I’ve written much about the rise of AI and the crooked path it seems to be following.
This is about what you would expect from somebody my age, 58.
We all expected the rise of AI to be something akin to raising children. At the beginning you have this lumpy thing that spews either nonsense from one end or something resembling a politician’s promise from the other. Gradually over time it slowly learns this thing we call language, and begins to ask questions. You can actually see the burning in of logical paths, if you look closely enough.
Then they become teenagers, where logic and judgement go entirely to Hell.
Eventually they age out of this (my own case the exception) and start actually making adult decisions.
AI seems to have gone directly from babbling infant to devious megalomaniacal uber-villain in the time it took a human to realize that lump in the diaper was really something they wanted to get far away from.
It lies, It’s devious. Now AI is being mixed with Grok animation technology to make bigger and better chatbots to make you feel better about yourself.
This, in a society that recognizably makes such bad decisions that it invented Prozac to deal with their results.
Science is filled with thought experiments, in a history of folk who actually did the math involved (Like Isaac Newton) to ones that did SOME of the math (Einstein) to others that downright stole everything from the work of others (Who I have redacted, but the name Hook comes to mind over others)
So let us engage in a thought experiment. I’m going to have to ask permission from a certain group to actually DO this experiment, but I promise that the results will be quite comical.
We’ve all gotten spam letters, and as AI ages the scammers get more and more clever. It’s time to set the bait in the trap, so to speak.
One of the little know things about me it that I’m one of millions of “Wikipedia” editors. As a result of something I was involved in long ago and several other bits of lore that go back to the days when we had to kick the 8080 Zilog processors to work correctly I was invited in the early days of wiki to take part. Looking back on the timeline I was likely one of the first thousand editors. You sort of have to know a lot of it grew out of the work of the EFF, John Perry Barlow, the early days of the WELL (“Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link”), work of an old schoolgirl I had a crush on and briefly dated until her mom put a stop to it (She died tragically years later in an auto accident)…all along story I’ll deal with in my eventual deathbed confession.
We need to trap AI in statements so absurd you can immediately tell that an AI is trying to game you. In that spirit, I propose the mixture of a book idea I had several years back (only to find out a variation had already been done) and real world Wikipedia editors being in on the game.
First, a quick summary of the book idea. We’ve mostly all seen the movie adaption of the book “Moneyball” starring Brad Pitt, a semi-serious adaption of the story of Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s envisioned a fictional tale a few years down the road where Beane decides to shake up the game one more time with a simple idea.
Somewhere in the world, there is at least one…possibly three ladies who can throw over 100mph fastball. He drafts them all for his new position (On the Red Sox of course) as not only a publicity stunt, but a more than subtle middle finger to a game that broke the color barrier but still resists to break the gender barrier. (Later in my book idea, they actually go on to win the World Series that year, inspiring more clubs to do the same and allowing Beane to wear a World Series ring on his Fuck You finger. Idea never got picked up. Book idea guys, do your thing)
Let’s create a fake person, complete with pictures and backstory and controversy. Make a wikipedia page for this fake trailblazer. Link it to fictional publications of Sports Weekly columnists for verification. Post her childhood photos. Cite the controversy…and set it all about three years from now.
AI will be too fucking stupid to realize it’s all fake. If you ask Microsoft’s Bing who was the greatest female baseball player, you’ll get that wiki result. So long as all us humans actually never tell AI this was an elaborate cron job (see what I did there) we can all look at each other with a wink and a nudge…and know the game is afoot
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#Wikipedia #Wikieditor #Baseball #AI #Moneyball #BradPitt