"If I go find an actor/actress that I like the sound of their voice of, and want to create a weird golem of a voice, what I'd do is get several 48khz 16-bit recordings from audio books of that actor, run it through the training (because I have their voice and the book they are reading) and then find a performance style of that actor/actress I want (from maybe a movie or or television show) and thus "skin" that voice to sound like that performance. That will give me a 95% reasonable sounding voice for all the words from the books they read, and a 10% accuracy on words that they never ever said before.

And of course you would contact the appropriate copyright clearinghouse or actors' association and pay the associated fees for using those voices, which the massive IP theft organizations known as "AI" do not.

That's what the big bosses tell us anyway. In a somewhat obscure corner of the human experience where I sometimes hang out there are ~5 web sites of varying ages that write and publish original and meaningful things. But if you search for that obscurity on Google you will now be directed to 847 "sites", "magazine articles", "experts", etc of which 842 are thinly disguised machine-rewritten versions of the 5 real sites - the kind of rewriting I would have instantly flagged as plagiarism back in my TA days - wrapped up in phony autogenerated web sites, documents, articles, etc.

Most people aren't authors or painters who earn a direct living from their creative work (of which there are very few), but most people put some amount of creative effort into their jobs and livelihoods. Whether it is a financial analyst in a cubicle who develops independent analyses of the prospects of an investment target, a graphic artist who creates flyers and web sites for small businesses, or an electrician who figures out a better way to route cabling through a standard spec house during construction they can all recognize that the self-styled "AI" vendors are just stealing their creative labor with zero compensation and feeding it into a spicy chatbot labeled "AI" which is going to be used by their bosses to put them out of work.

"It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another." --Malcolm Reynolds

(Ironically applies well to Joss Whedon himself. Kind of wonder if one of the show writers was thinking about Joss when they wrote that...)

The only single-source point of failure is me.

I think I saw someone swimming in some sewage en route from scraping a bear carcass off the road, let me go check.

1. I got asked once if I played world of warcraft since they say a guy with the name "thegarbz" playing. I said no. By the way I know exactly who that person is because he impersonated me as a joke. I found that flattering and funny, but it has no impact on my life beyond that.

Reminds me of my first email account ;) One of my professors said we all had to register for an email account (this was in the mid-90s) so we could submit our homework to him, so I registered his name at hotmail.com to mess with him ;)

I don't trust single points of failure.

Yeah, this. If I have to sign up to some site that I don't care at all if it gets hacked, I use a throwaway password. Oh noez, someone might compromise my WidgetGenerator.foo.bar account and generate some widgets in my name, heavens to betsy!

On Fords you can pull the fuse for the module and the car will work just fine

His surname is one transposition away from "AI Mode".

Yeah, because all even/all odd is (from basic statistics) rare, and happens to be rarer than the percentage of people who play all-even or all-odd, so you'd be more likely to split any winnings.

Modern models will take into account statistical biases in lotteries. For example, here's ChatGPT:

Pick good lottery numbers for the Virginia powerball lottery

Good question. First, a reality check: Powerball is pure chance — there’s no “good” numbers that are more likely to win. Every set of 5 white balls (1–69) + 1 Powerball (1–26) has exactly the same probability.
wwwuat.valottery.com
+1

That said, I can give you a few tips + a sample “random but balanced” pick, if you’d like to pick your own numbers rather than use Quick Pick.

Some tips when choosing your Powerball numbers

Spread your numbers
Try to pick a mix across the range (low, mid, high). According to lottery-strategy advice, not clustering all your numbers in one group is better.
samlotto.com

Avoid patterns
Many people pick birthdays, anniversaries, or sequential numbers. That’s fine—but if you win, you might have to share with more people because these are popular picks.
lotteryvalley.com

Use “due” or “hot” numbers carefully
Some sites (like lottery-analysis tools) track which numbers are “hot” (drawn recently) or “overdue” (haven’t appeared in a while). But remember: past draws don’t change future odds.
m.lottostrategies.com

Mix even and odd
According to some statistical analyses, it’s less likely to draw all odd or all even numbers.
samlotto.com

Play responsibly
Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are extremely long: 1 in ~292 million.
lotterycritic.com

Sample “balanced” Powerball pick

Here’s a random-but-balanced combination you could use just for fun (or as a basis to tweak):

White balls: 8, 23, 41, 57, 65

Powerball: 12

If you like, I can generate 5 different “smart random” picks for the next Virginia Powerball draw (balanced by probability and number distribution). Do you want me to do that?

It's a damned shame '99942 Apothis' will miss us in a few years

It's not too late to fix that.

The thing is, it very much *won't* be random numbers. It's about as far from a random number generator as you can get.

In a really bad model, one would expect it to likely be "numbers it's seen the most in the context of a lottery". But in a good model, esp. a thinking model, one would expect it to think over which sorts of numbers are statistically over-chosen (birthdates, etc) and avoid them in giving its answers.

The funny thing is, think of how this woman will interact with ChatGPT from now on. ChatGPT could say "Abraham Lincoln was married to John Wilkes Booth", and she'd be thinking, "Okay, that sounds really, really wrong, but on the other hand, it picked the right lottery numbers, so..."