Can we please stop paying attention to what this Nazi saluting man baby is saying?
FriendOfDeSoto
God is surprisingly versatile in the good book. Old testament god is totally judgy and throws a plague of locusts at you. Or a flood if you wear the wrong fabric or something like that. Hissy fits to the hilt.
New testament, so Jesus-story god is more chill. He only kills his own son to make a point. Father of the year material.
Now, a lot of this stuff is open to interpretation. One might argue I have interpreted stuff in the preceding two paragraphs as well. I wouldn't argue against that and I'm not going to get drawn into a biblical discussion because I really don't care. I am a lapsed Lutheran protestant and the Jesus they tried to teach me about wouldn't have given a fuck about your sexuality. So if fake LLM Jesus says you do your thing, it ain't my biz who you love, I'm at least inclined to believe it was programmed with a similar interpretation of the story. And while the idea of a Jesus, Mary, and God LLM chat bot is absolutely, undeniably, ridiculously ludicrous, it is almost reassuring that there must be enough training material out there to get it to give that serene a reply.
To be fair to the former PM and author, all of these points are touched upon one way or another in the article and so-called AI is merely another layer of threat to the existence of such a small language community. She didn't consider Icelandic safe before the models popped up and just now got worried. And while it's probably too early to have scientific proof about the influence of models to back up her argument, I don't think it's nonsense to think that way. And I think the guardian headline is misleading.
Note this is not a final ruling yet and can and probably will be appealed.
I used to be more judgmental about this stuff too. Having little terrorists of my own has mellowed me. I do prefer a kid watching YouTube videos on a tablet over the kid throwing a temper tantrum at the cafe. All parents need a break. And I feel like if my parents had had the opportunity to let me watch sesame street on a handheld device in the 80s at a restaurant, they would have in a heartbeat. There were for sure other grownups heavily judging my folks for allowing me to play Tetris on the Gameboy in the 90s while we waited for our food! And I still managed to get a bachelor's degree.
At the same time, they thought watching too much TV wouldn't be good for you and I don't think that has turned out the way they feared. All gamers would automatically become sociopathic killers and they didn't. I do think "social" media has proven to be detrimental. But the internet is vaster than that BS. Most pacifying tablet use will not turn kids' brains into a rotting mess.
And as they get older you need to have numerous talks. The sex one, the online predator one, now the weird AI/chatbot one, the one that contextualizes pornography and other disturbing shit on the internet one. And at a certain point, maybe 16 or thereabouts, you have to let go and hope for the best. They will find all this stuff anyway. You probably did as well. I know I did. The only thing that has changed is ease of availability for most of this stuff. So that's what we need to prepare them for and then cross our fingers.
Are we elevating a find-and-replace script to the level of artificial intelligence now?
I think that's a little unfair. They are not babysat, they're being distracted. And do you inspect every tablet to see if maybe the parents went to great lengths to curate suitable content and a child friendly walled garden? Not every tablet is unfiltered access to grooming chatbots.
Now, Melon Usk is a dick and Xwitter and Grok can go eff themselves. And at the same time: the mother has worked as a journalist, had given no consideration to which of the "personalities" of Grok to choose to let her offspring talk to in her Tesla, had neither engaged the NSFW nor the child mode settings. In her defense, she didn't let the kid do this unattended. And of course the chatbot should not ask no one for nudes. Or genocide. Or any of the other missteps this version of so-called AI has made already.
I'm having a real hard time to picking only one side to blame here. Even if you're not a journalist, you must have picked up enough stuff by osmosis to know that this isn't something you should let your kid do without prior research and a look at the settings available.
I'll be glad when he is no longer in power. I'm equally afraid of who will succeed him. Could our angry Americans please use their anger to change the absolutely insane system by which a president is elected and then invest wholesale in education? That's just two examples I could think of off the top of my head. What's good about getting rid of the orange only to fall into a fruit salad?
This isn't but also somehow is a shit post.
The only pope who probably would have had a chance to comment meaningfully on this development would have been his predecessor Francis, a Jesuit - they are the guys who desperately try to believe in the big man and the scientific method at the same time. He was relatively more at ease with modern tech. He was also old an infirm before he was recalled, which is the time when OpenAI burst onto the scene. This new guy is from a less science-minded order of Catholicism. So it isn't that surprising that he is sceptical in public about it and we maybe didn't hear that much about it from his predecessors.
It's not that clear really. His official titles would've been president and chancellor and he only got one of those in a manner the Weimar constitution legally envisioned. So the system, by which we would decide what an official title is today, was abused and then suspended all together. The title "der Führer" was basically a google translate from "il duce" in Italy and is not entirely honorific because he was leader of the Nazi party first. And he continues to be referred to by this semi-unofficial, semi-honorific title even in history books today and they don't always bother to disambiguate or add that they mean it sarcastically. So while Grok should be shot into space. And Nazi saluting Melon Usk deserves to be under this much scrutiny and more and can otherwise go eff himself as far as I'm concerned. The Ockham's razor for this gaff tells me the LLM just regurgitated book knowledge and nobody bothered to filter this with 2025 sensibilities. Not great but also more of a storm in a teacup. This won't make the top ten of atrocious things coming from the Melon.
I was also looking for a word other than 'honorific.' I find it has a positive connotation and should not apply to the titles of such infamous individuals as Hitler or Mussolini. But I could not come up with anything snappy.