I like to ask a variety of questions, sometimes silly, serious, and/or strange. Never asking in an attempt to pester or “just asking questions” stuff.

I’m generally curious and/or trying to get a sense of people’s views.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • More and more I’ve been listening to podcasts or treating Youtube videos like podcasts. It lets me multitask in a way that sitting down and trying to watch something just doesn’t.

    How much of them do you catch as you’re multitasking? Any time I try this I’m astounded at my unwitting ability to almost entirely tune out whatever they’re talking about, defeating any point to playing the podcast outside of giving myself some background noise.







  • All that aside, the point is that people talking about how it’s not “real AI” often come across as people who don’t know what they’re talking about, which was the point of the image.

    The funny part is, as I mention in my comment, isn’t that how both parties to these conversations feel? The problem is they’re talking past each other, but the worst part is, arguably the more educated participant should be more apt to recognize this and clarify or better yet, ask for clarification so they can see where the disconnect is emerging to improve communication.

    Also, let’s remember that it’s not the laypeople describing the technology in general personified terms like “learning” or “hallucinating”, which furthers some of the grumbling.


  • Which is a fair point, because AI has never meant “general AI”, it’s an umbrella term for a wide variety of intelligence like tasks as performed by computers.

    Do you mean in the everyday sense or the academic sense? I think this is why there’s such grumbling around the topic. Academically speaking that may be correct, but I think for the general public, AI has been more muddled and presented in a much more robust, general AI way, especially in fiction. Look at any number of scifi movies featuring forms of AI, whether it’s the movie literally named AI or Terminator or Blade Runner or more recently Ex Machina.

    Each of these technically may be presenting general AI, but for the public, it’s just AI. In a weird way, this discussion is sort of an inversion of what one usually sees between academics and the public. Generally academics are trying to get the public not to use technical terms loosely, yet here some of the public is trying to get some of the tech/academic sphere to not, at least as they think, use technical terms loosely.

    Arguably it’s from a misunderstanding, but if anyone should understand the dynamics of language, you’d hope it would be those trying to calibrate machines to process language.



  • I think this is all pretty good advice, thanks!

    However, this & the other replies, have made me realize I should have taken more time with the body text of this question. What I was a little more interested in was less the one-on-one interactions, and more something like…“How might one co-opt bad faith methods to spread helpful, good information?”

    It’s so easy to to toss out bad, harmful information, but might there be some ways to more easily put out good, helpful information that sticks with people? Or at a minimum, more benign info that doesn’t gradually push people down darker paths? 🤔