Extollation

Per Bloomberg, AI innovator Fei-Fei Li says Americans should be setting an example for the rest of the world when it comes to extolling the benefits of AI.
AI 'godmother': US skeptics have wrong mindset about the tech

Benefits for whom?

By contrast, many countries in Asia demonstrate a more positive attitude toward AI, according to Pew. Li chalks that up to a strong focus on the technology throughout early education in those regions.
AI Pioneer Fei-Fei Li Warns of Risks From Growing Tech Backlash

But a lot of counties in Asia, like China and Japan, are much higher-trust societies than the United States. And a greater focus on technology during early childhood education is not going to fix that.

This goes back to the conversation between Gavin Baker and Dario Amodei over the weekend. One of the points that Mr. Amodei made was that many people in the general public "always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over," and part of the reason for this is that companies, governments and the technology industry don't keep their promises to make things better for people.

Take Uber, for example. They promised a better way of getting a ride. Now I can't go from the airport to a hotel when I travel without giving up personal information, and Uber has been accused of monitoring the battery levels of people's phones to judge whether or not they'd be up to paying surge pricing. An unmitigated good, this isn't.

Or consider the following, from a recent episode of the podcast Decoder. Host Nilay Patel makes this observation, almost as a throwaway comment:

I had a partner at a very, very large consulting firm tell me they had done hundreds of AI deployments and less than two dozen had yielded positive ROI. I said, “Can you just tell me that on the record?” And he said, “Absolutely not. We want hundreds more.”

If businesses won't be honest about the results their enterprise customers can expect, because they want to keep selling lucrative, but non-cost-effective, services, why would anyone think that businesses would be more forthcoming with the public?

Senator Josh Hawley can open a Congressional subcommittee hearing with: "We’re here today to talk about one of the effects of this AI boom: the partnership between the AI industry and some of the biggest corporations in America to effectively scam consumers out of every last dollar they have in order to buy products that they need and rely on," without sounding like crackpot because people honestly believe that immiserating them for the benefit of executives and wealthy investors is the plan. It's unrealistic to presume that people going to extol the benefits of a technology that they understand is primarily intended to be a weapon against them.

There are a lot of technology boosters and techno-optimists who will happily pontificate about how generative automation, general artificial intelligence or what-have-you will make work optional and usher in a post-scarcity, utopian, society. All companies have to do to get there is receive a subsidy in the form of massive amounts of data from the public without needing to pay for any of it. I suspect that it's rational for people to be suspicious that a industry that claims that paying for its inputs will doom it will actually be ready, willing and/or able to share the wealth later.

Negativity Bias

I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.  I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust.  I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.  The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it.
Dario Amodei. Saturday, 15 August, 2026

I understand where Mr. Amodei is coming from here, but I think that I would portray the public as a little less paranoid. I don't believe that companies are setting out to "screw me over." Rather, I understand that the point of a business is to transfer wealth from other people to the owners of the business. Period. A business can set out to do just enough to maintain itself as a going concern, it can swing for the fences or pick a point in-between, but at the end of the day every business I deal with regards some or all of the money in my checking account as its rightful entitlement and seeks to find a way to transfer that to its owners.

And businesses have been known to go overboard. Back in 2013, Jamies Graigie, then the CEO of Church and Dwight, was railing against laundry detergent pods, which gained traction in the market when Proctor and Gamble (which had been working on the technology since the 1960s) introduced Tide Pods. Mr. Graigie's problem with Tide Pods was simple; they eliminated waste by providing precise amounts of detergent. But that waste translates directly into higher sales, and thus, to profits. Which is what shareholders want. More recently (two weeks ago), a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing accused corporations of using information gleaned about users to determine their willingness to pay higher prices, and thus charge them more. To be sure, there was a certain amount of grandstanding going on, with Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) noting in a press release that companies were out to "scam working Americans out of their hard-earned money," but it's pretty much understood that this is how businesses operate.

So, as I would put it, the public has a negative view of generative automation because they understand that the goal of companies is to use technology to increase their profitability, whether or not the technology actually makes the public better off. And this is a rational understanding, because the big shareholders in companies expect this... it's why they invest in new technologies in the first place. Mr. Amodei's post on X was a response to an investor, Gavin Baker. And one of Mr. Baker's critiques in the overall discussion was that bringing up the dangers of generative automation, or actual artificial intelligence, if that ever arises, is frightening the public, and is thus a driver of opposition. And Mr. Amodei's response is basically that what people are reacting to is the perception, honed over decades (with the help of people like Senator Hawley), that the business of business is to benefit people like Messrs. Baker and Amodei (and maybe even Senator Hawley), at the direct expense of the public at large.

We’re here today to talk about one of the effects of this AI boom: the partnership between the AI industry and some of the biggest corporations in America to effectively scam consumers out of every last dollar they have in order to buy products that they need and rely on.
Senator Josh Hawley

And while I don't buy into the talk of scams, since most businesses are not actively engaged in any sort of fraud, the fact of the matter is that money spends just as well regardless of how it was obtained. A business that makes $100 from providing good value for money can't do anything more with it than one that sells someone garbage or simply finds a way to provide nothing at all of use in return. And to the degree that money for nothing is a more efficient business model than money for value, it doesn't require an Economics degree to understand which option investors will find more attractive; especially in the short term. And this actively creates the sort of perverse incentives that Mr. Amodei understands erode public trust.

I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive.  The thing that will work is *actually curing cancer*.  I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.  That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.
Dario Amodei

I would go a step farther. Generative automation has to do more than simply "cure cancer" (which is a much taller order than Mr. Amodei's X post gives it credit for). It has to make that cure accessible to people who need it, rather than it simply being another way for "some of the biggest corporations in America" to extract money from people by leaving them with the option of watching family members die. If Anthropic creates a cure for cancer, only for Johnson & Johnson or Eli Lily & Company to monopolize it and use it to extract money from the public, the promise to benefit the world will still be considered undelivered on.

And here, Mr. Amodei's optimism may be showing. In a low-trust society, where many people feel that they can only trust themselves to look out for them, it's going to take more than technological advancement to win back trust. It's going to take showing people that they, and their interests, are important. But Mr. Amodei is certainly correct in his understanding "that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin" won't accomplish that.

Suburbia

Today is World Photography Day, so I went out with my camera, and snapped some frames. This year's theme is "home," but, to be honest, I find the place where I live kind of boring. Suburban cul-de-sacs are like that.

So I went over to downtown Redmond, which isn't too far away, and took some pictures down there. For no particular reason, I found this shot of some of the new apartments and condominiums that have been built over the past several years to be interesting, so here it is. 

On-Call

Ultimately, the [Trusted Contact] feature puts the responsibility back on the user, adds [Holly] Wilcox[, director of the Center for Suicide Prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health]. She would like to see companies like OpenAI be more proactive in partnering with existing crisis resources like 988.

"So maybe having a human jump into the conversation at some point who's trained and knows the tools of what to do for suicide prevention," she says. "And have them jump in and say, 'You know, what's going on? Can I help?"
She told no one about her agony except ChatGPT. What her death reveals about AI risks

I've heard this suggestion made before, when it comes to generative automation chatbots and people in mental heath crises or otherwise at risk. But so far, I haven't heard the question of "who would these humans be" addressed. And that's important. Not to mention how this would all work.

If "a human" receives a ping from ChatGPT or Copilot or whatever that a person it is communicating with is showing signs of being "at risk," what should come along with that? Are they dumped into the conversation cold, and have to then sort out who the person is, and what's going on, in real time? Are they given information that the user has already given the chatbot? If so, how much? And what happens if the person communicating with the chatbot doesn't want to talk to "a human?" Is "a human" allowed to force the issue, and, if the user is signed into the service that summoned them, force the service to not re-open communications with the user unless "a human" gives the all-clear? What can, or should, companies program into their user interfaces to detect people attempting to work around safeguards? What will be the tolerance for false positives, as well as false negatives? For the idea to be viable, these questions will have to be answered.

To be sure, "maybe having a human jump into the conversation at some point" isn't a bad suggestion on the face of it, but it's a very simple suggestion on a way to solve a very complicated problem, and the sorts of news stories in which this pops up don't often have the space to go into the depth required. The NPR story that I quote from to lead off this post isn't about how to solve the problems associated with people turning to LLM-powered chatbots for mental health advice; it's the story of an attractive woman who killed herself, and her family's heartbreak, driven by her journalist mother. This is a human-interest story not a technology story. And I suspect that it feeds neatly into the overall suspicion of LLMs, and the companies that make them, on the part of the NPR audience.

And there's nothing wrong with human interest stories. There's nothing wrong with a sympathetic portrayal of a woman, and her parents, designed to bring attention to a tragic situation and a potential risk factor of an emergent technology. But there does need to be some follow-up. "Maybe having a human jump into the conversation at some point," requires, at a minimum, a number of people who are going to be on-call, such that there are always people available, so that there is going to be "a human" available, whenever a chatbot detects some level of a person being at risk. That, in and of itself, is going to have measurable costs. In 2023, the wait time for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline was less than a minute. Understanding what it will take to keep the wait time low will be important. Not to mention the idea that there are likely some number of people who are turning to ChatGPT or Copilot or a different service specifically because they mistrust the 988 service.

But half of LGBTQ+ people in a recent survey by Pew Charitable Trusts said they worried a call to 988 could end in an unwanted interaction with police or a forced hospitalization.
Mental health crisis line 988 fields significantly more calls, 12 times as many texts in first year

Regardless of how realistic a concern that is, given an Administration (and 988 is a federal program) that has show itself to be hostile to the LGBT community, it's not necessarily an irrational one (and even if it was, we are talking about a mental heath service here). And, speaking of the current Administration, it also stands to reason that immigrants could be leery about using 988.

So there's a concern, worth taking seriously, that part of the reason why people turn to generative automation for mental health advice and guidance is that the resources with actual people behind them carry some sort of real or perceived risk for them.

I don't think that any of this is insurmountable. But it does require addressing, at least if a program is going to be successful. So I'd like to see a news story, or a podcast, perhaps, that actually looks at what it would take to build out this idea.

Telltale

 A  LinkedIn posted that I'd made pointing out some of the telltales of faked profiles prompted a simple enough question: "Why would anyone prey on someone that is looking for a job?"

There is, of course, a simple answer, "Money," but there's also a somewhat more nuanced answer: A painful, but recoverable, financial loss for someone in the United States or Europe can be a life-changing amount of money for someone in a poor country, and many of the random frauds that pop up on LinkedIn originate in just such poor countries.

There is a steady background hum of fraudulent activity on LinkedIn, a lot of it really minor; people shilling for companies that promise to get people jobs, offering résumé reviews/writing of dubious value or pointing job seekers to fake "recruiter" profiles. Things that LinkedIn, perhaps of necessity, is somewhat tolerant of, so one doesn't have to look very hard to find it. And that means that most of it is, in the grand scheme of things, unsophisticated. Much of it is boilerplate, and that means that it usually has telltales that something isn't right.

Which is all fine and good, but seeing a telltale, and knowing what it is are not the same. And this is where LinkedIn could be doing a better job for its users. As a run-of-the-mill social media platform, LinkedIn lives or dies by time on site and posts viewed, and so posts encouraging posting are common. But most people who use the site don't come there simply to read posts... they're social selling, looking for a job or trying to make connections. And fraudsters attempt to insert themselves into those activities. The occasional post informing people of what to look for would be useful to them, and it would let would-be thieves and con artists know that the site is on to them.