Flutterby™! : vegetative electron microscopy

Yesterday, an office mate who uses more LLM stuff than I do reported that XCode, Apple's development environment, was suggesting using an NSImageRenderer object (which doesn't exist in the Mac, though there is a counterpart, UIImageRenderer, on the iPhone). Other office mate was experimenting with the $200/month OpenAI product, and the results were initially interesting, but fell apart on deeper inspection.

Today comes the news that a weird conjunction of a couple of words across columns is making its way into scientific papers through the use of these automated bullshit generators.

(And if you missed it a few days ago, the BBC had a great takedown of using bullshit generators for summarizing.)

I can see why the dancing bears are impressive, and I get why people think these techniques have promise, but I also remember Eliza and Animals...

Retraction Watch: As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends its use