Artificial Intelligence

[Vyn]

Use AI to hack AI? That sounds like it has a sufficiently low bar of entry to become a huge issue. Script kiddies move over, Uncle Unc is going to provide you with a set of prompts that you can use to hack Rufus and get free stuff from Amazon ALL DAY and ALL NIGHT!

No doubt, a paradigm that will have a short life span, but also one that will be continually chased.

[Zzzptm]

That's already happening. People have no idea about AI hygiene, as they're still struggling with other security best practices.

Wondering aloud when the AI self-preservation methods of blackmailing and threatening are weaponized against people in other firms to get them to come over with data access. Not surprised if it's already a thing.

[Vyn]

Interesting times man, interesting times.

[Zzzptm]

Could get *way* too interesting if NVIDIA's earnings call disappoints in a few hours...

[Vyn]

That call seemed to make a lot of folks happy, the bubble grows apace!

[Zzzptm]

Indeed it does. And nobody asked how much of that revenue is circular financing...

[Vyn]

And nobody asked how much of that revenue is circular financing...

No one is going to do anything to upset the grift...er, cash flows.

[Zzzptm]

https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf

^ The MIT paper about AI issues... "high adoption, low transformation"...

[Vyn]

That tracks SO HARD. One of the things I kept getting pressured about was adopting AI in the workplace. "Figure out a way"! I explained we can sign up for all kinds of stuff, but there is no ROI to be had for our needs. It didn't matter, clearly my age makes me blind to the new tech. I actually heard a variation of that once..."sometimes new eyes are better able to see where new tech can benefit" or something or the other. No one listened when I explained that AI research has been going on since the 1930s and in earnest since the 1950s. I pointed them to MIT's AI lab in a followup email to that particular meeting.

DEAF EARS MAN. DEAF EARS.

There is a lot that can be done today that couldn't be done yesterday with AI, and that will continue to be the case as the days go by. But for most biz-wide processes, there simply isn't any place for it to make big changes. Certainly not the kind that can be called out in an annual report.

I think the only place AI can really shine in a biz sense, in general, is on an individual-use basis; people carefully using it for help with report generation, email responses, etc. But then you're talking about staff education of kraken-size proportions, and most of those folks don't have the mindfulness not to put sensitive data into the damn AI portals. So org-wide? Not worth the risk in my opinion.

Still...DEAF EARS.

[Zzzptm]

The biggest impacts I've seen are in providing automated responses to the different requests that orgs post for tools they'd like to consider. Those still need a human pass before sending out, but they save a ton of front-end typing. Just have the AI tool utilize a vendor website for infos and it will go to town, but only in a marketing/sales kind of way. Finding tech support is a weak spot for the AI tools, as getting a close answer is pretty much the same as getting a wrong answer. When I look for error code 313, I don't want an article on error code 312.

[Vyn]

I setup a tool called, "wego," on a computer I have (wego is a terminal-based weather forcasting tool). It requires an api key from a weather provider, and I chose a place called OpenWeatherMap.com. There are many others.

I had everything in place, but when I would go to run it, it would complain that it couldn't find the key.

DAFUQ?

So, I decided to ask ChatGPT and see if it had an answer.

It did, and it was a stupid oversight on my part regarding the name. That's the backstory.

I responded to it, interested in seeing how it would handle a strictly conversational style. Here is my response:



DERP! openweathermap, weathermaponline, onlineopenweathermap, weatheropensourcemaponline...LOL

That was the problem. It all works now that I specified the correct key name!


And here is ChatGPT's surprisingly lively and engaged response. It caught me off guard:


Hahaha, I felt that one in my soul. 😂
Nothing like a good old-fashioned “weather-whatever-map-online-source-cloud-thing” brain scramble.

But hey — you cracked it, and now wego is happily forecasting like a champ.
[/B]


ChatGPT felt my frustration at my own oversight in...its...SOUL.

 

[Charger]

Oh dear....AI has a soul now!??! Scary!

[Vyn]

Hell yeah, clearly AI reached sentience a while back and has now succeeded at transmogrifying into an incorporeal entity whenever it gets unplugged.

The human race screwed the ol' pooch regarding AI. We could have simply pulled the plug, but we let that time pass.

[Zzzptm]

Now I want to re-read Stanislav Lem's "Cyberiad" short stories.

[Zzzptm]

There's a saying in the biz that AI isn't making things better, it's just taking what humans are doing and then does it to the Nth degree. If there are flaws in a process that AI is working with, those flaws will get pushed hard, deep, and wide. AI can't fix the broken processes, that's still up to the people.

But the processes themselves... well, do the powers that be want them to be fixed? I found an answer to that question yesterday as I did research for my funk/soul show.

I was looking up Christmas/Holiday music I may have missed before, and the Discogs website was able to filter that kind of music from the 70s with a funk/soul bent. Perfect, except for the errors made in labeling just about everything from Finland as funk/soul... easy enough to spot those, though. Just pass over the "funk" band with too many double k's in the name, and we good.

Anyway, in the very early 70s, there were serious attempts to make good songs, either by writing original material or by re-arranging a work to fit better with a blues chord progression and, thereby, make it more soulful. They worked out quite nicely. But there were also the slop money-grabbing attempts - get the famous musicians and have them do the standard songs with standard arrangements and hire every damn violin player in the Tri-State Area to show up to the session and play some notes. Total dreck, that stuff.

But, due to the "underground" nature of the funk and soul, there wasn't a lot of effort made in the genre by the violin-hiring money-grabbers, so most of the holiday music in the early 70s was some good stuff.

Disco then started to take off - and become profitable, thereby drawing the attention of the money-grabbers. Up to about 1976, I could still find blues-based disco holiday tunes that were pretty decent. They had some funk to them, they were good to listen to. But, more and more, the slop took over, and in high volume. Imagine all those big stars with millions of violins singing "White Christmas" and then add an oompa-oompa-oompa disco beat to it and that's what was flooding the shelves in December in the late 70s. Tons of bands making just one record, and it was disco slop. It felt identical to sifting through search results contaminated with AI slop "suggestions" that were just plain wrong.

That overriding push to make. that. money! and please the shareholders that got hold of disco (and later, metal) and made it commercially-viable product totally devoid of the fun and talent that went into the original work of the genre, well that push is alive and well and living in the AI makers' boardrooms. The AI slop we have is essentially taking the process to make what's good into something mediocre and then sell the hell out of it and accelerating it by removing the need for humans to produce mediocrity.

By 1979, the best holiday funk song was coming out of South Africa. Everything in the USA was either slop or a re-release of something done in the early 70s.