Let's waste some damn time, shall we

January: “AI cannot even retrieve information accurately, and that there’s a fundamental limit to the technology’s capabilities. These models are often primed to be agreeable and helpful. They usually won’t bother correcting users’ assumptions, and will side with them instead. If chatbots are asked to generate a list of cases in support of some legal argument, for example, they are more predisposed to make up lawsuits than to respond with nothing.”

February: “Are these cookbooks written or reviewed by a dietitian or medical professional? Could a gastric bypass or cancer patient receive cooking instructions to make a meal contraindicated for their medical condition? If I were choosing for a library, I’d vet each one. With Hoopla, they are all there. Some might be excellent. Some might be dangerous.”

March: “Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale. This isn’t the first time SourceHut has been at the wrong end of some malicious bullshit or paid someone else’s externalized costs – every couple of years someone invents a new way of ruining my day.”

“Most of the tools we tested presented inaccurate answers with alarming confidence, rarely using qualifying phrases such as “it appears,” “it’s possible,” “might,” etc., or acknowledging knowledge gaps with statements like “I couldn’t locate the exact article.” ChatGPT, for instance, incorrectly identified 134 articles, but signaled a lack of confidence just fifteen times out of its two hundred responses, and never declined to provide an answer.”

“ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as “a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son,” a Noyb press release said. ChatGPT’s “made-up horror story” not only hallucinated events that never happened, but it also mixed “clearly identifiable personal data”—such as the actual number and gender of Holmen’s children and the name of his hometown.”

“Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it’s been processed by the AI servers. Amazon’s made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on.”

“eBay have changed their terms of service and you’re automatically opted-in for your personal data to be used for AI development and training.” (With opt-out instructions.)

I’m using the DW version of the original post as the masterpost, not gonna try to keep the WordPress mirror up-to-date. Off to add some new notes…

Related: an “oh, hey…” moment…

There’s a brief reference in Sybil Exposed to a diagnostic method that Sybil’s therapist reportedly used. As the author describes it:

After starting at the University of Kentucky in 1967/68, Dr. Connie Wilbur “showed residents how to test for [MPD]. She recommended that a patient be hypnotized, then encouraged to look into a mirror until someone different appeared. The patient was then asked if the person in the mirror had a name and an age. If the answer was yes, the diagnosis was multiple personality. Connie did not seem to realize what recent studies have shown: many people, even normal ones, will see different faces in a mirror within minutes of gazing.” (147-148)

(The book is from 2011, and apparently the paper that first named the “strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion” was from 2010. She meant really recent studies.)

It really sounds like both Jane Phillips and Christine Beauchamp could’ve been experiencing a version of this. They don’t describe a whole cinematic experience of seeing the figure in the mirror move and speak — they just describe looking at their face for a while, seeing it become someone else’s face, and connecting it to a separate presence. (Christine knew she was part of a system, so she was able to ID a specific headmate she already had some contact with. Jane was diagnosed years later, for other reasons, and only connected this in retrospect.)

So! Sybil’s doctor thinks that everyone who sees this illusion is multiple. And Sybil’s exposing author points out it’s an illusion everyone sees, inviting you to conclude that nobody is multiple.

But, look — compare this for a second to the mirror box illusion (video), the one used in mirror therapy for phantom limb pain. That works on everyone too! You can trick your brain into processing, say, “the mirror image of your right hand” as “actually your left hand” — and it still works whether or not you physically have a left hand.

Makes sense that everyone can optical-illusion their brain into processing “your face” as “somebody else’s face,” and it works whether you have other people in your head or not.

—

Finally, real quick, a Moon Knight thing:

From the strange-face article above: “The author, Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo, describes his set up which seems to reliably trigger the illusion: you need a room lit only by a dim lamp (he suggests a 25W bulb) that is placed behind the sitter, while the participant stares into a large mirror placed about 40 cm in front.”

The first time Steven perceives Marc acting differently from him in a reflective surface, the shot looks like this:

Hmm. Hmmmm.

(A second later Steven turns on a better light, and the mysterious not-him motion disappears. For now.)