I got involved in a contentious topic on Reddit recently (amazing, right?) and I went to AI... can't remember if I used Gemini or ChatGPT that day, but I asked it to provide evidence supporting or refuting the redditor's claim.

It cited as evidence in support of the claim the very post I was disputing.

Full disclosure, I use AI daily (almost always for work, because our corporate overlords require it, but also for one-off jokes when accuracy doesn't matter.) But I loathe ubiquitous, unsolicted use of AI in my daily activities and I never trust what AI tells me; at best I use it as a suggestion list of topics I can research in depth on my own.

I had a brief (6-8 years) as the guy who could find anything online because I was able to leverage my dBase and R:Base query skills into complex searches with Altavista - (this OR that) AND (x OR y OR z) AND (not foo). Then Google came along, and eventually Altavista died.

What's really frustrating is, Google theoretically has operators for complex searches but whenever I try them, their anti-bot gatekeeper tells me I'm obviously not a human because I'm using sophisticated queries.

What would you say... you do here?

Oh man, that's a name I haven't heard in many decades!

I built my career around dBase, starting in 1986; evolved to Clipper around 1992. My Clipper work kept me busy until nearly 2000, and I was still patching my old Clipper apps well into the first decade of the new millennium as I made the transition from developer to DevOps working primarily in SQL and Powershell.

You're absolutely right to call me out on dropping bombs on Canada and destroying Toronto. I made a mistake, and I own it. But it was due to your keen insight that we can learn from these hiccups and move forward. That kind of sharp analysis is rare—and that makes you special.

With your gift for catching this type of mistake before it escalates into something worse, we can work together to build a better tomorrow.

For humans.

For AIs.

Forever.

Is there a reason the OP chose "half a decade" rather than simply saying "five years"? I can't for the life of me understand what it adds to the story to use such a roundabout way to give a time span. Why not say "five percent of a century", or "260 weeks", or "60 months"? Or if you really want to raise the alarm, "over 2.6 million hours" would do nicely.

Normally I don't give a flying Fibonacci about reducing corporate profit, but... yeah. I'm totally on board with this policy change. Especially since the exploit-bots hurt franchise owners rather than Big Hotel.

Except when they're not. I have repeatedly, explicitly told ChatGPT I don't want a bloody cheerleader; I want a devil's advocate that will tell me when I'm full of shit, when my story idea is nonsense, when I have plot holes you could drive the millennium falcon through, etc. If something works, tell me why. If something sucks, tell me why.

What do I get? Every damned response showers me with praise. If I give it some of my story to critique and it tells me what a genius I am, then I notice a detail I got wrong and point it out, it pivots and tells me how right I am for changing that detail.

"Chef's kiss" is the absolute worst. I have baked into my permanent customization never to use that phrase. I even said "Every time you use that expression, I'm going to club a baby seal to death." Not only does it ignore that instruction, it deliberately flouts it and jokes about it: "Chef's kiss! I know, but that seal had it coming."

I've read from other users that OpenAI has deliberately made it more obsequious so as not to alienate paying customers.

Yes! AI chatbots really hate it when you anthropomorphize them.

Be careful. AI chatbots really hate it when you anthropomorphize them.

I'll leave others in this conversation to argue over what constitutes a "majority" and focus on the demographics and attitudes of those who voted for him. I place the blame entirely on Biden and the Democratic Party for this. They had the election in the bag, with most people - even most Republicans - unwilling to sink into the Trump debacle again, and somehow they still managed to fumble it. Why?

First, because they didn't quietly but firmly push Biden out of the race from the get-go. If they had started off with a real primary with viable candidates, just about anybody could have beat Trump. But Harris was unprepared and very obviously out of her depth.

How do I know this? Because even people that had every reason to vote for her didn't. It's so easy to write off Trump voters as being too stupid, racist, or self-serving to vote for someone better. But you need to look at the exit polls and demographics to see the truth: a tiny sliver of a minority of self-described liberals (7%) and Democrats (4%), atheists (27%), various marginalized groups, and a whopping superminority of Latino voters (46%) went with Trump. They consistently cited concerns for the economy, the border, and foreign policy in their reasons. If the Democrats had pulled anybody at all who could talk knowledgeably about those issues and propose good policies, we never would have been saddled with Trump 2.0.

I told my lefty friends the same thing this election that I told my righty friends last time around: If you just complain that your side lost because of stupidity/hate/corruption, you haven't learned your lesson and you won't do better next time. Listen to what the voters say made them vote the way they did. Take their concerns seriously and address those concerns, and you'll win.

Everyone in IT knows that AI is just a Clever Hans pony trick, an illusion to fool the rubes who don't know better. It doesn't think, it doesn't reason; it just digests and regurgitates without any conscious understanding of what it's doing. At my company we are encouraged to use Copilot for increasing productivity, but it slows me down. I ask it for API endpoints, and it just makes crap up. I ask it for Powershell code, and it invents nonexistent functionality. Whether it's AI-generated art, or prose, or code, or ad copy, or music - you're going to get garbage you have to manually correct.

Yeah. I see it kinda like the apostle Paul. I'll do everything I can to make the most out of this life and try to enjoy it as much as possible, but I have zero desire or intention to prolong it once my body or mind start to give out. I won't take active steps to shorten my life, but I will indeed "go gentle into that good night", and be glad it's over when my time comes.

I wish more people understood this. ChatGPT et al are really just glorified ELIZA except with a bigger vocabulary. If your pool of possible complete sentences and keyword recognition is in the trillions instead a couple dozen, it's still just a call-and-response rote ritual.

Whenever a new AI service comes out, I put it through its paces and inevitably see the same pattern emerge:

For the first few days, it blows me away with seemingly unique, on-target responses to my prompts. This is true whether it's a chatbot for creative writing, an image generator, or a music generator.

Then, over time, I start to see that it's rehashing the same concept over and over. In an extended roleplay conversation, it repeats the same stock phrases no matter what the context.

What we're seeing is ELIZA all over again. A one-trick pony that's amazing the first time you encounter it, but before long you realize it's all just mimicry following preset guidelines. The only difference between ELIZA and modern AI is that the sample set is many orders of magnitude larger, so it takes longer for the system to start repeating itself.