Dave Winer is writing about the Claude LLM as if it is a real person that he's sitting down with and teaching things to, like a child.

[jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com]

@cstross @kevinteljeur

I am totally unsurprised about Winer. I never met Dawkins, but I have corresponded and met with Dave several times.

Note: I met my second wife because of a proto-blog Dave was writing in the mid 1990s.

[theogrin@chaosfem.tw]

@cstross @kevinteljeur

Marketers have been preying on the human tendency to see patterns in everything since the dawn of history (or at least the dawn of marketing), but I think that with this one they've reached a new level of genuine evil.

This is the first instance of one of these scams that I can recall which actually and actively damages the mark's cognitive ability. It's like measles, if you catch it it'll wipe out your immune system and make you more susceptible to other diseases.

[ETA: Okay, possibly organized religion.]

[keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca]

@theogrin @cstross @kevinteljeur Finally, We Have Invented Memetic COVID From The Classic Scifi Novel "Don't Invent Memetic COVID"

[ehproque@neopaquita.es]

@phf @cstross @kevinteljeur all it takes is for someone in the TESCREAL bunch pulling an L. Ron Hubbard move and we're all fucked.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@ehproque @phf @kevinteljeur If L Ron Hubbard's playbook is the worst you can imagine then I envy you. (Hint: TESCREAL is *already* a proto-religion, the sort of syncretistic soup that pre-Nicean Christianity emerged from, adjacent to Rabbinical Judaism and early Islam, circa 100-500CE. It's done an embrace-and-extend on all the transhumanist memes in the same way that early Xtianity glommed onto all sorts of weird-ass shit from the Levant.)

[ehproque@neopaquita.es]

@cstross @phf @kevinteljeur it's all it takes, but of course it can be enhanced!

[affekt@hachyderm.io]

@keithzg @theogrin @kevinteljeur @cstross Strong parallels to Snow Crash

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@Affekt @keithzg @theogrin @kevinteljeur No, Snow Crash (alas) is SF that took Julian Jaynes' "On the origins of consciousness and the breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" seriously and asked what-if (poiler: Jaynes' book was crank pseudoscience).

[affekt@hachyderm.io]

@cstross @keithzg @theogrin @kevinteljeur fair enough, I was ripping out one small part of one plot point.

[midnitemikewrites@zirk.us]

@cstross @kevinteljeur It's so much worse than ELIZA. LLMs are a sociotechnical loop trained on user behavior. Whatever pleases the user is fed back into the system to produce more of it. In one of my blogs I called chatbots as a service an "echo cathedral."

Metaphor might be redundant now that I think about it... but you get the point.

Mike @ Misaligned Markets (@MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us)

(4/12) But by design LLMs hide the involvement of humans in their process chain. Their entire marketing and UX requires this invisibility. The result is no different from any other UX dark pattern. Users adopt patterns of use that designers prefer. Designers train on those patterns creating a self-reinforcing loop. If this scales, I think it'll be worse than social media. https://misaligned.markets/llm-intelligence-is-a-dark-pattern/ #LLM #UX #darkpatterns

zirkus (zirk.us)

[rasterweb@mastodon.social]

@kevinteljeur Shrugs… not surprising.