The Less Things Change

When I was growing up, I lived in a distant suburb of Chicago. One of the most distant, actually; out past the city limits and one was considered to have exited Chicagland entirely. It was about 90% White when I lived there, and as a result, I tend to talk like, and have the same interests as, a White guy from the suburbs. This caused something of a problem when I went away to college at a Historically Black College/University (HBCU). For many of my classmates, my accent and hobbies weren't simply artifacts of a life spent out in the boondocks, they were a deliberate repudiation of both them, and being Black.

And this was my introduction to the idea that many people in the United States are quite sensitive to actions, attitudes or lifestyles that can be construed as a rejection of themselves. As time went on, I came to understand that this could be a very sore point for people, even rising to the level of a perceived attack on them; something to be retaliated against. Which brings me to this:

Many locals interviewed by the USA TODAY Network declined to speak publicly, citing concerns about potential political retribution if they were quoted picking one name over the other.
The Gulf of What? Has Trump's name change caught on?

With Freedom Fries 3.0 being the newest thing to hit the new cycle, I decided to check if 2.0 was still in effect. And, as far as Google Search is concerned, it is. And so I came across the USA Today article that I quoted above. While I'm sure that some of the fears of retribution are overblown, that leaves others as perfectly reasonable. Not that seeking to punish someone for going along with President Trump's pretty executive orders comes across as remotely reasonable to me.

But then again, I see the President's executive orders, and people's willingness to take sides on them, as being less important than whether it might rain again tomorrow, or whether traffic will be bad. I certainly don't see it as either a rejection or, or an attack on, myself. Sure, the President has a greater inclination for performative childishness than I might prefer, but he's hardly the only person for whom that is true. And so this can be nothing other than a pointless sideshow, rather than a rationale for sharpening the knives.

While I think I would have been surprised by this turn of events back when I was in college, part of that is due to the fact that I was a young person in college, and just learning about how the broader adult world worked. Now, having been a resident of said world for the past few decades, it's more evident to me that there's nothing new to see here.

And None For All

Much of the public outcry over data-center construction has centered on electricity costs, water consumption and noise. [...] Unions and construction trade groups are now entering the fray from the other side, warning that such actions endanger thousands of building-related jobs.
Blue-Collar Jobs Are the New Flashpoint in Data-Center Fight

People who understand that they will benefit from building datacenters are unhappy with people who understand that they will incur costs from living near datacenters. I think that about sums it up.

And it's a microcosm of the bigger debate over datacenters: Who will benefit, and who will pay the costs? It's a given that it's more profitable to do something when the costs of doing it are shared, but benefits are concentrated. And, as Dario Amodei has pointed out, businesses generally have a poor track record of living up to: "It'll be great! You'll see!"

Construction unions versus communities is a bit different, as it comes across more as a zero-sum game; for one side to get what it wants, the other has to lose out. But it's still the sort of contest of competing interests that boils down to a fundamental disconnect between who benefits from a given set of developments, and who bears the costs for them, with both sides feeling that they're being called upon to subsidize gains for someone else.

And this is a bigger societal problem that's going to have to be addressed: when people feel that they're left holding the bag for benefits that accrue to someone else, they stop supporting initiatives where they're unable to see any tangible, direct, benefits to themselves, even when that creates hardships for others.

It's Not Everything

It's difficult to find a television these days that isn't "smart;" meaning that it's connected to the Internet, is sending information about what one watches on it to someone else and is designed to be a conduit for targeted advertising. And now this same mindset is, unsurprisingly, coming for computer monitors as well.

Near the end of the Ars Technica story I was reading on how LG had been pushing advertisements into monitors, and what this could mean for smart monitors, the author makes the following point:

Ads and OSes [Operating Systems] could one day help drive down the price of monitors, as they did TVs.

I get it, but this presumes that price begins and ends with the amount of money one pays for something. If a monitor, or a television, for that matter, is set up so that I have to engage with advertising for some amount of time before I can do what I set out to do, that's also a price to be paid. The fact that it isn't a monetary cost doesn't change that.

A number of services and whatnot on the web are described as "free," because they don't require uses to open their wallets, or grant access to their bank accounts in order to use them. But money is not the only measure of price, despite that social convention. The whole idea behind the concept of the "attention economy" is that attention has value... generally speaking, it's only organizations that are seeking attention without offering anything in return that actively promote the idea that it's valueless.

But a lot of people passively promote the idea. I don't Scharon Harding, for example, doesn't see attention as having no value, but casting trading attention for monetary payment as a way of driving down the price conveys that idea. Which gets in the way of people understanding that they are, in fact, paying something, and can make the same sorts of cost-benefit and value for value calculations they would for anything else. After all, it's well understood that businesses place a dollar amount on the time they can get (or require) that people watch advertising for things they likely don't want. Why shouldn't the public at large?

Year One

I received my first digital camera as a gift in 2001. Since then, I've developed the habit of taking a camera with me everywhere I go, to the point where if I forget to bring one along, I think of myself as not having a camera, despite the fact that my cellular phone has one built in.

Every so often I go out and around specifically to take pictures, for one reason or another. In 2004, the BBC was having a photo contest, and I was looking from something interesting to shoot, and recalled that there was a weekly anti-war protest over in Lake Forest Park.

So I went over and shot some pictures. Didn't win any prizes, or anything. But it was fun. I'm reminded of all this due to World Photography Week, and was talking a walk down memory lane, courtesy of my store of digital photographs.

Other than the name of the President, the current Lake Forest Park protests aren't much different than the old ones; if the call to "Impeach Bush" were gone, it might not be evident that I hadn't taken this in the fall of 2025.
 

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.

Guess What's Back

Remember SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19? Well, if you don't, National Public Radio wants to remind you.

"Just like all previous summers since the pandemic began," the NPR website notes, "COVID-19 cases are ticking up again, even while other health threats make more headlines."

Yes, and?

The accompanying story is okay, but doesn't offer much in the way of information that a reader or listener could directly act on. So the whole thing comes across as "Hey! This virus is still around out there!"

Which, in the absence of any concrete information about what people should, or should not do, makes the story seem more like a trivia piece than a useful news story. I understand that the NPR audience, being somewhat on the leftward side of the political spectrum, was more invested in the social measures that were in place to combat the spread of the disease back in 2019 and 2020, but there's no action for them to get behind now. And so the story takes on an air of "here's one more thing to concern yourself with." And I'm not sure what that does for anyone.

Validity

There's a fairly expansive ecosystem on LinkedIn, and I suspect social media in general, that seeks views, likes and other social media currency by offering a steady stream of unabashed validation to all and sundry. Such as the following:

I find the trend of people placing their names on these bland aphorisms to be interesting. Do they really expect to be credited for coining these shopworn phrases?

What I find to be interesting about this is the implication that one's "value" is an objective number, and that people for whom it's not self-evident are incorrect or not worth someone's time. But as I encounter the world, there's nothing objective about value. Some people value certain things, or people, and other people don't.

And for someone like me, who understands all value to be instrumental (as in a means to an end), it stands to reason that what one wants or needs is what determines how valuable something is. I wouldn't pay $175 for an NFL ticket. Not because I don't see it's value, but because I'm not interested in watching football games live. But if a ticket landed in my lap, I'd ask around to see if anyone wanted it, and happily sell it to them, because they'd rather have the ticket than some amount of money, and I'd rather have the money than the ticket. Our whole economy is based on this sort of exchange.

But people find this idea, that they have a certain value, and other people should be able to see that, as validation. Which is why these sorts of things how up in my feed: someone I know had "liked" them for found them "insightful." Which is fine. But it doesn't work for me. For me, the choice of place comes down to people who are doing something where I can offer them some assistance. Which I think works better, people tend to be more open about what they're attempting to do.

Unsolved

I was listening to a recent episode of the Decoder podcast, about how opposition to (hyperscale) data centers cuts across the otherwise entrenched partisan divide between Democratic and Republican voters. It was something of a follow-up to a story in The Verge from Gaby Del Valle about the broader opposition to these large data centers.

There wasn't anything really out of the ordinary in their discussion; the idea that dislike of generative automation and the data centers that house it crosses political boundaries is pretty much common knowledge at this point. But one thing did stand out for me. Host Nilay Patel asked Ms. Del Valle if there was something the technology companies could do to blunt the opposition, basically, could they buy the communities off in exchange for acceptance. The response:

I don’t know about paying for healthcare, but something that I didn’t include in the piece, because it was extremely dry and very technical, was that the small protest ended with about an hour and a half long presentation from a land use expert on how to write local zoning ordinances to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built. It was really specific stuff, like “You could have them on multiple small parcels of land.” It was really dry. “You could require them to use this amount of reclaimed water, et cetera, et cetera.”

She then went on to note that what she believed communities wanted was some level of community input into the process.

It seems to me that changes to zoning laws is something that communities can do to have a greater level of control over what goes on in their immediate vicinity; in other words, it's a solution, or at least part of one, to the problem that these places feel they have. And it was left out of the story for being "extremely dry and very technical."

Part of me wants to use this as an indictment of modern media, leaving out the part of a story that people could actually use, because it didn't come across as "sexy" enough. But that presumes that Ms. Del Valle made the wrong call on that, and I'm not certain that she did. Her intuition that readers of The Verge would have simply tuned out if she'd gone into those details may have been bang on the money. The news media is a business, and whether that business is ad-supported or funded by subscriber dollars, boring stories are deadly. And solutions to problems, especially solutions that would take a fair amount of effort, are not known for bringing in eyeballs.

Although, to be sure, it's not clear that what The Atlantic's Derek Thompson calls "solutions journalism" is being attempted often enough for there to be a large enough sample size to really figure it out. This could simply be a situation where no-one wants to be the guinea pig.

Everything Becomes Crabs

I was listening to the podcast Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, and their fourth segment was about one Jiang Xueqin, otherwise known as "the Chinese Nostradamus." During the discussion and interesting point was made; that left to its own devices, every crazy conspiracy theory eventually winds up being anti-Semitic.

While there's quite a bit of evidence for this axiom in North America, and, I suspect, in Europe, I wonder how well it holds up worldwide. While Mr. Xueqin is Chinese, his family moved to Canada when he was young, so I'm not sure that he's representative of the nation is a whole, which strikes me as not really having a history that lends itself to the sort of pervasive anti-Jewish prejudices that constantly seem to meander through the industrialized West.

I suppose that this could be considered a corollary to the question of whether there's some sort of messianic figure that people in East Asia think they are if they have serious mental health issues. While there are a decent number of documented cases of people coming to the conclusion that they are the returned Jesus, it seems that this wouldn't really be the case in non-Christian countries.

In any event, I do wonder if there is some or another out-group in that part of the world that people feel are conspiring against the common good, in the way that Jews are often said to be here. Or if the entire idea of some grand cabal is itself confined to the United States and the like. I would be unsurprised to find that there is some research on the topic, but even before Alphabet decided that Google search was just too useful, I lacked the skills to track it down. 

Sun Bright

While I'm not a big one for flowers, once I started carrying a camera with me, I started noticing them a lot more than I did previously. I found these in a parking lot near where I live. I don't think that they're new, but I don't remember seeing them before. In any event, they were eye-catching, and since I had a camera with me...
 

Nailed It

Generative automation seems to have become the new hammer; for the person who has it as a tool, any task in front of them requires nails. I received an e-mail to notify me of a new Windows promotion that Microsoft is running as "the ultimate college bundle." Buy an eligible Windows 11-base personal computer "for college" and receive: a year of Microsoft 365 Premium, a year of XBOX Game Pass Ultimate and a customizable XBOX Wireless Controller. Okay, fair enough. Not my thing, but I can see how it could be an attractive offer. What I don't see is how it relates to this:

The Slop is strong with this one.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that for me, college was quite some time ago, and I don't claim to be completely up on what "Generation Z" is all about these days, but I'm pretty sure that whomever prompted (and whomever greenlit) this picture isn't either.

Because while I suspect that there is an overlap between young female gamers and anime fans, I wouldn't think that the two were synonymous. And so this picture doesn't say "gamer" to me; it says "anime cosplayer." Because who else would go to their college library wearing a sērāfuku and bring a ninjatō with them (especially one that seems to simply float in the air behind them, as though looking over their shoulder)?

This usage of generative automation strikes me as absolutely perfunctory. While I understand Microsoft wanting some sort of image for the advertisement, why use a poor-quality generated one? Was a photograph of an actual college-age student, in a library or dormitory, with an actual book really that expensive? The time, energy and money to source something that resembles the target market was really that dear?

"AI Slop" has been defined as usage of generative automation that demonstrates contempt for the audience; the idea that since the audience will lap up literally anything placed in front of them, one may as well serve up the cheapest garbage one can find. That definition came to mind when I saw this. Nothing about this illustration says: "We understand young people who want to use their PCs for both school and gaming." Rather it conflates gamers and cosplayers and presents the sort of lazy stereotype that shows not only a lack of understanding, but a lack of desire to understand.

Uncharted

This is why I'm dubious about using generative automation when I don't have a clear idea of what the output should look like.

In short, the State Department produced a map of Africa showing countries that were receiving aid, and none of the places highlighted on the map matched the nations referenced.

While the criticism of people in the State Department for not checking the map for accuracy prior to preventing it is well taken, I am a bit unsure that it's a reasonable expectation, if one believes that saving time is the primary use case. After all, I don't think that it would have taken that much time for a person to make this map. Start with a blank map of Africa and color-code the relevant countries. Someone who felt that, in the interests of speed, this task should be passed off to generative automation seems unlikely to then go back and compare the output to an actual map of Africa.