One of the major stories from the rise of AI tooling was when people cooked a recipe that included glue.

I don’t think it’s unfair to assume some non-trivial percentage of people use these tools in a very dumb way.

That's fair. But refusing to date somebody because you assume they're using it in the dumbest possible way seems a bridge too far.

Maybe it is. Humans are weird creatures; we draw all manner of lines in the sand on different issues, some rational and others not.

I hope we get some interesting psychological studies out of this sort of story in the coming years. Maybe we can learn a thing or two about ourselves.

They wouldn’t do this stuff unless it worked at large scale.

The irony is, at least in my case, I made the impulse decision to just cancel outright instead of accepting the lower price, which lost them what had been a 15 year recurring customer. I’m one person, but I wonder how many others did the same.

> Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum.

To what end?

We’ve interacted with the internet using the same text-oriented protocols, the same markup languages, and even the same layout elements for 36 years. What profit motive exists to upend that and standardize on a new format like conversational language?

And, based on the development trends of the internet over its entire history, what suggests that if the world were to commit to some radical shift in the foundational technology underpinning the web, it would move towards voice, or vision (what does this mean?) based interfaces.

I get that AI is cool, and it has legitimate use cases, but is it possible that we as technologists might be falling into that age-old trap of having a solution in search of a problem?

> All AI has to do to justify these valuations is capture 1/3rd of Google.

Is that all? It really is that easy huh.

> I find it easy to imagine some disabled, or disfigured, otherwise blocked-from-stardom person using tech like this to transform themselves and be able to express their truth without being unfairly judged by the physical form they were born into.

Outside of a select number of A-list actors, are there situations where the other 85-90% of actors are able to express their truth today?

One of the common problems with creative industries (and the primary reason I switched away from pursuing game development) was that you're not expressing your truth; you're expressing someone else's truth in exchange for money. And unless you have lots of other intangible and often uncontrollable qualities, and are willing to play politics, you will probably never end up in a position to express your truth (with any degree of notoriety) through your own or other people's work.

I am not disabled or disfigured, and while I'm blocked-from-stardom that's just because I have a fairly uninteresting existence overall that wouldn't warrant it on it's own. So I can only guess at this stuff from an outside perspective, but from where I sit, I don't see AI as a sea-change enabler for the people you're referring to.

Also in Texas - I got this same alert and, (seemingly) like every else in the state I now have emergency alerts turned off. Which is bad.

The other example that comes to mind is, I was in Toronto a few years back and got a “Nuclear incident emergency alert” stating that there was NO problem at the nearby power plant and NO abnormal release of radiation. Equally uninformative, hugely more alarming (and relevant).

Don’t give people ideas, or we’ll start getting 8am morning news sirens.

We need to bring back (human curated) webrings!

I love the idea of bringing back human vetted directories. As long as the vetters stay human and sites are readily removed for grifting/SEO optimizing/AI click farming. I think that means they need to stay niche though. I really miss people making content because they wanted no and not because they want to make a living from it.

Generally speaking most people ask “is this ethical” _before_ doing something.

The answer, by the way, is no.

A slightly different perspective for your consideration:

I watch videos of people playing through games and talking about or alongside it. There are two main reasons, both of which I (obviously) think are valid.

1. I enjoy gaming and use these videos as background noise when I’m doing things for work that don’t have a high cognitive load. If I’m going to have something on TV or streaming, I’d prefer it be associated with one of my interests.

2. For games with some sort of planning or problem solving element, I watch videos of people who are better at them than me so that I can learn different ways to do things. A classic example is Factorio, which has a thousand ways to organize a production line. It’s useful to see different people do this in different ways and optimize for different things, and yes - talk through it while they do. That translates into me being more informed and coming up with better ideas myself, which means more fun playing the game.

It’s very much fine for this to not be for everyone and all, but that doesn’t always make it trash/bilge.