NEW: A new pre-print study offers the first causal evidence that outsourcing reasoning tasks to AI can rapidly erode users' independent performance AND their will to persist despite difficulty.
"People’s persistence drops... they’re also not willing to try without AI.”
futurism.com/artificial-i...
NEW: Teenage boys are pulling classmates' photos off Insta and running them through cheap nudify apps and the fallout has now hit nearly 90 schools across 28 countries with 600+ known victims since 2023, per a WIRED/Indicator analysis.
UNICEF estimates 1.2M children were targeted last year alone.
But hey, remember when nobody wanted to fight for universal healthcare? Because it was pie in the sky? How’s that working out? Any follow up on that?
A billion dollars is the socio-economic equivalent of a loose nuke, and we should work to prevent the acquisition of the former with the same urgency and ruthlessness we use to prevent the acquisition of the latter.
Ban this shit from your life.
Seriously. Boycott. And keep away from your kids.
‘Coyote vs. Acme’ takes a jab at Warner Bros. for initially shelving their film for taxes in new trailer announcement video.
“Happy Tax Day. Check your write-offs.”
In theaters August 28th.
the "absolutely not the succession theme" soundtrack on this is a fucking master stroke
JUST IN: John Eastman, the conservative attorney who helped devise President Trump's last ditch strategy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, has officially been disbarred, per the California Supreme Court:
me with the time machine, to my 1996 self:
the year is 2026. the Pope is the only world leader you respect. you believe unironically that the cultural mores and sexual behavior of San Francisco are destroying America. computers were a mistake
It’s infuriating when a woman comes forward about a man raping her in his hotel room after drinking and the response is “Why would she go to his room?” “Why would she drink with him?” This is Mike Pence logic. Women should be allowed to hang out with men without expecting they will be raped.
Doe had broken up with the user in 2024, and he used ChatGPT to process the split, according to emails and communications cited in the lawsuit. Rather than push back on his one-sided account, it repeatedly cast him as rational and wronged, and her as manipulative and unstable. He then took these AI-generated conclusions off the screen and into the real world, using them to stalk and harass her. This manifested in several AI-generated, clinical-looking psychological reports that he distributed to her family, friends, and employer.
![For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related tasks, for “therapy.”
Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.”
Trying to communicate with her fiancé was like walking on “ChatGPT eggshells,” the woman recalled. No matter what she tried, ChatGPT would “twist it.”
“He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:fhnih5ovyd5w5pch254ordo2/bafkreidy34if6qaoxglmgyuqzd45qrtblapduetgu6y3m4vwuto6etcmem)
For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related tasks, for “therapy.” Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.” Trying to communicate with her fiancé was like walking on “ChatGPT eggshells,” the woman recalled. No matter what she tried, ChatGPT would “twist it.” “He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”
Shortly after moving out, the former fiancé began to publish multiple videos and images a day on social media accusing the woman of an array of alleged abuses — the same bizarre ideas he’d fixated on so extensively with ChatGPT. In some videos, he stares into the camera, reading from seemingly AI-generated scripts; others feature ChatGPT-generated text overlaid on spiritual or sci-fi-esque graphics. In multiple posts, he describes stabbing the woman. In another, he discusses surveilling her. (The posts, which we’ve reviewed, are intensely disturbing; we’re not quoting directly from them or the man’s ChatGPT transcripts due to concern for the woman’s privacy and safety.) The ex-fiancé also published revenge porn of the woman on social media, shared her full name and other personal information, and doxxed the names and ages of her teenage children from a previous marriage. He created a new TikTok dedicated to harassing content — complete with its own hashtag — and followed the woman’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as other teens from her kids’ high school. “I’ve lived in this small town my entire life,” said the woman. “I couldn’t leave my house for months… people were messaging me all over my social media, like, ‘Are you safe? Are your kids safe? What is happening right now?'”
A woman sued OpenAI last week alleging that ChatGPT reinforced the obsessive, violent delusions of her stalker (her ex-boyfriend.)
This woman's claims (as detailed by TechCrunch, left) are chillingly similar to those of a completely different woman whose story Futurism reported on in Feb (right):
AI is profoundly unpopular. A recent NBC News poll found that among 18-34 year-olds, AI's net favorability rating is -44. *Negative 44*. Those are basically serial killer numbers. It's not much better among women 18-49. (Men over 50 and upper class are the only ones who like AI, and just barely.)
Again: for any big liberal donor who wants to funnel millions into fixing this country's politics, the ROI on buying any struggling paper and simply tasking it with doing real reporting on local news is vastly higher than the same $$ given to some group that does mass ad buys every election year.
women were kept out of meetings and career opportunities at Pixar because John Lasseter was so much of a sex pest that people decided it was easier to simply not have them in the room with him
how many talented women didn’t get a fair chance because one guy couldn’t behave himself?
anyone who says people opposing data centers are just nimbys need to stop echoing industry propaganda and see what it’s actually like to live near one
A tool called DROP lets California residents fill out a few forms to keep their personal data from being tracked or sold by data brokers.
One of the ways news media often fail us is by giving us the microscopic rather than the telescopic view. Everything I mention in this essay is well-documented, but the dots are mostly not connected to make visible this death by a thousand cuts our country is undergoing.
I will hand a Peabody Award to anybody who writes a streaming limited series without flashbacks, jumpbacks after an in medias res opening, or parallel timelines.
Things that work: giant rocket, very precise math, orbital mechanics, cameras, iPhones
Things that don’t work: Microsoft Outlook, toilets, sat phones
Forgive me a moment of spite amid the moonjoy: suck it, Elon.
Every single one of the astronauts who went to the moon and back on Artemis II was educated at a public school.
Thinking of the teachers who poured into Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen tonight. You helped send a kid to the moon!
🌕 💛
This infuriating attitude shows up on the bookshelves in learning environments, too. We expect girls to empathize with boys, but we kneecap every opportunity to let boys empathize with girls. And look where we are.
So it turns out the rocket scientists are pretty good at this rocket science stuff.
Nobody assumes the CEO of Toyota must be some sort of brilliant engineer, but we have for some reason developed this collective notion that being a successful tech CEO must make you a tech genius.
In "Technofeudalism," Yanis Varoufakis argues that Big Tech firms aren't actually engaged in capitalism, because nonstop investment replaces the need for profits. Instead, they just undercut and eliminate all competitors, then charge rents for access to infrastructure, i.e. feudalism.
1984 calendar meme with the lady saying "the empire is at war with Persia and the Pope" and the calendar says January 1054
Free newsletter: We need to talk about the inherent weirdness of the AI bubble, and how strange it is that an industry that loses billions of dollars to create few productivity benefits is described as a disruptive technology rather than an industry of WeWorks.
www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-really...
The Moon: oh wow you guys decided to come back
Artemis II crew: earth’s haunted
This is no way to live, man
