Do you imagine the sock puppet cares who feeds it? Or appreciates your reply?

Just adding Huawei as another example of a company that once had pretty good support. However you can argue for mitigating circumstances in Huawei's case. Or for extra culpability depending on how you interpret the Juniper fiasco with Chinese sauce.

Not a very constructive FP with a vacuous Subject, too. Were you just seized by the uncontrollable urge to FP something?

I have three linked takes.

The first take is that diagnosis is quite difficult. I think that is partly a matter of excessive specialization to deal with the overload of medical knowledge, but one of the negative repercussions is that many doctors avoid diagnoses. Also related to the flawed economic model, but it's relatively safe (and too profitable) to treat the symptoms without worrying too much about diagnosing the cause. Until the cause becomes so serious that there is no difficulty at all in recognizing what is killing the patient.

Second take is that the AIs don't care about making mistakes. No human sense of shame or uncertainty or perhaps even humility or anything else that might make the human doctors hesitant.

Third take is the psychological harm to the doctors. You might they they deserve some comeuppance for their bad attitude in the past, though I think that's unfair to most doctors. However I think this is yet another AI thing that makes people feel bad. My new joke involves the need for CMINT for the "applied psychologists" who are installing so much new software in human beings. In this case the software under attack (called upgrade?) is the patients' trust in the physicians.

Websearched CMINT and see that I need to explain it meant "Configuration Management, Integration, and Test" from my ancient days at TI with the last Lisp machine. Big complicated project but I was hired by the CMINT section that was supposed to help the parts fit together without making things worse... (But so long ago that I can only recall a few details about three of the biggest bugs I found way back then. At that time a mere half million transistors on a chip was at the leading edge...)

Because they must maximize the profit, so whichever brand is more profitable should take over!

However I think "Only Pepsi Catastrophe" doesn't have the same ring as "Only McDonald's Catastrophe".

Parent already modded up, but I hope some folks give the story some of the funny comments it deserves.

Me? I'm just waiting for the "Only McDonald's Catastrophe." Since profit maximization is the only criterion that matters, only the most profitable food source deserves to survive. If not McDonald's it could be something worse. Google's AI result put Starbucks in second place, though it's easier for me to imagine Ronald swallowing Starbucks than vice versa.

So I should explicitly ask the google "What will be the last food source standing?"...

Hmm... Not only themselves. Sometimes they are the victims of their own success.

Going for funny here, but the story is mostly tragic? However it is the story of my latest interaction with product support. And I should have smelled the trap before I walked into it.

So since the longer joke is going to fail, let me start by stealing a joke from an "Elevator Lift" video. Sorry I can't remember their names right now, but the joke is something like this:

Back to the sad funny story. I saw a special "thank you" sale for a Huawei device. I haven't touched Huawei in some years, but before that I had several decades of unusual satisfaction and good value. Perhaps 10 devices of various sorts, including at least two smartphones.

But this new device has already caused several days of struggle. Previous devices never needed much support, though I do remember one tricky installation problem for Linux, but this new device is so far from "latest and greatest" that it should be funny. And I think it all started because Huawei was too successful to be trusted, even if it had been possible to keep Huawei "engaged" in the standards. Regarding support, each day I've been updating the latest problems--but Huawei support hasn't gotten back to me yet and I will probably laugh myself silly if they ever do. Sad funny.

Seriously disappointed. Doesn't anyone have a funny story of AI interaction?

Sorry I can't step up first. A few of my AI interactions have been useful, many have been infuriating, and some of the others were just too stupidly wrong to be funny.

Quoted against the censor trolls, though I can't tell what upset them. That they didn't get FP? And I didn't like your vacuous Subject.

However, I sort of anticipated this problem about 40 years ago. My original formulation was something like 'Too much computer use must be bad for your mental health'. In those days I was largely focused on the exhaustion of long hacking sessions needed to fix programs. These days I think the biggest problem is anthropomorphism, but the AIs started it because the VCs think "engagement" and "attention" are valuable--and the VCs are always desperate for more money ASAP.

Our human hardware is amazing. Remarkably flexible, though short of Turing's UTM because their ain't no infinite tapes. However the human software has always been buggy and problematic and kind of random. I think religions may be the best example from the old days, but these days the applied psychologists are creating new bugs much faster than we can patch them...

"Fortunately, of course, I am... immune to its effect." Not. But hopefully I get some protection due to my preference for books? This story is about people who were not immune, but maybe they were on the brink before the AI pushed them over?

Okay, so the discussion did produce a good joke. Not the feeping creaturitis I was looking for, but still...

But why did you propagate the AC brain fart Subject?

Not feeling motivated to search for signs of intelligent life on today's Slashdot. But I'll give the Funny tab a click just to make sure it's as empty as usual. Probably could be a "feeping creaturitis" joke on the topic, but...

Pretty weak FP. Care to clarify how it relates to the question? Cannot even tell if you have or have not experimented with AI.

I have done a bunch of experiments with various AIs. Or you might call them games, since I haven't been rigorous about it. Also read a number of books on the topic, though the older ones were mostly science fiction and the newer ones are largely cookbooks. Long time since I read it, but my recollection is that When Harlie was One by David Gerrold was probably the funniest, A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hancock is the best recent critique, though it largely focuses on an alternative understanding of how intelligence works, and What is ChatGPT Doing by Stephen Wolfram may have been the biggest disappointment. Videos have been much less insightful...

I have gotten some useful results from the AIs, but mostly not. My latest thinking is that depending on AIs is probably bad for mental health--but there's a whole lot of that going on. Our human hardware is pretty good, but the software is remarkably buggy and we don't seem to have any plan for the upgrades... Treating AIs as though they were human is definitely problematic.

Back into ancient history: As a writing tool for personal use, my favorite may have been WordStar. Long time ago, but in some ways I see the new generative AIs as just being much more powerful ways to write from a different level of abstraction. Well, more like from a number of levels of abstraction in rapid succession. Way back then I felt like I could write much faster and hopefully "better" with WordStar than without it, but most of the increments of improvement since then were "not so much". You might prefer to compare the latest generative AIs to the earliest IDEs?

Oh. And spell check. I really like spell check. In the WordStar days is was a separate process, not integrated...

These days? I'm not sure anyone could pay me enough that I would want to risk the mental damage of using AI for long hours--and I imagine that I've seen evidence around here somewhere. I strongly suspect it is that harmful. My original formulation from about 40 years ago was something like 'Too much computer use is not good for mental health' and I still think so.

Newest book I've started reading on "Internet considered harmful" topics is The Attention Fix by Andrew Hansen. Translated from Swedish?

Interesting FP, but that's not the cause of the declining birth rate. Rather that is a more general problem linked to a broadly detached misunderstanding of how things work or how to fix the problems. Japan is still fishing for an economic solution.

Ma Nature has a simpler approach. Each couple is supposed to produce at least four children, but only the two with the best genetic luck are supposed to survive long enough to reproduce. That's the equilibrium status based on averages, but Ma Nature's version of progress would actually call for more dead children than that...

Me? I think we could do better using some amount of reason. But I can't recall having read any rational discussions of a human right to reproduce or to receive genetic counseling...

Now you seem to be contradicting yourself. Are you going to pay the blackmail or not?

Hmm... Naw, not worth the requote against the censor trolls. But I know that censor moderation is sometimes evidence of important points they lack other response for...

NAK.

But I think you're a racist, too, and not the first one in America's brief history.

Deserve Funny and the story got none. And I think we all need more funny these weeks...