Reckons

Reckons

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We need to prepare for ‘addictive intelligence’
We need to prepare for ‘addictive intelligence’
The allure of AI companions is hard to resist. Here’s how innovation in regulation can help protect people.
AI companionship is no longer theoretical—our analysis of a million ChatGPT interaction logs reveals that the second most popular use of AI is sexual role-playing. We are already starting to invite AIs into our lives as friends, lovers, mentors, therapists, and teachers.
We need to prepare for ‘addictive intelligence’
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.
To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.
It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit.
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
Meet the Guys Dating AI Girlfriends
Meet the Guys Dating AI Girlfriends
Flirty, sexy, seductive, supportive. Your AI companion can be whatever you want her to be. And now a growing number of men are turning to bots to ease their loneliness or satisfy their kinks. The choices are endless. The emotions are real.
Meet the Guys Dating AI Girlfriends
The Other Bubble
The Other Bubble
Buried in the 8000 words I wrote last week was a worrying story — that Microsoft considered drastic measures to free up  capacity in its US-based servers for GPUs to power the AI boom. In an email shared with me by a source from earlier this year, Microsoft's senior leadership team
The Other Bubble
It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
Understand AI for what it is, not what it might become.
The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires.
We’re in a race to the bottom that everyone saw coming and no one is happy with. Meanwhile, the search for product-market fit at a scale that would justify all the inflated tech-company valuations keeps coming up short. Even OpenAI’s latest release, o1, was accompanied by a caveat from Altman that “it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it.”
The project of techno-optimism, for decades now, has been to insist that if we just have faith in technological progress and free the inventors and investors from pesky regulations such as copyright law and deceptive marketing, then the marketplace will work its magic and everyone will be better off.
Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don’t get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present
It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
The Sustained Two-Shot
The Sustained Two-Shot
What do you do when you’ve got two actors, a bunch of dialogue, and only enough time to get one camera angle? Consider one of the oldest tools in the filmmak...
The Sustained Two-Shot
No one buys books
No one buys books
Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.
The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
Books by the Obamas sold so many copies they had to be removed from the charts as statistical anomalies.
Sometimes it’s just a timing issue, like Marie Kondo. She did a book about Joy at Work, about making your office sparked with joy because it’s not cluttered. It published in March of 2020.
No one buys books
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity
Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you're out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology
you're admitting that you outsource your decisionmaking to the thing that sometimes tells people to brew lethal toxins for their families to consume? What does that even mean?
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity