@[email protected] draw for me a full body image of two happy upright anthropomorphic long-haired alley cat pirate hybrids with LED implants and gold earrings drunkenly shouting happy songs through the empty night

Style: fustercluck

@[email protected] draw for me a cartoon cockatoo singing “'O sole mio!” with a scruffy alley cat boozing it up for the night.

@[email protected] draw for me two hyper-caffeinated long-haired kitties electrified with open-mouth smiles chugging coffee.

Style: anime

Does not work for ANY phrase. It seems to be presuming that the person asking is referencing something. Sample results copied here in order of AI’s least theorizing to its most.

• horses before giraffes meaning

“Horses before giraffes” has no scientific meaning because giraffes are not ancestors of horses…

• put your horses before giraffes meaning

“Put your horses before giraffes” is not a recognized English idiom. The similar and well-known idiom is “put the cart before the horse,” …

• always put horses before giraffes meaning

The phrase “always put horses before giraffes” is a variation of the well-known medical aphorism: “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras”…

• titrated solutions beget relief meaning

The phrase “titrated solutions beget relief” means that carefully adjusted or fine-tuned treatments can bring about an end to a problem…

@[email protected] draw for me a woman holding a full coffee mug with text “Fuck NAZIS” on the mug.

When last night’s phone call from the folks turned to Kirk and violence, I made a point to mention that, yes, there were lots of posts for violent ‘retribution’, but we have no idea how many are just bots trying to stir the pot rather than actual people – but consoled? them that it was still proper to worry because surely those posts would convince some suggestible people that the bot-post ideas are a widely held and acceptable reaction.

From Al Jazeera:

Governor Cox told a news conference on Friday: “On the evening of September 11, a family member of Tyler Robinson contacted a family friend, who then informed the Washington County Sheriff’s Office that Robinson had either confessed to or implied that he had committed the incident.

“This information was relayed to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office and investigators at Utah Valley University and conveyed to the FBI.”

and

Governor Cox said cryptic messages were engraved on shell casings recovered with the rifle, which he read out phonetically. Their meaning is not immediately clear.

One spent shell case read: “Notices, bulges OWO what’s this?”

Cox said three unfired shell cases read: “Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow symbol, and three down arrow symbols”, “Oh Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Ciao, Ciao, Ciao” and “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO”.

So he’s online a lot. There’s the wikipedia article on the history of Bella Ciao.

This reminds me of a post a year ago about orb weaver Araneus ventricosus also using fireflies as bait. I thought this would be a follow-up, but they’re talking about a different species here.

I see a duck demanding peas. Tasty rolly green peas.

You are absolutely correct. It took time for the evidence to be reviewed, accepted, and for the new consensus to be codified. Mostly, I wanted to let folks know the headline was a bit click-baity and give some examples of how we got here. I wish we were wired to get the same excitement from titles like, “Zoologists agree: Giraffe are four species – not just one!” with an article that gives more credit to all the research.

I thought we already knew this. A quick search found this from 2018: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6206193/

All giraffe (Giraffa) were previously assigned to a single species (G. camelopardalis) and nine subspecies. However, multi‐locus analyses of all subspecies have shown that there are four genetically distinct clades and suggest four giraffe species. This conclusion might not be fully accepted due to limited data and lack of explicit gene flow analyses. Here, we present an extended study based on 21 independent nuclear loci from 137 individuals. Explicit gene flow analyses identify less than one migrant per generation, including between the closely related northern and reticulated giraffe. Thus, gene flow analyses and population genetics of the extended dataset confirm four genetically distinct giraffe clades and support four independent giraffe species. The new findings support a revision of the IUCN classification of giraffe taxonomy. Three of the four species are threatened with extinction, and mostly occurring in politically unstable regions, and as such, require the highest conservation support possible.

Edit: this 2021 report has a nice image:

Kudos! I no longer have to deal with any of that, but I appreciate it’s been a problem and am glad you took action. Thank you!

On your advice, I read it. Good essay. Yes, the image is Whatever, but the creative part for this post was the pun, so I still gave it an upvote because I haven’t heard it death.

It has always been strange to me that anyone would think animals don’t have a wide range of emotions. I understand that a scientist can’t ask how an animal is feeling, and must instead record avoidance/seeking behaviors, but it also seems vanishingly improbable that emotions aren’t part of a long and useful evolutionary methodology to get to the next generation. Cows have friends. Sure, it took effort to prove, but why wouldn’t we expect that? We see mothers nurture their offspring, and we could easily call it love and concern. It is good to see we now have proof that it isn’t just the cuddly creatures with emotions, but at least as far down the scale as fish.

I read that as including human interaction as part of the pain point. They already offer bounties, so they’re doing some money management as it is, but the human element becomes very different when you want up-front money from EVERYONE. When an actual human’s report is rejected, that human will resent getting ‘robbed’. It is much easier to get people to goof around for free than to charge THEM to do work for YOU. You might offer a refund on the charge later, but you’ll lose a ton of testers as soon as they have to pay.

That said, the blog’s link to sample AI slop bugs immediately showed how much time humans are being forced to waste on bad reports. I’d burn out fast if I had to examine and reply about all those bogus reports.

These attacks do not have to be reliable to be successful. They only need to work often enough to be cost-effective, and the cost of LLM text generation is cheap and falling. Their sophistication will rise. Link-spam will be augmented by personal posts, images, video, and more subtle, influencer-style recommendations—“Oh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.” Networks of bots will positively interact with one another, throwing up chaff for moderators. I would not at all be surprised for LLM spambots to contest moderation decisions via email.

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community.

Ouch. I’d never want to tell someone ‘Denied. I think you’re a bot.’ – but I really hate the number of bots already out there. I was fine with the occasional bots that would provide a wiki-link and even the ones who would reply to movie quotes with their own quotes. Those were obvious and you could easily opt to ignore/hide their accounts. As the article states, the particular bot here was also easy to spot once they got in the door, but the initial contact could easily have been human and we can expect bots to continuously seem human as AI improves.

Bots are already driving policy decisions in government by promoting/demoting particular posts and writing their own comments that can redirect conversations. They make it look like there is broad consensus for the views they’re paid to promote, and at least some people will take that as a sign that the view is a valid option (ad populum).

Sometimes it feels like the internet is a crowd of bots all shouting at one another and stifling the humans trying to get a word in. The tricky part is that I WANT actual unpaid humans to tell me what they actually: like/hate/do/avoid. I WANT to hear actual stories from real humans. I don’t want to find out the ‘Am I the A-hole?’ story getting everyone so worked up was an ‘AI-hole’ experiment in manipulating emotions.

I wish I could offer some means to successfully determine human vs. generated content, but the only solutions I’ve come up with require revealing real-world identities to sites, and that feels as awful as having bots. Otherwise, I imagine that identifying bots will be an ever escalating war akin to Search Engine Optimization wars.

I heard several sound bites with officials saying, ‘No one could have predicted this’ and I keep thinking, “I betcha some groundwater geological engineer already predicted this exact disaster complete with amount of rain needed per each foot-level of river rise and with a precise measure of their margins of error.” I do NOT know that for a fact, but – having known geological engineers – it feels like the sort of thing they’d calculate out of idle curiosity (especially if they notice new development diverting groundwater in unmitigated ways).

ptarmigan

Deep in the entrails of the framework, the databases have been glitching: incorrectly issuing penalties and wrongly moving recipients into the Kafkaesque “penalty zone”. The bug was falsely cancelling welfare benefits to thousands of recipients across many years.

That’s a really critical bug. QA is supposed to catch this sort of thing. Development is supposed to fix it, and fast. When the client is a government, it should have the foresight to put in the contract that it will withhold payments until such critical bugs are fixed. If you don’t do that, why would the vendor bother with QA and bug fixes?

And all of that is aside the fact that the whole thing results in busy work, hoop-jumping, and wasting time for both the people administrating it and those trying to get benefits. Sheesh.

Yours is a perfect and concise expression of my main complaints.