I like that you wrote "costmetic". All of these people are kids. Some are adult-aged, but they are all mental infants. And if anyone believes there isn't a market for this, may I remind you of the Crazy Frog? From Wikipedia: "Jamba/Jamster boomed—when VeriSign bought the business it had a turnover of $15 million per quarter and 3 quarters later this increased to $150 million a quarter—in 2005, the company made close to $600 million in revenue." A fool and his money are soon parted.

More JPEG for the same number of bytes?

No em-dashes for you! Slashdot turns the misinterpreted UTF-8 bytes into "Ã--", i.e. the A-tilde is encoded as a numeric HTML entity and the em-dash turns into two minus characters.

That's a multiplication x, unicode 0x00D7, encoded as a two-byte UTF-8 sequence (0xC3, 0x97), which reads as à (A-tilde) followed by an em-dash if interpreted as Windows-1252 characters.

That's roughly the data rate of uncompressed mono 16bit 44.1kHz audio, i.e. CD quality, albeit just one channel instead of two. If you believe that's what they send, you're a rube. You could send compressed SD video with audio in that bit rate, not merely screenshots every few seconds.

"LG Ad Solutions" should not be a thing.

Don't pay.

It's the gray goo scenario. AI consuming text and generating text wherever it can, until there's nothing left but AI slop.

At least, probably.

That'll draw some people to see the movie and up the box office by at least $30, maybe $40.

https://xkcd.com/908/

This is why. It has nothing to do with sound quality. Digital makes these shenanigans possible. Digital data is handled by programmable devices. Programmable devices can be turned against you at the press of a button not if but when the manufacturer wants to. You can't look at something to see if it will do what you want it to do. Software-defined functionality means it can do anything and nothing and you will never know before or even after your money has been spent.

That's the difference between tech enthusiasts and technicians. The tech enthusiast says "Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!" but the technician says "The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."

...to build another Clippy. With vulnerabilities and unmaintainable code. In fact, forget Clippy.

  Yay humanity.

Protyping. Think diffarent.

That's an excuse for not paying attention. We've trained young people on touch screens. Obviously they prefer what they know. Like all young people ever they think the rules don't apply to them, so what is important to them, pixels on screens, takes precedence over actually DRIVING THE FUCKING CAR in traffic with OTHER PEOPLE, not NPCs.