Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

What do you trust AI to do?

Real vs. AI. AI is so dumb, it ‘thinks’ it was being racially sensitive.

The pictures above are from one of texts from my linguistics course. The one on the left is real. The one on the right was created by artificial intelligence.

Don’t blame AI entirely. As we learned from Hal, who explained his behavior in “2001” in the sequel, “2010,” you have to be really careful how you program these machines.

Hal was programmed to remove any obstacle that threatened the success of the mission to Jupiter. If that meant killing those pesky astronauts on board, so be it.

The AI (Google’s LLM Gemini) that added a black member to the Wehrmacht “was apparently trained to generate (racially and ethnically) diverse, but had no way to know in what actual, factual contexts such diversity existed (or did not exist),” according to the book.

This happened in 2015. We know that AI is exponentially “smarter” today. But we would still do well to be careful in what we trust it to do.

Seeing that reminded me of something I recently realized about my own attitude toward artificial “intelligence.”

I’m not engaged in creating fake images that look real (although sometimes I do play around with Photoshop), so I’m not really concerned about ending up with fake black Nazis.

I write and edit. And ever since people around me (people who are not writers and artists) started using AI to generate text, I’ve thought, “I would never do that.” And not because I feared losing my job; I’m basically retired.

But I’ve avoided saying that, because I knew how people would react: “Look at the old Luddite who started out writing on manual typewriters!” Which I did; but I’m not a Luddite. I’ve enthusiastically embraced every new technology that has come along since those early days. I was usually at the vanguard of each change, and coached others in how to use it.

But not this. And one day recently, listening to some other people talking back and forth about the advantages and disadvantages of using AI, it suddenly hit me why I refused even to think about it.

No matter what technology was involved, I have never entirely trusted anyone else to express something I wanted to say. Oh, sure, I trusted my reporters and my associates on the editorial board. But I coached them ahead of time on how to write it, and as editor had complete control of the final form.

Sometimes I would rewrite it completely. Not because I was smart and they were dumb. I did the same thing to myself. Over and over, I would write an entire column and then throw it away and rewrite it entirely — sometimes I’d be so disgusted with the draft I’d even abandon the subject and write about something else.

No matter how much I fed to the machine ahead of time, when it was done, I’d be dissatisfied and rewrite it, taking pretty much as much time as if I were rewriting something I or a trusted subordinate had written.

So where’s the advantage in doing it in the first place?

So I basically just use AI to help with searches, and I apply plenty of caveats to that. Just as a way of sniffing the air as I start out on serious work; I always dig deeper than Google’s AI shows me.

So what about you? In what ways do you use AI, and to what extent do you trust it?

Remember Hal?

Are you getting more cold-call emails lately?

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‘Why do you keep sending me emails?’ asks Will Robinson.

I am. And I assume AI is to blame. At least, I hope it is. If actual humans are sending these mindless, hopeless missives, they have my sympathy. Well, a little sympathy. Not enough for me to respond to them.

The sympathy is because, well… during my newspaper days, I used to tell people that there were a lot of things I could imagine myself doing other than journalism, but there was one thing I knew I could NEVER do: sales. (I have a horror of the idea of making a pitch to someone that I wouldn’t want someone to make to me. And I almost never want to hear a sales pitch.)

Having my impression is that the most miserable kind of selling cold-calling. So yeah, I pity the humans who have to do it.

But I think these are bots. I think they’re a reflection of the trend toward more and more businesses turning to AI. Here’s a recent example I just dug out of my trash folder:

Brad,

Unlike most banks, we can give you funding that matches Adco Ideas’s timelines.

Upto 250K-5M USD approved in just 24 hours (as a revolving line). No collateral required.

And interest applies just on the amount you use.

Can I tell you more?

Best,

Xxxxxx

I don’t take the utter cluelessness (the name of the agency is ADCO, not Adco Ideas. They’re getting that from the URL. And there’s not a single word indicating awareness of what ADCO is or does) as proof that this is AI. A lot of humans are that unobservant.

I think it’s AI because since about the first of the year, I’ve been getting so MANY of them on my ADCO email.

How about you? Are y’all seeing the same?

Apparently, top editors suspect the Matrix is coming

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It really struck me that a day or two back, the editors of two of our nation’s premiere newspapers led their reports with the news that Sam Altman — a guy I’d only heard of, before this week, because I’ve listened to some really deep, detailed podcasts about AI in recent months — had been hired by Microsoft after being fired by OpenAI.

If you haven’t spent years of your life agonizing — and I mean agonizing — over what to put on a front page and how to play it, day after day, this may not seem to mean much.

But it meant volumes to me. Excuse me for oversimplifying the definition of a lede story, but it basically means that, at least for a moment or a day, this guy being hired was more important to the world than anything going on in Israel or Gaza or Ukraine or anywhere else in the world. Nothing presidents, kings or dictators were doing anywhere mattered as much.

Now why would that be? This is something you might expect to see, and sometimes still do, in a paper that’s historically all about business, by which I mean The Wall Street Journal. But these are general-purpose newspapers, and the cream of the crop.

So what pumps this up so?

Well, the guy was canned from OpenAI because some people on the board were worried about what AI might do to the human race, and thought Sam wasn’t as worried about it as they were.

But that’s a tempest in a teacup unless you, the editor making the play decision, think this guy’s work situation really IS of some sort of monumental importance to our shared fates — either because you’re worried about the Matrix or Skynet or some such, or because you think AI is so awesome that you believe where Sam has a job, and who he’s working for, overrides everything else in the world.

You wouldn’t be seeing this if the guy was the head of McDonald’s or something — unless, maybe, in the WSJ. They still love them some business.

So… if I see the White Rabbit, should I follow it? Should I keep an eye out for Terminators?

If I were inclined to be a pessimist, here’s what I’d worry about

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I hope Gary Larson doesn’t sue me for using this. I just saw it on Pinterest, and thought it a way better illustration for this post than the boring shot of Putin I originally put here.

Well, these are some of the things I’d worry about. Not all are even near the top of the list. These are just things that were in the news today — actually, all three were in one of the several papers to which I subscribe — so they’re on my mind at the moment.

So worry away, folks…

Classic American tragedy — The headline was “Teen sought in Amber Alert dies in shootout after running toward deputies.” Basically, a 15-year-old girl that authorities were seeking to rescue from her armed-and-crazy, murderous father is now dead — shot by, well, authorities. So your initial reaction is, there go the stupid cops again. But then, if you care at all, you actually read about what happened. And you see it’s not so simple. What happened (so far as know at this point) was, shots were fired near a school. The school is placed briefly on lockdown. Then cops find a woman with multiple gunshot wounds, who is pronounced dead at a hospital. The call goes out to look for the husband, Anthony Graziano, and the couple’s young daughter, Savannah. Graziano’s Nissan is spotted, and pursued. He starts shooting, putting several rounds through a police car windshield. With bullets still flying both ways, someone, “wearing protective equipment, including a tactical helmet, emerged from the passenger side of the vehicle, ran toward sheriff’s deputies and then fell amid the gunfire.” When it’s all over, it’s discovered that someone is Savannah, and she and her father are both dead. What do you think should be done to prevent such things? This is very much like what happened to Breonna Taylor — someone with the victim starts shooting at police, and the victim is killed in the crossfire — but since she was black, a lot of people simplified it to “racism.” With Savannah being white, one is tempted to simplify by saying, “guns.” For instance, since I watch at LOT of British cop shows, I think, why can’t our cops go unarmed, like them? But of course that ignores the fact that there are 393 million guns in private hands in this country, and a lot of those hands belong to people who like to shoot first, like Graziano. So no, I don’t know that answer, but I’m pretty sure it can’t be summed up in one word.
A big AI advance — I often sneer at artificial intelligence, noting that it may be artificial, but it certainly isn’t intelligent. Well, something like this makes me take a step back, and have “Matrix” thoughts. See that block of images below. None was taken by a camera. And they were generated not by hours of work by a CGI artist, but by “the artificial intelligence text-to-image generator DALL-E.” The one at the upper right came into being in response to the phrase, ““A woman in a red coat looking up at the sky in the middle of Times Square.” The only human input for the one at bottom left was, “Red and yellow bell peppers in a bowl with a floral pattern on a green rug photo.” I don’t know what the prompt was for the boy in black-and-white, but this is scary. Note that I say, “the phrase,” “input,” and “prompt.” Each time, I almost wrote “command,” but dare we speak of issuing orders to our future digital overlords?
Ukraine dilemma — If you don’t spend too much time thinking about it, you can conclude that the thing to do is simply cheer for Ukraine to win, and Putin to lose. And I do. But I also worry. As I have since the start. Those of you who think Brad is just this wild warmonger — because I would sometimes use military force when you would not — may have been taken aback by the way I worried when all this started. I was running about like Neville Chamberlain, wringing my hands — sort of, anyway. Once it started, I continued to worry, while following the above formula. But while I rooted for Ukraine, and was pleased by that country’s recent successes, I continued worrying about the big picture, which goes like this: Putin needs to be humiliated, so he stops doing this. He didn’t pay a price in Georgia, or for his early moves on Ukraine. This has to stop. He needs to go. But he’s got all those nukes, and what will he do with them on his way out the door? Anyway, I urge you to read this piece, “Putin is limping toward an endgame in Ukraine. Should the West go along?” Read the whole thing, if you can. It basically asks, if fixing “elections” so he can save some face by annexing part of Ukraine — again — should we let him do this disgusting thing, to prevent a nuclear holocaust? My gut, of course, says the hell with him. But I don’t want nuclear hell unleashed on the rest of us, either. What’s the right move?

The first and the third problems are very similar. Any intelligent, or merely satisfying, response to either has enormous barriers in front of it. Get rid of those 393 million guns (the only thing that would really fix the problem)? Good luck. And imagine Joe Biden, in this poisonous political environment, trying to steer a course that does something enormously sickening to all sides, in order to avoid Armageddon. Forget about the consequences in the midterms — would it even be possible to do it?

Maybe we should stop worrying about 1 and 3, and let 2 happen, so the algorithms can make the decisions.

Anyway, as I said, if I were inclined to be pessimistic about life, the universe and everything, I’d spend all my time thinking about things such as these…

The upper-right was generated by “A woman in a red coat looking up at the sky in the middle of Times Square.”

I’m a bit obsessed with my iPad, and my iPhone knows it

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I hardly go anywhere without my iPad.

Certainly not if I’m going somewhere work-related — a meeting or an interview or whatever — because it’s easy to carry and can perform most work-related functions.

But I don’t go on vacation without it, either. And in the past, I haven’t even left the hotel or B&B without it. When we went to Thailand and Hawaii several years ago, I carried it in a drawstring bad strapped across my chest (I long ago outgrew the trying-to-look-cool thing) or back. See the embarrassing image below.

But by the time we went to Ireland and then to Boston, I’d decided if I absolutely had to do something while walking about on vacation, my phone would do. If I can keep the blasted thing charged.

Still, the iPad goes with me nearly everywhere.

And my iPhone has noticed. Lately, it’s been acting a bit sarcastic about it. Every time I leave the house now — for a walk, or to go to the grocery — I’ve started getting these notifications, like the one above, as soon as I’m a few blocks from the house.

They’re like, “Hey, you — it looks like you left your baby behind! Don’t you want to run back home and get it?”

OK, so maybe this isn’t petulance on the part of the phone. It seems to have started when I allowed the iPad to update its operating system recently. And there seems to be an easy way to turn off such notifications.

But… maybe one of these times, I really would want to go back and get it. So I’m leaving it on for now. I’ll just have to see how much it bugs me going forward…

Here I am with me mate Mark, whom I met on the road to Kanchanaburi in 2015. He’s a retired roofer from England. Note that in addition to the drawstring bag, I’m wearing my tropical-weight travel vest. So I’m really not kidding when I say I’ve outgrown trying to look cool on the road.

Sometimes, robots try too hard, and assume too much

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Those of you who travel more than I do (these days, I hardly leave my house!) probably noticed this before, but it’s the first time I’ve run into it.

As I mentioned, we took a quick trip to Memphis a few days back, and while we were there, I looked at my phone and noticed I had an appointment with one of my doctors set for the next day — which was the day we’d be driving back. The time was for right about the time we’d be leaving Memphis. (I knew I had an appointment that week, but I’d thought it was later in the week.)

So I called, and they called me back the next morning as we were about to leave, and reset the appointment for this coming Friday at 9:10. So I entered that into my iPhone.

At least, I think that was the time. I just looked at my calendar, and it says 10:10. (As you can see above, I smudged the doc’s name. Y’all know I usually don’t worry too much about my own privacy in a medical context, but I try to respect that of my physicians’.)

So… I’m left to assume that since I entered the time as 9:10 when I was in the CDT zone, my iPhone automatically “corrected” it when we cross the line back into EDT.

I fixed it earlier on my phone, but it still shows up on my PC as 10.10. (Which is another technical problem.) So now I’ve put in a call to the doctor’s office to make sure.

Anyway, I hadn’t known iOS could be quite that “helpful.” Or that presumptuous…

Roy Rogers and Wonder Woman! You can’t beat that…

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OK, I was kinda ragging on Google Adsense the other day for the “older women” ad they put on my blog, but here’s one I actually like.

Not enough to click on it, mind you — that’s against the rules. I just like it as a visual enhancement of the blog.

My childhood hero Roy Rogers, with the best Wonder Woman! (No offense to Gal Gadot, but this one was pretty special.)

Can’t say I appreciate the slight suggestion that there’s something salacious going on (“opens up about his life”), this being Roy and all. I mean, he’s just being polite posing for a picture. The photographer probably said, “Pretend she’s Trigger!” and Roy obliged.

Of course, she’s not Trigger, but I don’t hold that against her. Not her fault at all. She’s doing her best, and her best is pretty good…

Hey, you promised me OLDER women!

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AdSense won’t let me click on its ads, but at least I can occasionally make fun of them. I think.

Yesterday, they put the one you see above in the top position on my blog. I don’t know why. You probably didn’t see it (at least, I hope not), but for some reason the algorithm thought Brad Warthen wanted to.

I don’t have any guilty secrets that this reveals, or I probably wouldn’t post this. I haven’t been searching for anything remotely likely to lead to such associations. Here are some of my recent Google search terms:

no-knock warrant raid
npe
Ramesh Ponnuru
where is wordle on nyt app
hugh weathers

Over on Amazon, I’ve looked for:

Wrangler Authentics Men’s Classic Relaxed Fit Cargo Short
The Lincoln Highway: A Novel
Sun Joe SJH901E 18-Inch Electric Telescoping Pole Hedge Trimmer
Hourleey Garden Hose Washer Rubber, Heavy Duty Red Rubber Washer Fit All Standard 3/4 Inch Garden Hose Fittings, 50 Packs

Sexy stuff, huh?

OK, wait. This morning — after I saw the ad — Pinterest showed me this pic of Norma Jeane posing for a pinup painting (between pins of “Far Side” comics and Mickey Mantle), and the cutline used the name “Earl Moran,” and that made me curious enough to search for that name, which showed me this bevy of softcore images. And hey, all of those women, if still alive, are older than I am.

But that was after Google showed me the ad.

Personally, I feel cheated: If you think I’ve got some kinda thing for “older women,” why don’t you show me something like this, or this? You know, hubba-hubba stuff…

Don’t try to palm off some young babe on me. Give the customer what he wants — or what you, for inexplicable reasons, think he wants…

Anyway, this post is for my “AI is artificial, but not intelligent” file…

How about an ‘I ALREADY GAVE’ button?

It’s artificial, all right, but let’s not call it ‘intelligence’

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not smart (2)

As y’all know, I worry a good bit about what the internet is doing to us. But I don’t worry about “artificial intelligence” taking over the planet in some deliberate, organized way like in “The Matrix.”

That’s because I don’t see it as intelligent, either in a bad way or a good way. Oh, it’s capable of some impressive tricks. Some of them, like Google Maps, I think are pretty wonderful. But intelligent? Nope. I worry about the things it does that are the opposite of intelligent. And I worry about how it’s making us dramatically less intelligent. That’s what all those “Rabbit Hole” posts are about.

And on the good, useful side of intelligence, I’m never going to trust it to operate any car that I or people I love are riding in — or driving next to. Yep, it can react more quickly and often more logically than a human to many situations. But it is so very, very far from being able to see and understand everything we do.

My email today provided two examples that brought all this to mind for me, yet again.

First… I recently wanted to re-read Post Captain, the second book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, for the first time in years. But I had lost my copy of it. I figured if I bought another, I might lose that, too. So I bought access to a Kindle version, which I can read on my iPad’s Kindle app.

And now, using the “brilliant” capabilities of Amazon’s recommendation code, it sends me invitations to read some other books in the series, having no clue that all of those are sitting, well-thumbed, on my bookshelves.

OK, you say, that seems reasonable. A clerk in a bookshop could make the same mistake. Seeing me buying Post Captain, he might reasonably say, “Hey, if that interests you, have you read the other 20 books in the series?” And I wouldn’t think he was stupid at all.

But that clerk isn’t the vaunted, imperial technology of Amazon, which supposedly has instantaneous access to everything about me that’s on the Web, and possesses an uncanny ability to process all that information and act effectively upon it, even to the point of planting (with my help!) two spies — my Echo devices — to listen to everything I ever say in the privacy of my home.

Which should not make it hard for it to know that I am a compulsive blogger — something not hidden at all, since the blog bears my name — who bores the ever-loving crapola out of all my readers by mentioning my Aubrey-Maturin mania over and over and over again, for years on end.

No, again, I’m not saying a human couldn’t make the mistake. But if a human being was in touch with all that information, and was able to process it constantly with superhuman speed, he wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking I haven’t read HMS Surprise. (The Stasi wouldn’t have made that mistake in even a casual effort to manipulate me, and East Germany ceased to exist well before the rise of artificial you-know-what.) So he would just suggest something else.

No, Amazon isn’t stupid for doing this. It’s just utterly failing to impress me with its supposedly amazing intelligence.

OK, I sense I’m losing you on that one. The example doesn’t come across as sufficiently stupid to you, even after I explain why it drew a snort of contempt from me.

So here’s another one. My Ancestry app has recently stopped defaulting to my tree when I open it. I have to tell it I want to open the tree after it has shown me various offers of really cool stuff that’s supposed to make me super-impressed at what Ancestry has to offer me.

And the one it keeps offering first is something it calls “your Photoline.” And there’s one of my great-great grandfathers, along with his son my great-grandfather, my Dad, and me.

I infer that Ancestry expects me to react like this:

Wow! That’s me! And there’s my Dad when he was young! I wonder who those other, old-timey guys are! Am I related to them? Can Ancestry really tell me amazing things like that? Where did it find all these pictures?

And so forth.

But here’s the thing: Ancestry has these pictures because I put them on my tree. Every single one of them. I not only scanned them, but I recognize the way I cropped them in Photoshop. I remember wondering whether I should remove that streak across the picture of me, and deciding to leave it because the streak is part of the story of the picture.

(That’s a mug someone at The Jackson Sun shot in the newsroom’s studio in 1985 to go with a story for the business page about the fact that I, the Sun‘s news editor, was leaving to become news editor of the Wichita paper. The streak is there because the Sun had recently started trying to save photographers’ time by shooting such routine mug shots with a Polaroid camera. They’re quicker, but often they leave streaks like that — which I suppose makes them sort of like “artificial intelligence.” I’ve always liked the picture anyway, including the cocky grin I had, because I didn’t know yet what an awful place to work the Wichita paper would be.)

There’s some human stupidity here, too. A human thought this would be a great way to pull people into Ancestry, and wrote (or caused to be written) the code that would automatically skim the database for such pictures, and match them up. And it might have impressed someone utterly clueless, like those celebrity guests on that PBS show who are so amazed to learn who their grandparents were.

But why doesn’t this brilliant code know where it got the pictures, which was from me, the guy it’s trying to impress? It doesn’t seem like that would take many ones and zeroes at all. It seems like the one thing it ought to know the most easily. Even a pretty dumb human would know that.

Anyway, I’m not worried about this kind of intelligence taking over. Oh, it can perhaps destroy society, by destroying our ability to think clearly. But it can’t run the place… or drive a car to my satisfaction, either…

Oh, and don’t even get me started on referring to a single person as “them.” Of course, plenty of human do that, unfortunately…

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits

Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

What do you trust AI to do?

Are you getting more cold-call emails lately?

Apparently, top editors suspect the Matrix is coming

If I were inclined to be a pessimist, here’s what I’d worry about

I’m a bit obsessed with my iPad, and my iPhone knows it

Sometimes, robots try too hard, and assume too much

Roy Rogers and Wonder Woman! You can’t beat that…

Hey, you promised me OLDER women!

How about an ‘I ALREADY GAVE’ button?

It’s artificial, all right, but let’s not call it ‘intelligence’