I didn’t know that uwu news influencer was a thing.

It's probably a thing where if you start thinking about it, it's always been around, but we've just never had the right vocabulary to describe it.

Adam ruined his ruination. He truly does ruin everything

Yeah exactly. Loving the dude's mental gymnastics to avoid the simplest answer and instead spin it into moralising about promptfondling more good

what is this “alignment” you speak of? I’ve never heard of this before

I see. Please forgive this philistine!

~aaaaaaaaaaaa~aaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!

I mean would it be great if there were some way to freely generate explanations tailored to one’s individual experience? Absolutely, yes. Are LLMs that? Absolutely not. Have the cranks convinced themselves through a mashup of dunning-kruger and gell mann amnesia that LLMs are the first thing? Absolutely, yes.

Non tech-focused AI scam:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/cops-called-after-parents-get-tricked-by-ai-generated-images-of-wonka-like-event/

A story from a couple months ago that I heard about just now from the scam goddess podcast.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/25/sam-bankman-fried-sentenced-multi-billion-dollar-fraud

SBF sentence gets announced this week. Over/under on 15/45/75 years?

Oh yeah sorry, sometimes I forget that board members and execs are the core contributors to human innovation, and that Google spends all its money on hiring the best and brightest think tank people. It’s why they only make good and ethical decisions that no one gets mad at, ever. /s

To be completely fair it appears he has experience in medical research, with some publications in the 80’s. That being said his LI plots his trajectory from just some guy to thinker tanker grifter guy.

My initial reaction was essentially a mix of “sorry to this man” and “well I don’t really expect psychology today to publish anything approaching meaningful on tech/ai” so I wanted to see if those reactions were justified. Well…

This makes PT look like a total rag. The author, John Nosta, bills himself as “The World’s Leading Innovation Theorist and Keynote Speaker” which really just sounds like “lecture circuit grifter” to me. Let’s take a look at the rest of his front page:

STRATEGIST

Driving change that is changing the world. John’s informed voice has become a beacon of insight to help dissect and define innovation in health, medicine, and technology.

INNOVATOR

Not just a simple observer, John is directly engaged with top companies, thinkers and initiatives. His perspective is from the inside out and provides an “insiders” view of a complex and changing world.

THOUGHT LEADER

John is consistently ranked among the top names in health technology and innovation. Beyond simply an influencer, he is also defined as “most admired” to “top disruptor” in technology, life sciences and medicine.

So yeah if you asked chatGPT to come up with the profile for an AI lecture circuit grifter, it’d probably look like the above.

Looking through his contributions to PT you might think he is just recycling armchair AI philosophy to make a quick buck and honestly I’m having a hard time thinking otherwise.

Totally agree.

IMO a better analogy would be clothing sweatshops rather than the power loom. Same utilitarian effect of textile affordability increases. Same ethical fuckery with exploitation of labour.