John Scalzi: Please I Beg of You Do Not Use “AI” In Your Business
Communications.
The thing is: I’m not special. Every writer and creative person, from
the most successful down to the very newest, is inundated with these scam spam emails. Lots
of them, every single day. Pretty much every one of us, I assure you, now associates “AI”-
generated text with attempted fraud.
AI writing has become the modern day Facebook ad: sure, the product looks intriguing, but
you know this particular link is a scam.
Pro Publica does a profile of Mark McAfee of Raw Farm,
a raw milk producer that's been linked to various salmonella and e. coli poisonings, and a
bird flu related
recall.
“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they
recovered,” McAfee acknowledged before my visit. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And
I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t
climb.”
Via Tara
Calishain. Sarah Taber
@sarahtaber.bsky.social points out that the reason he sells everywhere but Minnesota
is accountability, because the Minnesota Department of Health uniquely oversees a team of
interviewers called Team Diarrhea
who track down food poisoning cases fast enough to actually pin down fresh dairy products.
The thing is... I grew up on raw milk. I find pasteurized milk to be kinda yicky (though
that could also be homogenization, and breed of cattle and what not). But the more I learn
about aspects of the culture I grew up in, the more I realize how horrific some of it was.
These Popular Snacks Contain High Levels of Additives and
Contaminants
A new investigation from Consumer Reports and Yuka reveals that some of
America’s most ubiquitous foods—from brands like Cheetos, Hostess, and Jell-O—contain
concerning substances. How did we get here?
They note that many of the products they tested exceed the daily consumption limits in a
single serving, calling out Hostess Donettes Powdered Mini Donuts and Little Debbie Oatmeal
Creme Pies.
Via.
From tante
@tante@tldr.nettime.org and Peter Rojas @roj.as:Landmark German ruling declares
Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers
Google's AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams,
subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to
the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the
plaintiffs and drew connections that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The
publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn't respond appropriately.
Google's defense was that users could check the linked sources themselves. The Decoder notes that Pew finds that only 1% of
users click a source link from Google's AI overviews. Oumi’s Study Finds
50% of
AI Overviews Untrustworthy:
Of the AI Overviews powered by Gemini 3 we were able to assess, about 91%
contained the correct answer. Only 39% of the total overviews were both correct and fully
supported by its cited sources, a combination we term “trustworthy.”
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange observes:
Google's defence needs to be amplified by anyone talking to politicians about
'AI' regulation:
Google is explicitly saying in their legal filing that the outputs
from their LLM should not be trusted and that users should know that.
That's one hell of an admission. Imagine saying that about any other
category of product.
That also feels remarkably similar to Fox News's defense in libel cases. Chisnall also notes:
The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the
defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but
it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the
output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the
output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.
It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an
official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM
vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of
perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM-
integrated tooling.
Edit: The Decoder:
Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it
liable for false answers (lobste.rs.
Ars Technica: Nobody needs AI to search the
Internet, court says in ruling against Google
The machines are fine. I'm
worried about us. On what "AI" and LLMs are doing to astrophysics.
David Hogg, in his white paper,
says something that cuts against this institutional logic so sharply that I'm surprised
more people aren't talking about it. He argues that in astrophysics, people are always the
ends, never the means. When we hire a graduate student to work on a project, it should not
be because we need that specific result. It should be because the student will benefit from
doing that work.
Via.
I know I've linked to something like this before, maybe even this site, but I can't find
it right now. moh_kohn: How building
an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight.
Via.
Terence
Eden’s Blog @blog@shkspr.mobi: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML, on a
developer observing a young woman in a UK housing benefits office browsing the service's
sites on a PlayStation Portable. Lots more on that in the resulting Fedi thread.
What Web Does Tommi Want? 🤯
@tommi@pan.rent has a picture of a T-shirt that reads:
HTML&
CSS&
JS& not you
SVG
stux⚡️ @stux@mstdn.social
It’s absurd
People are paying for AI tokens to create bot accounts on #Mastodon to post
nonsense, increasing the costs for servers, storage and emails all while making the #AI
hype even bigger so our servers are gonna costs a lot more
And some wonder why I hate pointless LLMs (AI) so much🤔
Kirk pulled a quote from this video on Mega Man 2.
His design rules for Mega Man 2 were specific and deliberate. Enemies appeared
in small waves, three or four at a time, using the same attacks, so players could actually
learn the pattern. Terrain and placement adjusted the challenge, not random enemy
behavior. And here's the detail that reveals everything. The last enemy in each wave was
easier than the ones before it. I'll say that again on purpose. The final enemy in a wave
was easier. Why? Kamura explained the psychology this way. He'd notice that people don't
replay games, even good ones, because when they think back, their minds go to the hardest
parts, and that memory makes replaying feel like work. He didn't want players remembering
Mega Man 2 as a slog. He wanted them to remember feeling like they were getting better.
And then he said something that is essentially the entire point of this video. I quote, "I
wanted the player to feel like he was improving at the game, too."
I've been thinking a lot recently about addictive behaviors and product design and...
okay, full disclosure, I have a Stardew Valley save with over 300M gold. I recently
deleted the Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit apps from my phone.
I'm struggling with this as much as anyone else. I mean, sure, I've got a walk to and from
the office, that's some time to do some mindless tapping, but...
Circa 2001, I had a Sega Dreamcast with Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 on it. At some point I was
trying to unlock the hidden area in the final level, and spent a bit of time on it, and
realized I wasn't building transferrable skills.
Sometime in between now and then, I was playing Half-Life 2, and realized that if I went
into a melee with low health, the attacks were nerfed and I could move through the levels
more quickly.
Games have gotten more refined, and now Stardew Valley doesn't require any skill, it's
just tap for dopamine. But at least it wears its politics on its sleeve, and you discover
pretty soon that maybe having little creatures that live on your farm and harvest your
crops, whose color you can change, is kinda problematic? That, as you kill all of
the denizens of a level of tiled, lit, underground space, obviously an advanced
civilization, in order to steal their cloth, that maybe there's a commentary on
colonialism here?
Charlene and I are hooked on a TV show called The Way Home (and other friends
whove tried it have gotten similarly hooked), and one of the recurring themes is a
compulsion to participate in history, in a way that explores addictive behavior, so maybe
that's the thing that's framing my experience of the world these days.
But, between "AI"/LLM chatbots, online gambling, computer games, etc., I'm wondering where
the boundary is in the things that we create between giving us joy, giving us new
experiences, and exploiting holes in human perception to create deliberately addictive
experiences.
And I'm pondering this as someone who participates in a lot of IRL stuff, indeed as
someone who's an organizer of a lot of community, from square dance calling to Urban Chat forums.
I don't have good answers, but I'm disturbed.