For today's conservatives, anything they don't like--from policy to postage stamps--is communist. They're like grade-school kids who have learned an insult word, but don't actually know what that insult word means. So whatever it is they don't like, it's "communist."
This wouldn't be a problem if conservatives actually were grade-school children. But they're not--they're actually running the government of one of two remaining superpowers on the planet. And it seems like they're running that government with about the same efficacy as you might expect from having grade-school children trying to run things.
Today's Conservatives = MAGA are no longer involved in a political party. It is kind of a religion with features of a tribe - like sports ball team fans. It requires strict, unthinking adherence to the MAGA articles of faith. Suspension of all critical thinking. Instead of going to church, you have to watch State TV. You may never criticize Dear Leader. And, you are required to demonize nonbelievers (and brown people).
Cults are extreme versions of the tribalism that dominates so many human behaviors. "Us" is good, and we should defend anything associated with it. "Them" is bad, and should be viewed as a threat. That's a prominent role of the human cerebral cortex.
Musk knows how to attract young people. Look at his AI waifu. If liberals really want to win back the hearts of young people, I suggest Google and Japan collaborate to launch a competing AI waifu.
Or is it that he appeals to incels? How does one win them back? Have you read about the gaming platform that young Chinese men are flocking to that appeals to their grievances about gold diggers because the one child policy has them outnumbered by females in their generation?
In Antonia Fraser's "The Weaker Vessel," seventeenth century documents from England showed that more girl infants died from "lying on" (babies "accidentally" killed by being rolled onto at night) than boy infants. The gender preference can manifest in a lot of ways.
Inexpensive portable ultrasound machines meant female fetuses were aborted by the zillions, to ensure the one child allowed was male. There must be a surplus of Chinese males of a certain age, which is extra problematic because of cultural xenophobia; Chinese largely want to marry other Chinese.
Contrary to the biological preference, or not, the one child policy produced a paucity of girl babies in rural China because male babies could be expected to work the fields and care for the parents. Girl babies were thrown into the local rivers. That is why there are so many more men than women in the current generation.
I totally agree. They are not conservative. It is the radical fascist red hat party. I am conservative; I vote d b/c they lower the debt and provide services.
The only problem is they talk about lowering the debt and providing services, but when in power, they do the complete opposite (see"BBB" and "D.O.G.E."). Stop voting against your own interest.
For that matter, why did people ever use the respectable word "conservatives" to refer to the belligerent, anti-democracy reactionaries who've always been reichwing extremists?
Don't forget Mitch McConnell's role in the fascist radicalization of SCOTUS, Bill Barr's preemption of the meaning of the Mueller Report and Mueller's damaging reticence in stating the truth of the findings.
From an elected representative point of view the two have all but completely melded. From an individual point of view the meld is less complete, but (obviously) still complete enough to elect a MAGA slate. If it votes like a MAGA, its a MAGA.
They call their annual hatefest CPAC. The C is for Conservative. In my world, the words “Conservative Republican” haven’t been respectable since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 run.
“They're like grade-school kids who have learned an insult word, but don't actually know what that insult word means. So whatever it is they don't like, it's ‘communist.’”
Their current 'leader' has the same problem with many terms. A perfect example is tariff, all he knows, which is all he wants from using it, is attention (even better if it is miss-direction from a topic he wants ignored). "Oh, they fear me when i say tariff, and all the media show up to cover ME."
A Trump supporter in a rural area put up a sign after the election: "Communism has been defeated again." That house has all the Made in China Trump paraphernalia.
I'm surprised they're bringing "communist" back, when they were having such success with the equally undefined but well-demonized term "socialist" in their media.
White supremacist “Christian” nationalists took a term used within a community and actively redefined it to use against that community. They’re now working on doing the same with anti-Semitism. Previously they coined reverse racism. It’s all part of an effort to maintain their social position at the expense of everyone else and the nation.
It is embedded in fascist DNA. Mussolini started as a socialist newspaper editor and both he and Hitler stole rhetoric and policies from Marxist parties, so they needed to identify their biggest enemies as the Marxist Socialist and Communist parties, which really existed in the 1920s. Today's fascists are simply regurgitating the old lines out of habit.
On more than one occasion I've had conservatives I know call something or someone "socialist," which prompted me to ask them "Do you know what socialism is?"
The answer I get every time is "government telling me what to do." That's the verbatim response every time.
Usually I try to explain what socialism actually is and provide some real-world examples of it functioning well (e.g., many of the Scandinavian countries). Some understand it. Others respond with "it works there because everyone is the same" (as in, everyone is White). Those others I never speak to again.
Same here. When they respond it’s because everyone is white, I’m tempted to start reciting a list of all the white-on-white bloodletting over the past 2,000 years in Europe, but I know they don’t have the attention span to stick with me. If they had the grit to stick with it they would have taken history classes in high school.
So much of what the right depends in terms of influence, recruitment and rank-and-file motivation is manufactured through Big Lie propaganda tactics. Anything that dilutes the saturation of the Big Lie is an existential threat to the Right.
To the extent that AI creates a reality-based alternative to the Big Lie, it undermines everything the GOP is doing. So obviously, the right will want to either control it or destroy it.
Since destroying AI at this stage seems like trying to get toothpaste back in the bottle, I expect that the right will try to control AI by enlisting their next favorite tactic after the Big Lie: Extortion.
The radical right will threaten AI companies with God-knows-what to parrot the right’s Big Lie du jour. I have no doubt the extortion discussions are already underway…
Extortion has already happened. Their 180 degree pivot from their previous “liberal” statements indicates they caved, or they all developed some kind of neurological disease at the same time. The second option is highly improbable.
I take exception to you comparing how conservatives run the government to what you'd expect from grade school children. Grade school kids would do a much better job. We would have parties, puppies, balloons and kittens in the Whitehouse instead of Steve Miller, Pete Hegseth and the present child rapist in chief. Heck, if the kids were bright seventh and eighth graders, we might even get Whitehouse bulletins from the president that are written in grammatically correct English!
I think you owe all the grade schoolers in this country, and, indeed, the whole world an apology. For shame!!!
That's correct! Members of the extraterrestrial MAGA species are described as having the emotional maturity of a ten year old human boy. They also are described as sadistic, driven by sex and power, demanding, and vengeful. Nocturnal. Legislators meeting and voting in the middle of the night.
Like the people who put a dead match back in the box of matches.
Communists!
Like the people who, cruising slowly for a park at the mall, as soon as they see a heavily laden shopper stopping beside a car, put on their indicator and bring everyone else to a stand still for several minutes while they wait for the space to become free.
Communists!
Like the people who, in a public toilet, pull off the end of the roll of paper with one hand in such a way that the loose end of the paper is now hidden inside the canister.
I learned a lot from that blog post, including this quote from Bertrand Russell:
“The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.”
"souped up autocorrect" is a very accurate description.
It all falls in the family of heuristic programming, that is programming that decides on the basis of rules applied to a set of data, instead of specific values entered as in comvensional programs.
The results depend on the defined rules. More sophisticated programs will have algorithms to help define the rules.
Since the rules are defined (directly or indirectly) by human beings, the same set of data with different rules can produce contradictory results.
So critical thinking should be applied before accepting the results.
In many ways, the Colbert Report was prophetic. There is the quip that Paul mentioned, but then there was also the the term "truthiness", which refers to not necessarily objective truth but rather that something "feels true".
My all time favorite bits from the show that really needs to be required watching for all citizens is when Stephen started his own super PAC, which was in response to the Citizen's United ruling. If people actually saw the process and saw how absurd it was and how easy it is to effectively bribe a politician, I think most people would see how dirty campaign financing really is.
That horse bolted long ago. Political bribery is right out in the open now. The Supreme Court effectively ruled bribery to be legal. Musk personally dropped a quarter billion dollars on the Trump campaign.
> large language models — which we are, misleadingly, calling artificial intelligence — are still, essentially, a souped-up version of autocorrect.
Exactly. They are statistical engines that, based on the training material, give a response with the highest probability given the input data.
So there is some delicious irony in the examples given. For prompts about climate change and tax cuts, the LLM's give a result that's the best summary of the information on the Internet. So it's a sort of consensus of all available information about those two subjects, which "conservatives" could have found themselves if they were more widely read.
After Musk wanted Grok to be more "politically incorrect", they used posts from X to train their LLM. The antisemitic responses MechaHitler gave are an indication of the extremist views of X posts. The old maxim of the software world "garbage in, garbage out" came into play.
So at as far as collective wisdom of data posted on the Internet is concerned, Colbert is absolutely right that "reality has a liberal bias".
And BTW, Republicans have been accusing their political opponents of being socialists/communists since the 1890's. It's hardly new. To them, FDR was one of those evil commies. And that's another irony, since the Republicans clearly believe in socialism for the rich, and "you're on your own" for the rest of us.
"LLMs give a summary of the best available information on the internet." This is a reason why the regime is removing content from the government websites. 😢 No content, no data, no best available summary.
And it's "best available" in the past - it's not even using today's info but what it was trained on years ago (not counting Gemini or things that summarize live searches).
Grok has probably been trained or retrained by reading Musk's Twitter posts, of which there are a great many. To make an LLM in your own image, you have to post a lot. Elon's time investment has paid off, lol.
There are manual overrides built into Grok to allow humans to "correct" it when it gets sidetracked. There was a period a few weeks ago when it would insert complaints about South African white farmer genocide into nearly every query response. That was traced back to someone telling Grok to do that.
Having seen the initial prompt for the original Bing Chat back when it was exposed by users and posted to Reddit, I can picture the white genocide stuff as having been mentioned in Grok's initial prompt, maybe just as an example of the type of controversial subject that Grok shouldn't shy away from discussing. Maybe this particular white genocide glitch was more complex than that, but the old Bing Chat initial prompt was amazingly short and non-technical.
That makes sense, because so often Elon's post is just a one-word response, like "concerning." The model needs to follow the whole thread in order to master the Musk mentality.
"As far as I can tell, large language models — which we are, misleadingly, calling artificial intelligence — are still, essentially, a souped-up version of autocorrect." Thank you for saying that! I'm a translator and the client platforms with the tools I use have added AI. I call it a writing tool because you still have the work to put in to make sure it's the high quality and accuracy you need. It used to be that you could "train" the tool and create glossaries to that end, but with AI I'm now getting interference from the AI itself in suggestions and omissions that mean it's even MORE work when it's supposed to be the opposite, and just doing my own typing like in the good ole pre-AI days is more time-efficient. That's really a counter-productive shiny object.
I slightly (but respectfully) disagree. I would amend your statement to say: there are a lot of jobs, some of them highly paid, that have a large component which could be described as souped-up autocorrect. However, current LLMs only cover that part of the job (with some errors) and the output always needs to be reviewed by an expert. This is true from my experience in: computer coding, translating Latin to English and summarising meetings.
An LLM can make an expert far more productive, but can’t replace an expert. In computer coding, I’ve seen a current LLM follow an apparently sensible pattern and produce rubbish because it didn’t have an “understanding” of the overall situation.
Thank you. Gary Marcus’ comments are useful. I use an LLM to give me examples of how to invoke libraries I haven’t used recently (or ever). It is (or seems to be) faster than searching for the correct library and working out how it use it.
I don’t like AI. Not because it’s communist, which is ridiculous (like the Republican Party) but because it doesn’t work and is based on stealing others work. Just like the Republican Party.
"[The Democrats are] basically a lot like a European Social Democratic party."
I disagree. In any democratic, developed country the US Democratic party would be a somewhat right-of-center party - something like the German Christian Democrats, or moderate elements of the British Tories. It is true that some American Democrats are firmly in the Social Democratic region, but the party itself remains controlled by conservative, right-of-center people.
The problem is that many of those never-Republicans in the US have insurmountable difficulties crossing this particular red line. From the standpoint of a foreign observer it is remarkable how often Americans who call themselves progressive are so affected,
My thought is that if AI and Crypto disappeared tomorrow they wouldn't be missed by anyone but a few tech billionaires and a bunch of people who would have bid up the price of tulips in the 17th century.
We all tend to favor our own point of view, but narcissists ONLY consider their own. All other viewpoints are perceived as biased. In this case we are dealing with multiple sociopathic narcissists and maybe a few psychopaths as well. The perception of pure evil is hard to shake. Is that just liberal bias or truth?
Call. Write. Email. Protest. Unrelentingly. About everything ❤️🩹🤍💙
Use/share this spreadsheet as a resource to call/email/write members of Congress, the Cabinet and news organizations. Reach out to those in your own state, and those in a committee that fits your topic.
My experience of AI is that the term Artificial Intelligence is an oxymoron with the emphasis on "moron."
That tech genius Musk produced a Nazi AI program and then DOD immediately implemented it is mindboggling. Well, nobody is likely to accuse Secty Hegseth of being intelligent. AI images are usually quite easy to spot. The images are too perfect. I have found online AI apps like ChatGPT often produce answers to questions that I did not even ask. So I just Google and get better results. Also annoying is that the grammatical structure of answers reads like a 5th-grade textbook. It sounds like the station announcements on the London Underground trains. Let's face it, MAGA intelligence is an oxymoron too.
LOL, Musk can't fix anything much less his AI, he is not a genius regardless of how hard the Reich has tried to prove that lie. Musk like Trump was born wealthy and was simply not as stupid as Trump to waste it all on con man ideas. Musk got super rich when PayPal sold and he got his cut, this doesn't make him smart. He only owns 12% of Tesla stock and while he is the CEO he doesn't do the job, someone else does, he is just the face. Engineers at Tesla do all the smart stuff but he is enough of a con man to convince the Reich he is genius, much like Trump has done. But, when you are a group that has been believing people like Rush, Beck and Fox News you look for lies to believe. Like Trump, Musk has made claims of release dates Tesla never hits. We should already have Self Driving Semi Trucks going coast to coast if you believe what Musk says and also Trump said Infurstructure Bill is 2wks out, 9yrs ago. These people are only good at 1 thing, Lying.
I think ppl forget that a lot, that Elon is *only* a CEO. Not an engineer, not a coder, not a scientist in any right, not even the founder of most of his companies! He loves to portray himself as the great genius bc that what his mommy always told him, but he has vanishingly few actual skills. If I'm to believe he's some kind of godlike creature brimming with sperms bearing his rare and amazing intelligence, as he likes to believe, I'd kind of also had to believe he might actually be a pro ranked gamer-lol. Lmao, even.
And you're right on the money, their only real skills in this administration are their prolific lying and master class projection
That is the talent Musk, Trump and con men of that nature have, the abilty to make people that are either too lazy to check for themselves or just too trusting to believe anything they tell them. The really sad part is that it is hard to get these poor people to understand the facts that are in their face.
Oh man, I live among them in the Appalachians. It's borderline tragic to see so, so many ppl around me fall into his trap with their whole hearts. i wish i knew how to help outside of the little protests in my hometown. I wanna do outreach, but I don't know where to even start, how do I get through to them? I'd need cult extraction training!
It's been 10yrs now and I've not reached any of them. Seems to me that recuiting new voters is the only solution to this Hell. Every time I point out some disgusting bad thing Trump has done they will break their backs to find a way to justify it. You have to understand they are not justifying this for you, they are doing it for themselves. It seems here in Alabama that most of these people I've known most my life are bad racist and I simply didn't see it before. One thing for, I will never look at any of them the same way again.
Thank you Paul for citing the great Stephen Colbert,who besides giving us the notion that " reality is known to have a liberal bias (delivered at the at the press club dinner in front George W.!), also gave us the notion of " 'truthiness', a truthful or seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for something not because of supporting facts or evidence but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true". Merriam Webster. He was criticizing politicians, e.g. iraq war begun based on no evedence. trump and his minions have expanded it to a full blown dogma. Colbert was prescient.
AMEN! Reality here on the ground is always going to be left-liberal because of the many struggles we face. The Mamdani and Fateh candidacies are just the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended). People are seeing their friends and neighbors swept off the streets and banished into oblivion, just as what happened during the Nazi era. The more the MAGAT cult of personality oppresses us, the further left we are pushed.
For today's conservatives, anything they don't like--from policy to postage stamps--is communist. They're like grade-school kids who have learned an insult word, but don't actually know what that insult word means. So whatever it is they don't like, it's "communist."
This wouldn't be a problem if conservatives actually were grade-school children. But they're not--they're actually running the government of one of two remaining superpowers on the planet. And it seems like they're running that government with about the same efficacy as you might expect from having grade-school children trying to run things.
Today's Conservatives = MAGA are no longer involved in a political party. It is kind of a religion with features of a tribe - like sports ball team fans. It requires strict, unthinking adherence to the MAGA articles of faith. Suspension of all critical thinking. Instead of going to church, you have to watch State TV. You may never criticize Dear Leader. And, you are required to demonize nonbelievers (and brown people).
In other words, a cult.
Exactly.
Cults are extreme versions of the tribalism that dominates so many human behaviors. "Us" is good, and we should defend anything associated with it. "Them" is bad, and should be viewed as a threat. That's a prominent role of the human cerebral cortex.
Sp;am bot reported.
Reported again. "Poisoning our food" had now been replaced with "magnesium" message.
Musk knows how to attract young people. Look at his AI waifu. If liberals really want to win back the hearts of young people, I suggest Google and Japan collaborate to launch a competing AI waifu.
Or is it that he appeals to incels? How does one win them back? Have you read about the gaming platform that young Chinese men are flocking to that appeals to their grievances about gold diggers because the one child policy has them outnumbered by females in their generation?
I believe the last thing I read was that males outnumbered females because the culture favors male children
In Antonia Fraser's "The Weaker Vessel," seventeenth century documents from England showed that more girl infants died from "lying on" (babies "accidentally" killed by being rolled onto at night) than boy infants. The gender preference can manifest in a lot of ways.
Inexpensive portable ultrasound machines meant female fetuses were aborted by the zillions, to ensure the one child allowed was male. There must be a surplus of Chinese males of a certain age, which is extra problematic because of cultural xenophobia; Chinese largely want to marry other Chinese.
Contrary to the biological preference, or not, the one child policy produced a paucity of girl babies in rural China because male babies could be expected to work the fields and care for the parents. Girl babies were thrown into the local rivers. That is why there are so many more men than women in the current generation.
Why do people still use the respectable word ”conservatives” to refer to the belligerent, anti-democracy reactionaries of MAGA?
I totally agree. They are not conservative. It is the radical fascist red hat party. I am conservative; I vote d b/c they lower the debt and provide services.
Voting d b/c they lower debt and provide services sound more like you're moderate to me.
The only problem is they talk about lowering the debt and providing services, but when in power, they do the complete opposite (see"BBB" and "D.O.G.E."). Stop voting against your own interest.
For that matter, why did people ever use the respectable word "conservatives" to refer to the belligerent, anti-democracy reactionaries who've always been reichwing extremists?
Because just as all liberals are not communists, all conservatives are not MAGA.
Liberal parties have nothing to do with communist parties and vice versa. But conservative parties have a lot to do with the MAGAts.
St. Reagan, the Bush League and Newt Gingrich paved the way for Trumpkopf and his MAGAnuts.
Don't forget Mitch McConnell's role in the fascist radicalization of SCOTUS, Bill Barr's preemption of the meaning of the Mueller Report and Mueller's damaging reticence in stating the truth of the findings.
If only Billy Barr were White House counsel now. We'd have Barr Epstein going viral!
What they did was criminal. Legal but criminal.
And Lee Atwater, Pat Buchanan, The Moral [sic] Majority, Phyllis Schlafly, etc, etc.
Oh yeah, Tricky Dickies cronies.
And the exaltation of him by the reichwing made him all the worse.
From an elected representative point of view the two have all but completely melded. From an individual point of view the meld is less complete, but (obviously) still complete enough to elect a MAGA slate. If it votes like a MAGA, its a MAGA.
They might not be MAGA, but they are fascist.
Really non MAGA in the GOP are exceedingly rare.
They call their annual hatefest CPAC. The C is for Conservative. In my world, the words “Conservative Republican” haven’t been respectable since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 run.
This is a perfect analogy:
“They're like grade-school kids who have learned an insult word, but don't actually know what that insult word means. So whatever it is they don't like, it's ‘communist.’”
👩🍳💋
Their current 'leader' has the same problem with many terms. A perfect example is tariff, all he knows, which is all he wants from using it, is attention (even better if it is miss-direction from a topic he wants ignored). "Oh, they fear me when i say tariff, and all the media show up to cover ME."
Epstein files, Epstein files, Epstein files.
He might want the topic ignored, but we're going to keep reminding him.
One of the commenters on NPR yesterday afternoon said exactly the opposite. It's DonnyJon who keeps bringing up the Epstein situation .
Ironically, he keeps bringing it up precisely because he wants it to go away. That only serves to prove that he's an idiot.
The NPR commenter said that it would be history in a week if Trump would shut up about it.
The word 'Woke' is a perfect example. @jayneconverse on instagram did an entire post explaining the word, it's history, and it's integral meaning.
A Trump supporter in a rural area put up a sign after the election: "Communism has been defeated again." That house has all the Made in China Trump paraphernalia.
Or “far left lunatics” as Trump calls them.
I'm surprised they're bringing "communist" back, when they were having such success with the equally undefined but well-demonized term "socialist" in their media.
Don't forget, if it ain't communists, it's Woke.
Another word that they don't know what it means. Of course, Nobody knows what "woke" means.
My understanding is that woke means awake to the reality of everyday racism.
Good a definition as any!
White supremacist “Christian” nationalists took a term used within a community and actively redefined it to use against that community. They’re now working on doing the same with anti-Semitism. Previously they coined reverse racism. It’s all part of an effort to maintain their social position at the expense of everyone else and the nation.
decent; functionally civilized, considerate.
Ha!
It is embedded in fascist DNA. Mussolini started as a socialist newspaper editor and both he and Hitler stole rhetoric and policies from Marxist parties, so they needed to identify their biggest enemies as the Marxist Socialist and Communist parties, which really existed in the 1920s. Today's fascists are simply regurgitating the old lines out of habit.
On more than one occasion I've had conservatives I know call something or someone "socialist," which prompted me to ask them "Do you know what socialism is?"
The answer I get every time is "government telling me what to do." That's the verbatim response every time.
Many folk think communist and socialist are synonymous.
People with serious authority problems! And no understanding of the actual meaning.
I have problems with chauvinist authoritarians!
What do you respond with?
Usually I try to explain what socialism actually is and provide some real-world examples of it functioning well (e.g., many of the Scandinavian countries). Some understand it. Others respond with "it works there because everyone is the same" (as in, everyone is White). Those others I never speak to again.
Same here. When they respond it’s because everyone is white, I’m tempted to start reciting a list of all the white-on-white bloodletting over the past 2,000 years in Europe, but I know they don’t have the attention span to stick with me. If they had the grit to stick with it they would have taken history classes in high school.
So much of what the right depends in terms of influence, recruitment and rank-and-file motivation is manufactured through Big Lie propaganda tactics. Anything that dilutes the saturation of the Big Lie is an existential threat to the Right.
To the extent that AI creates a reality-based alternative to the Big Lie, it undermines everything the GOP is doing. So obviously, the right will want to either control it or destroy it.
Since destroying AI at this stage seems like trying to get toothpaste back in the bottle, I expect that the right will try to control AI by enlisting their next favorite tactic after the Big Lie: Extortion.
The radical right will threaten AI companies with God-knows-what to parrot the right’s Big Lie du jour. I have no doubt the extortion discussions are already underway…
Extortion has already happened. Their 180 degree pivot from their previous “liberal” statements indicates they caved, or they all developed some kind of neurological disease at the same time. The second option is highly improbable.
The irony of it is that the owners of AI companies all follow "Mencius Moldbug". They're as reactionary as it gets.
Definitely some of them. Not sure it’s all.
Altman, MuskRat, Zuck, Bozo Bezos, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and of course, Theil and Andreessen. That's just a partial list.
I can’t find any info that Sergey Brin is a Curtis Yarvin follower. Admittedly I only look at Wikipedia.
Zuck and Bezos are sucking up to Trump.
I take exception to you comparing how conservatives run the government to what you'd expect from grade school children. Grade school kids would do a much better job. We would have parties, puppies, balloons and kittens in the Whitehouse instead of Steve Miller, Pete Hegseth and the present child rapist in chief. Heck, if the kids were bright seventh and eighth graders, we might even get Whitehouse bulletins from the president that are written in grammatically correct English!
I think you owe all the grade schoolers in this country, and, indeed, the whole world an apology. For shame!!!
Indeed. I have slandered them all with this comparison, and I do apologize!
I am ashamed of this Cult like administration. They fire anyone who doesn't fit the playbook. This is not Democracy.
They are running our government into the ground.
Morons
Are
Governing
America
Grade school kids would at least be more kind and try to do the right thing for others.
I remember that in third grade there was a brief craze for insulting people or activities by calling them vichyssoise.
That's correct! Members of the extraterrestrial MAGA species are described as having the emotional maturity of a ten year old human boy. They also are described as sadistic, driven by sex and power, demanding, and vengeful. Nocturnal. Legislators meeting and voting in the middle of the night.
Like the people who put a dead match back in the box of matches.
Communists!
Like the people who, cruising slowly for a park at the mall, as soon as they see a heavily laden shopper stopping beside a car, put on their indicator and bring everyone else to a stand still for several minutes while they wait for the space to become free.
Communists!
Like the people who, in a public toilet, pull off the end of the roll of paper with one hand in such a way that the loose end of the paper is now hidden inside the canister.
Communists!
Spam bot to an unrelated infomercial. Seen everywhere. Reported
Somebody please report. My phone freezes attempting to report this.
I got it.
It's gone. Thank you!
Same. It’s really irritating!
Going to use "souped up autocorrect" when I have the AI convo with students at the start of this year 😂 Thanks Paul!
I'm kind of partial to "libertarian derp". LMAO!
Have you ever noticed that "derpitude" rhymes with "turpitude"? Coincidence?
Derp actually has a formal technical meaning!
https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what-is-derp-answer-is-technical.html
I learned a lot from that blog post, including this quote from Bertrand Russell:
“The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.”
AI will give you an answer out of the world of pop culture. It's not academic.
"Stochastic Parrot" is another analogy.
I’ve been saying something similar—it’s autocomplete on steroids.
"souped up autocorrect" is a very accurate description.
It all falls in the family of heuristic programming, that is programming that decides on the basis of rules applied to a set of data, instead of specific values entered as in comvensional programs.
The results depend on the defined rules. More sophisticated programs will have algorithms to help define the rules.
Since the rules are defined (directly or indirectly) by human beings, the same set of data with different rules can produce contradictory results.
So critical thinking should be applied before accepting the results.
Stephen Colbert was right - republicans live in a separate reality.
and to have them in control is not good for the real reality.
In many ways, the Colbert Report was prophetic. There is the quip that Paul mentioned, but then there was also the the term "truthiness", which refers to not necessarily objective truth but rather that something "feels true".
My all time favorite bits from the show that really needs to be required watching for all citizens is when Stephen started his own super PAC, which was in response to the Citizen's United ruling. If people actually saw the process and saw how absurd it was and how easy it is to effectively bribe a politician, I think most people would see how dirty campaign financing really is.
No one in either chamber, on either side of the aisle, wants to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
That horse bolted long ago. Political bribery is right out in the open now. The Supreme Court effectively ruled bribery to be legal. Musk personally dropped a quarter billion dollars on the Trump campaign.
I remember when Bill Maher kept (correctly) pointing out W's separate reality bubble. How tame that was in comparison....
> large language models — which we are, misleadingly, calling artificial intelligence — are still, essentially, a souped-up version of autocorrect.
Exactly. They are statistical engines that, based on the training material, give a response with the highest probability given the input data.
So there is some delicious irony in the examples given. For prompts about climate change and tax cuts, the LLM's give a result that's the best summary of the information on the Internet. So it's a sort of consensus of all available information about those two subjects, which "conservatives" could have found themselves if they were more widely read.
After Musk wanted Grok to be more "politically incorrect", they used posts from X to train their LLM. The antisemitic responses MechaHitler gave are an indication of the extremist views of X posts. The old maxim of the software world "garbage in, garbage out" came into play.
So at as far as collective wisdom of data posted on the Internet is concerned, Colbert is absolutely right that "reality has a liberal bias".
And BTW, Republicans have been accusing their political opponents of being socialists/communists since the 1890's. It's hardly new. To them, FDR was one of those evil commies. And that's another irony, since the Republicans clearly believe in socialism for the rich, and "you're on your own" for the rest of us.
"LLMs give a summary of the best available information on the internet." This is a reason why the regime is removing content from the government websites. 😢 No content, no data, no best available summary.
"Best available" has a lot of intellectual wiggle room. Best is in the eye of the beholder.
And it's "best available" in the past - it's not even using today's info but what it was trained on years ago (not counting Gemini or things that summarize live searches).
Grok has probably been trained or retrained by reading Musk's Twitter posts, of which there are a great many. To make an LLM in your own image, you have to post a lot. Elon's time investment has paid off, lol.
There are manual overrides built into Grok to allow humans to "correct" it when it gets sidetracked. There was a period a few weeks ago when it would insert complaints about South African white farmer genocide into nearly every query response. That was traced back to someone telling Grok to do that.
Having seen the initial prompt for the original Bing Chat back when it was exposed by users and posted to Reddit, I can picture the white genocide stuff as having been mentioned in Grok's initial prompt, maybe just as an example of the type of controversial subject that Grok shouldn't shy away from discussing. Maybe this particular white genocide glitch was more complex than that, but the old Bing Chat initial prompt was amazingly short and non-technical.
This was a fairly obvious (and successful) attempt to push Trump into offering white South African people asylum.
I read that it was trained on who Musk followed on X. Can’t remember where I saw that now.
That makes sense, because so often Elon's post is just a one-word response, like "concerning." The model needs to follow the whole thread in order to master the Musk mentality.
"As far as I can tell, large language models — which we are, misleadingly, calling artificial intelligence — are still, essentially, a souped-up version of autocorrect." Thank you for saying that! I'm a translator and the client platforms with the tools I use have added AI. I call it a writing tool because you still have the work to put in to make sure it's the high quality and accuracy you need. It used to be that you could "train" the tool and create glossaries to that end, but with AI I'm now getting interference from the AI itself in suggestions and omissions that mean it's even MORE work when it's supposed to be the opposite, and just doing my own typing like in the good ole pre-AI days is more time-efficient. That's really a counter-productive shiny object.
I slightly (but respectfully) disagree. I would amend your statement to say: there are a lot of jobs, some of them highly paid, that have a large component which could be described as souped-up autocorrect. However, current LLMs only cover that part of the job (with some errors) and the output always needs to be reviewed by an expert. This is true from my experience in: computer coding, translating Latin to English and summarising meetings.
An LLM can make an expert far more productive, but can’t replace an expert. In computer coding, I’ve seen a current LLM follow an apparently sensible pattern and produce rubbish because it didn’t have an “understanding” of the overall situation.
Gary Marcus has a recent substack on AI making expert coders less productive: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-news-ai-coding-may-not-be
Thank you. Gary Marcus’ comments are useful. I use an LLM to give me examples of how to invoke libraries I haven’t used recently (or ever). It is (or seems to be) faster than searching for the correct library and working out how it use it.
Thanks for the link. And the link in Mr. Marcus' article to another comparing belief that LLMs are intelligent similar to a belief in psychics.
In my experience, the C-Suite will happily put up with errors if it allows them to layoff a lot of people and pocket the change.
One time I was working on a slide show for jury selection and it got destroyed so my wife decided to have ChatGPT create one.
It was like a 1L did it: it regurgitated the relevant law but clearly had never selected a jury before.
I don’t like AI. Not because it’s communist, which is ridiculous (like the Republican Party) but because it doesn’t work and is based on stealing others work. Just like the Republican Party.
"[The Democrats are] basically a lot like a European Social Democratic party."
I disagree. In any democratic, developed country the US Democratic party would be a somewhat right-of-center party - something like the German Christian Democrats, or moderate elements of the British Tories. It is true that some American Democrats are firmly in the Social Democratic region, but the party itself remains controlled by conservative, right-of-center people.
They’ve never been able to push through universal healthcare but I understand they’ve tried (not an expert, I’m observing from Canada).
The problem is that many of those never-Republicans in the US have insurmountable difficulties crossing this particular red line. From the standpoint of a foreign observer it is remarkable how often Americans who call themselves progressive are so affected,
I see your point. It’s absurd to call Dems socialists (or far left lunatics—a favourite phrase of Trump’s).
My thought is that if AI and Crypto disappeared tomorrow they wouldn't be missed by anyone but a few tech billionaires and a bunch of people who would have bid up the price of tulips in the 17th century.
We all tend to favor our own point of view, but narcissists ONLY consider their own. All other viewpoints are perceived as biased. In this case we are dealing with multiple sociopathic narcissists and maybe a few psychopaths as well. The perception of pure evil is hard to shake. Is that just liberal bias or truth?
Call. Write. Email. Protest. Unrelentingly. About everything ❤️🩹🤍💙
Use/share this spreadsheet as a resource to call/email/write members of Congress, the Cabinet and news organizations. Reach out to those in your own state, and those in a committee that fits your topic.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13lYafj0P-6owAJcH-5_xcpcRvMUZI7rkBPW-Ma9e7hw/edit?usp=drivesdk
This is an invaluable resource under one umbrella Megan, many, many thanks!
Thank you so much for your sweet comment! You’re welcome!!
My experience of AI is that the term Artificial Intelligence is an oxymoron with the emphasis on "moron."
That tech genius Musk produced a Nazi AI program and then DOD immediately implemented it is mindboggling. Well, nobody is likely to accuse Secty Hegseth of being intelligent. AI images are usually quite easy to spot. The images are too perfect. I have found online AI apps like ChatGPT often produce answers to questions that I did not even ask. So I just Google and get better results. Also annoying is that the grammatical structure of answers reads like a 5th-grade textbook. It sounds like the station announcements on the London Underground trains. Let's face it, MAGA intelligence is an oxymoron too.
LOL, Musk can't fix anything much less his AI, he is not a genius regardless of how hard the Reich has tried to prove that lie. Musk like Trump was born wealthy and was simply not as stupid as Trump to waste it all on con man ideas. Musk got super rich when PayPal sold and he got his cut, this doesn't make him smart. He only owns 12% of Tesla stock and while he is the CEO he doesn't do the job, someone else does, he is just the face. Engineers at Tesla do all the smart stuff but he is enough of a con man to convince the Reich he is genius, much like Trump has done. But, when you are a group that has been believing people like Rush, Beck and Fox News you look for lies to believe. Like Trump, Musk has made claims of release dates Tesla never hits. We should already have Self Driving Semi Trucks going coast to coast if you believe what Musk says and also Trump said Infurstructure Bill is 2wks out, 9yrs ago. These people are only good at 1 thing, Lying.
I think ppl forget that a lot, that Elon is *only* a CEO. Not an engineer, not a coder, not a scientist in any right, not even the founder of most of his companies! He loves to portray himself as the great genius bc that what his mommy always told him, but he has vanishingly few actual skills. If I'm to believe he's some kind of godlike creature brimming with sperms bearing his rare and amazing intelligence, as he likes to believe, I'd kind of also had to believe he might actually be a pro ranked gamer-lol. Lmao, even.
And you're right on the money, their only real skills in this administration are their prolific lying and master class projection
That is the talent Musk, Trump and con men of that nature have, the abilty to make people that are either too lazy to check for themselves or just too trusting to believe anything they tell them. The really sad part is that it is hard to get these poor people to understand the facts that are in their face.
Oh man, I live among them in the Appalachians. It's borderline tragic to see so, so many ppl around me fall into his trap with their whole hearts. i wish i knew how to help outside of the little protests in my hometown. I wanna do outreach, but I don't know where to even start, how do I get through to them? I'd need cult extraction training!
It's been 10yrs now and I've not reached any of them. Seems to me that recuiting new voters is the only solution to this Hell. Every time I point out some disgusting bad thing Trump has done they will break their backs to find a way to justify it. You have to understand they are not justifying this for you, they are doing it for themselves. It seems here in Alabama that most of these people I've known most my life are bad racist and I simply didn't see it before. One thing for, I will never look at any of them the same way again.
Thank you Paul for citing the great Stephen Colbert,who besides giving us the notion that " reality is known to have a liberal bias (delivered at the at the press club dinner in front George W.!), also gave us the notion of " 'truthiness', a truthful or seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for something not because of supporting facts or evidence but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true". Merriam Webster. He was criticizing politicians, e.g. iraq war begun based on no evedence. trump and his minions have expanded it to a full blown dogma. Colbert was prescient.
AMEN! Reality here on the ground is always going to be left-liberal because of the many struggles we face. The Mamdani and Fateh candidacies are just the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended). People are seeing their friends and neighbors swept off the streets and banished into oblivion, just as what happened during the Nazi era. The more the MAGAT cult of personality oppresses us, the further left we are pushed.