Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: Brinklump Linkdump (20 Jan 2024)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Sympathy for the spammer (15 Jan 2024)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Linkty Dumpty (15 July 2023)"
The thing is, there really is an important area of AI research for Google, namely, “How do we keep AI nonsense out of search results?”
Google’s search quality has been in steady decline for years. I blame the company’s own success. When you’ve got more than 90 percent of the market, you’re not gonna grow by attracting more customers — your growth can only come from getting a larger slice of the pie, at the expense of your customers, business users and advertisers.
Google’s product managers need that growth. For one thing, the company spends $45 billion every year to bribe companies like LG, Samsung, Motorola, LG and Apple to be their search default. That is to say, they’re spending enough to buy an entire Twitter, every single year, just to stay in the same place.
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Google's chatbot panic (16 Feb 2023)"
A read-only interlocutor is a robot troll.
In 1977, my father, a computer scientist, brought home a teletype terminal (a keyboard and a printer, no screen) and an acoustic coupler (a box with two suction-cups that matched up with the speaker and mic on the receiver of a standard Bell phone), and he connected it to the DEC PDP minicomputer at the University of Toronto. I was seven years old. I was hooked.
Continue reading "“Conversational” AI Is Really Bad At Conversations"