499-framework
And the next generation is turning our surprisingly well, despite all our worst efforts. My kid – now 16! – and I just launched our latest joint project, "The Sushi Chronicles," a small website recording our idiosyncratic scores for nearly every sushi restaurant in Burbank, Glendale, Studio City and North Hollywood:
https://sushichronicles.org/
This is the record of two years' worth of Daughter-Daddy sushi nights that started as a way to get my picky eater to try new things and has turned into the highlight of my week. If you're in the area and looking for a nice piece of fish, give it a spin (also, we belatedly realized that we've never reviewed our favorite place, Kuru Kuru in the CVS Plaza on North Hollywood Way – we'll be rectifying that soon).
And yes, we have a lavishly corrupt Supreme Court, but at least now everyone knows it. Glenn Haumann's even set up a Gofundme to raise money to bribe Clarence Thomas (now deleted, alas):
https://www.gofundme.com/f/pzhj4q-the-clarence-thomas-signing-bonus-fund-give-now
The funds are intended as a "signing bonus" in the event that Thomas takes up John Oliver on his offer of a $2.4m luxury RV and $1m/year for life if he'll resign from the court:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-VJrdHMug
This is truly one of Oliver's greatest bits, showcasing his mastery over the increasingly vital art of turning abstruse technical issues into entertainment that negates the performative complexity used by today's greatest villains to hide their misdeeds behind a Shield of Boringness (h/t Dana Clare).
The Bezzle is my contribution to turning abstruse scams into a high-impact technothriller that pierces that Shield of Boringness. The key to this is to master exposition, ignoring the (vastly overrated) rule that one must "show, not tell." Good exposition is hard to do, but when it works, it's amazing (as anyone who's read Neal Stephenson's 1,600-word explanation of how to eat Cap'n Crunch cereal in Cryptonomicon can attest). I wrote about this for Mary Robinette Kowal's "My Favorite Bit" this week:
https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/
Of course, an undisputed master of this form is Adam Conover, whose Adam Ruins Everything show helped invent it. Adam is joining me on stage in LA tomorrow night at Vroman's at 5:30PM, to host me in a book-tour event for my novel The Bezzle:
https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/23/gazeteer/#out-of-cycle
Image:
Peter Craven (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aggregate_output_%287637833962%29.jpg
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
#pluralistic#the bezzle#ryan broderick#mary robinette kowal#exposition#john oliver#margot robbie#adam conover#ai#ai search#change healthcare#centralization#pharma#pbms#pharmacy benefit managers#corruption#scotus#crowdfunding#clarence thomas
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Why are there generative Ai search results in front of me when I open a new tab in Firefox and how do I kill it?
I've torn through several threads trying to figure out how to remove Google's new "SGE" in search feature and everyone asking is getting sandbagged by customer support.
I've tried using other search engines but none really present decent results when compared to Google, as that's how monopoly works unfortunately.
#hack the planet#anti google#kill google#anti ai#fuck ai#fuck google#google sge#sge#ai search#browser#firefox#web development
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I have unwittingly witnessed a new level of the absurd. Behold, the AI-generated equine anatomy models.
Ah yes, my favourite parts of the equine body. Paster and... *looks at the smudged writing on hand* boob. At least this one looks purely decorative and the being actually looks like a horse. But don't worry, it gets worse.
If we completely ignore the hipopotamus musculature of this one, there's still a lot of things that don't make sense in this one, like a tail that ends in a series of bone spikes and a complete lack of molars. You could make a cool pokemon on the basis of this, but it's not even in the realm of being an actual anatomy help.
I'm firmly convinced this is not a horse, this is something that really, really wants you to think it is a horse. The more you look, the more things look... wrong. The more details turn out to be shifted, bones crammed in to fill in the familiar form, its shape merely implied so that the human mind fills the gap. Of course the text seems like gibberish, because its anatomy is incomprehensible. it's either a parasite or a monster and in each case, it's an eldtrich body horror. I'm kind of angry at how well this joke writes itself.
#I'm just angry that despite of the fact I have almost every AI site blocked it still showed up in the search#I don't think these will fool anyone but still - make sure you know the things you reference are actually accurate#I can recommend Herman Dittrich's drawings when it comes to the equine anatomy#This time I was just searching for the anatomy it bc I forgot what's the name of the canon bone#anti generative ai
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AI in E-commerce: Increase Conversions with ViSenze
One of the common concerns about providing AI in ecommerce using visual search is that while it can increase clickthrough rates and average order values, this growth doesn’t quite cross over into conversion rates.
Although visual search is still a nascent technology, it holds huge potential for the e-commerce industry. In fact, the gap between image recognition and sales may not have to do with visual search itself, but with the way people are using it.
Visit Us:-
#ai in ecommerce#ai in retail#ai search#smart recommendation#product recommendation#product tag#product discovery
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According to my Google photo app, this is a squirrel. I have at least then pictures of a squirrel in my collection.
I know. I've taken them.
But too Google AI eyes, this is squirrel-ly perfection.
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Today, I told my husband learned about the Kent State Shooting after I mentioned it in a conversation. He was so surprised he started to look it up using Bings AI search.
When asked about the differences between this event and the Boston Massacre, which was one of the biggest events that sparked the American Revolution, this is all it could come up with. The rest you can see for yourself.
I just thought I'd share this here as some interesting food for thought and conversation.
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ChatGPT-Style AI Search Engines Could Cost Google, and Microsoft Billions in Computing Cost
The CEO of search engine You.com Richard Socher said that an AI chat experience along with applications for charts, videos and other generative tech raised expenses between 30% and 50%. He also mentioned that the technology gets cheaper at scale and over time.
Footing the bill is one of main reasons why search and social media giants with billions of users have not yet launched an AI chatbot overnight.
He also mentioned that one is accuracy, and the second is you have to scale this in the right way.
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Dystopian button my friend saw during a job application
#AI#dystopian#dystopia#button#job applications#job search#job#artificial intelligence#highpost#Imagine showing this to someone in 1980
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world.search(you);
#zeno's art#danganronpa#danganronpa 2#goodbye despair#super danganronpa 2#chiaki nanami#doodle just a doodle bro#the dangan characters are very fun to draw might do a lineup (unlikely)#she was always my favorite though i wish she had more substance#though i guess they can excuse that seeing as shes literally an AI#also world search you by mili is the most chiaki and hajime coded song ever#comfort straights <3
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Horti's new plant advice chatbot is based on gpt-3 and things are going well
🔥 writeup by tradescantia hub
#gpt3#chatbot#neural network#ai weirdness approves#do not try any of its advice#its not a search engine#it just plays one on tv#automated bullshit generator#now plant flavored
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Google is getting progressively, frustratingly more useless.
#it's the ai. you cannot use ai on such a grand scale. humans can't moderate it and iron out the problems#i search 'do feathers protect birds from heat' hoping my ducks are not wearing fluffy parkas in 90+ degree weather#and all i get are 'feathers help protect them from the cold by making a pocket of air!'#i know this. i do not care. will my ducks get heat stroke.#'they're cold hardy!' die#negative salt
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Me, calmly watching Grian's episode
Grian's time lapse music:
#mcyt#grian#hermitcraft#ai art#(I accidentally put some AI art. That wasn't my intention. it was just the first image that appeared when I searched Angel playing the harp)
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Y’all ever wonder how AM canonically got the voice he uses? Like I’m pretty sure that voice wasn’t government mandated or whatever💀💀
I headcanon that he just took the angriest and bitter voices he had recordings of and just mashed and spliced them until it sounded…not as terrible as other humans voices
#ihnmaims#AM uses ai voice technology#headcanons#sorry#i have no mouth and i must scream#am ihnmaims#either that or he just searched:#‘humanity’s biggest hater’ and Harlan Ellison showed up
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AI-powered Smart Visual Search | ViSenze
AI-powered Smart Visual Search unlocks more revenue by allowing high-intent customers to shop and convert instantly with our industry-leading 99% accurate image search.
Visit Us:-
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