Fuck AI

"the idea is tantalizing"

No the fuck it isn't, and that's not even a Fuck AI type opinion just basic fucking scientific principles

In relayed news, a recent study that concluded I am, not just the smartest person in the universe but also the smartest that has every been or will ever be.

Alt text.

A recent Axios story on maternal health policy referenced "findings" that a majority of people trusted their doctors and nurses. On the surface, there's nothing unusual about that. What wasn't originally mentioned, however, was that these findings were made up.

Clicking through the links revealed (as did a subsequent editor's note and clarification by Axios) that the public opinion poll was a computer simulation run by the artificial intelligence start-up Aaru. No people were involved in the creation of these opinions.

The practice Aaru used is called silicon sampling, and it's suddenly everywhere. The idea behind silicon sampling is simple and tantalizing. Because large language models can generate responses that emulate human answers, polling companies see an opportunity to use A.I. agents to simulate survey responses at a small fraction of the cost and time required for traditional polling.

They were so busy thinking about the fact that they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. How much of an idiot can you be?

Silicon sampling, has to be dumbest thing I've heard of in a while.

Axios updated the story:

Editor's note: This story has been updated to note that Aaru is an AI simulation research firm.

But still stands by their claim:

New findings by Aaru, an AI simulation research firm, for Heartland Forward show that a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses

What kind of bullshit "fact checking" is this?

"New findings by Smegma, an Xbox chatroom research firm, show that your mother is a woman of loose morals who has had sexual intercourse with dozens of Xbox gamers."

wtf...

Wasnt it axios that had that controversy recently where some github admin ended up in a flame war with an ai, and axios made up quotes?

Or was that someone else?

It's ironic that the survey companies, who I thought wanted to avoid noise and bullshit, would pay for noise and bullshit that any RNG could fill.

Yes, but how much of the training data is synthetic data? Because I expect this startup has no idea. Microsoft uses ML to crawl files on OneDrive to build aggregate models of document types, then use that for LLM training.

It's just all slop all the way down, huh? Just a fuzzy picture of a fuzzy picture hit with the "sharpen" filter 20 times?

Okay, that means that per immediately I'll never trust axios as a source again

I instantly thought "fuck no, this can't be true", then read the AI part.

Wtf

I'm still convinced axios made up the "truck owners don't use their shit right" back in 2018 and it caused 75% of the internet here for trucks. To this day after asking repeatedly I still have not found a single lock of evidence outside one of their hit pieces.

What an interesting but absolutely horrible idea.