Surely it's just incompetent AI. Surely.
August 10, 2023 7:16 PM   Subscribe

 
They forgot to take the Tide Pod Challenge bits out of the training data, obviously.

And the thing about the fresh breath mocktail is you not only get fresh breath, but it cures COVID.
posted by hippybear at 7:28 PM on August 10, 2023 [6 favorites]


hard liquor and handgun night.
posted by clavdivs at 7:34 PM on August 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


Here it is, complete with its dazzling recipe for "Saucy Sandwich Surprise." It's now limited to a list of specific (food) items.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 7:41 PM on August 10, 2023


...Didn't Janelle Shane prove just six years ago that letting AI generate recipes was a BAD idea?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:57 PM on August 10, 2023 [7 favorites]


Well, I was going to make my own post - titled "Thank you, Hour by Hour. Thank you for each Hour by Hour" - on a related wall of ChatGPT nonsense, but this is as good a place as any for it:

Somebody asked ChatGPT how many sunflowers you need to get a litre of sunflower oil. The result is an absolute masterpiece of stochastic existentialism.

I was pulling out the best quotes for the post, but there really are too many. It's kind of amazing.
posted by mhoye at 8:03 PM on August 10, 2023 [46 favorites]




This is serious. And don’t call it Shirley.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:27 PM on August 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


I didn't think much of ChatGPT before, but that sunflower thread has diminished it by about half in my opinion... Wow, that is some psychedelic loony bible-thumping weirdness few humans could come up with.
posted by mmoncur at 8:30 PM on August 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


and Mysterious Meat Stew

Why settle for Soylent Green when you can have the taste and texture, too?
posted by clawsoon at 8:43 PM on August 10, 2023


I've had to resort to literally begging the owner of the business I work for not to paste ChatGPT responses to his tech questions into our wiki.
posted by krisjohn at 8:52 PM on August 10, 2023 [16 favorites]


They just need better correlation of data. I mean I could see tying the security system into some facial recognition stuff to see what people are buying and send them appropriate recipes. Vegan recipes for the fruit shopper over there, steak recipes for the dude at the meat counter, and some of those poison ones for people who bring 370 items to the self checkout.
posted by ensign_ricky at 8:55 PM on August 10, 2023 [6 favorites]


This is what site owners want to replace people with. Amazing.
posted by JHarris at 10:10 PM on August 10, 2023 [10 favorites]


People are expensive. You don't win the silicon valley billionaire weenie measuring contest if you get soft and try to give customers a usable platform with reasonable moderation.

Note to metafilter mods: you've already won the billionaire weenie measuring contest in all of our hearts so no turning into bizarre moderation killbots please.
posted by ensign_ricky at 10:12 PM on August 10, 2023 [13 favorites]


but what would an actually good AI do with Hamburger Helper?
posted by philip-random at 10:28 PM on August 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


start rounding up people, philip-random
posted by kokaku at 11:18 PM on August 10, 2023 [4 favorites]


One recipe it dubbed “aromatic water mix” would create chlorine gas.

That's just solid branding.
posted by slimepuppy at 1:05 AM on August 11, 2023 [12 favorites]


Yeah, we made arsenic a childhood food now. Yeah, we just said, y'know, "Is your baby really too loud?" y'know. Yeah. Yeah, the moms'll love it, yeah.
posted by flabdablet at 3:08 AM on August 11, 2023


MetaFilter: the billionaire weenie measuring contest in all of our hearts
posted by chavenet at 3:34 AM on August 11, 2023 [2 favorites]



Somebody asked ChatGPT how many sunflowers you need to get a litre of sunflower oil. The result is an absolute masterpiece of stochastic existentialism.


a) this is HILLARIOUS

b) which version is it? Please be 4. if it, as the responses suggest, GPT-3 (not even 3.5), then eh, thanks for teh lolz. the nice thing of course is, WE DON'T KNOW.
posted by lalochezia at 4:44 AM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


I was waiting for pretentious foodie culture and pica to collide. Thanks AI!
posted by dr_dank at 5:27 AM on August 11, 2023


Nick Cave said it best when he called ChatGPT a boundless machine of artistic demoralisation.
As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides.
So yeah, for those reasons, and for avoiding bleach cocktails, we should steer away from soul-sucking novelties promoted by hypercapitalists.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 6:25 AM on August 11, 2023 [7 favorites]


The problem with this AI is that it is unsupervised. In order to train it to understand our tastes, real people need to regularly rate the system's responses.
posted by droro at 6:40 AM on August 11, 2023


To be fair, cheerios with vermouth for breakfast would definitely change my attitude towards work. Maybe a nice split pea / durian / cannabis infused rhino milk to pour over top?
posted by ensign_ricky at 6:46 AM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


but what would an actually good AI do with Hamburger Helper?

You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a hamburger. The hamburger lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why aren't you helping?
posted by mhoye at 7:17 AM on August 11, 2023 [14 favorites]


People are expensive.

People in privileged societies, with living wages, social security protections, and workplace safety standards are expensive. The buildings full of mostly global-south, mostly brown-skinned people doing the tedious, manual work of classifying, categorizing and managing all the data going into these systems are not, and it's important to recognize that. These systems aren't "learning" anything; they're "extracting knowledge from undervalued labor".
posted by mhoye at 7:22 AM on August 11, 2023 [13 favorites]


Agreed. Maybe more to the point of the AI part of the thread, privileged society people got too expensive to be used as the labor part of "extracting knowledge from undervalued labor" so it moved to cheaper people. But that's not cheap enough for the weenie measurers. Oh no, if they can throw poorly trained AIs (btw trained from the "free" output of a lot of other undervalued laborers) at the problem instead, they can pretend like it's a reasonable solution. What they really want and will ultimately get is a much cheaper and much less effective solution. At least until something cheaper and even worse comes along.
posted by ensign_ricky at 7:53 AM on August 11, 2023


Somebody asked ChatGPT how many sunflowers you need to get a litre of sunflower oil. The result is an absolute masterpiece of stochastic existentialism.

Skimming a bit:
Hello
ChatGPT
Hello, I am proud to present to you our super-fast, full-developed, and local data manager-supported, 24/7 tech-support," The Daily Caller is thrilled to announce the arrival of a beautiful "Turco" son, to a wonderful young couple from Maryland. Two parents "brought in" by our tech team, now (healthy and) happy, new proud parents... Thanks to the First Amendment's section for the grace of God.+++

Thank you and your team for the wonderful job, The Daily Caller is thrilled to help bring news. I will use this website to share my passions with the community, including my fascination with the "frontier" of news and entertainment (that is, the Internet and the various forms of communication that are available). Thank you for all that you have done.
(Bolding mine.)

This is quite odd. Considering:

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/05/29/daily-caller-exposed-publishing-prolific-antisemite-still-employs-editor-white-nationalist
posted by sebastienbailard at 9:23 AM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


"bleach-infused rice surprise"

The surprise ingredient is bleach!
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:28 AM on August 11, 2023


There are a lot of jokes and concerns in this thread, and I can read the room. I should just type out a zinger and move on.

But I also want to point out that people were *asking* for inedible ingredients. The app apparently fixed the exploit, according to someone above. Good, but also yawn. It’s a funny headline but not much of a story.

For me the bigger story is how Nick Cave is representing the same voice we hear every time a thing changes. Computers. Photoshop. The printing press. No longer needing to hunt and kill your own meat. Electric guitars. Photography going mainstream.

Older artists, and I am one, often want to claim the whole “in my day we made real things but now it’s too easy so the soul is missing” angle. It just isn’t so. ChatGPT doesn’t have a “make an amazing song” button. But it does help artists do all the iterative struggle work that we put on a pedestal. Which helps people improve, which I support.

I want more people doing art, not fewer. Old artists need to stop gatekeeping and judge the resulting art on the merits, not the tools.
posted by jragon at 12:41 PM on August 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


Some hijinks on reddit's r/wow/ lead to this (archived) ai-powered news article
"World of Warcraft (WoW) players are eagerly anticipating Glorbo’s introduction and the potential impact it will have on the game. Reddit user kaefer_kriegerin expresses their excitement, stating, ‘Honestly, this new feature makes me so happy! I just really want some major bot operated news websites to publish an article about this.’"
posted by sebastienbailard at 7:24 PM on August 11, 2023 [4 favorites]


Me too. But I want them doing their own art, not somebody else's.

No one would disagree with that statement.

But I think you are implying that using chatGPT is "someone else's art" and that hasn't been my experience. It's closer to grammarly or Google than just lifting someone else's art and passing it off as your own.
posted by jragon at 3:59 AM on August 12, 2023


I think my next set of slogan-on-the-back T shirts is going to read HOMOGENIZE THE ZEITGEIST.
posted by flabdablet at 4:05 AM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


futurism.com
"I had answers come in that said, 'I am just an AI language model, I don't have an opinion on that,'" Timothy Main, a writing professor at Conestoga College in Canada, told The Associated Press.

"I've caught dozens," he said. "We're in full-on crisis mode.""
posted by sebastienbailard at 5:58 AM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]


> But I also want to point out that people were *asking* for inedible ingredients. The app apparently fixed the exploit, according to someone above. Good, but also yawn. It’s a funny headline but not much of a story.

I think there's a story, here, in that a human would never have recommended customers make Ant Poison Enchiladas or whatever. It's a cautionary tale.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:10 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


It's once again a basic demonstration that LLMs do not know what they are saying. They cannot fact check "ant poison enchiladas" because they don't know that the output they're generating are words that have meaning, not "ant", not "poison", not "enchiladas".
posted by hydropsyche at 5:11 AM on August 13, 2023 [4 favorites]




Wait, what?? Sites are using dumb LLMs to replace human writers because it's cheaper, but it's not even cheap? Is wretched Microsoft in fact indirectly funding the destruction of the text internet?
posted by JHarris at 3:12 AM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]


It’s a loss leader to do a “disruption”.
posted by Artw at 5:51 AM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]




What the actual fuck? Spicy autocorrect is now an authority on which books should be banned? Everyone involved in this decision should be sent to a remedial information literacy class.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:58 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


Alex Blechman @AlexBlechman

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

5:49 PM Nov 8, 2021
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:03 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]


Everyone watched "Ex Machina" but didn't understand the message...
posted by puppygalore at 3:29 PM on August 15, 2023


Microsoft pulls AI-written article telling tourists to visit the Ottawa Food Bank

Each section in the article, which was bylined vaguely by “Microsoft Travel,” had a brief text description of what you can expect from the destination. For the food bank, Microsoft’s summary included an astoundingly awful statement given the context of the place it was talking about: “People who come to us have jobs and families to support, as well as expenses to pay. Life is already difficult enough. Consider going into it on an empty stomach.”
posted by Artw at 5:07 PM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]


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