Grist

Nobody in Particular started in late December of 2006. Which means that I'm about a couple of months away from having been at this for 20 years. What started out as an attempt to make myself a better writer has become something of a compulsion in the meantime, with an early goal of averaging 13 posts per month turning into a minimum of 13 and an average a bit north of 15. Although not all of those are text posts... I do post photographs I've taken while out an about on an irregular basis.

But I have been thinking of winding things down by the end of the year. In part because I don't know that all of the time that I've spent in front of my keyboard has, in fact, made me a better writer, but also because I'm starting to feel that Alphabet, which owns Blogger, is simply helping itself to everything I post here and dumping it onto the massive pile to training data for the latest version of Gemini, having granted themselves a limitless license via their terms of service.

To be sure, that doesn't bother me, in and of itself. If the text I've posted here is useful, then it's useful. But it's also a reminder of one of the contradictions of generative automation. The companies that produce and sell it hold it out as something that can bring massive benefits to everyone, not just the wealthy investor and executive classes. But if the technology is that amazing, and will produce so much value that it will make literally everyone wealthier, why couldn't OpenAI, Anthropic and so on have borrowed the money to pay people for training data? Why resort of casting the whole of the open Internet as "fair use" and engaging in piracy of books if the technology was going to create enough to make everyone whole?

While it's fashionable to just presume that everyone over a certain net worth is greedy and grasping, and then call it a day, I do find it useful to pay attention to what the people whose job it is to make money on investing consider to be good investments. And if generative automation is only a good investment because the most important inputs are free, then it's worth being suspicious of the claims of enough returns to give some to everyone in the end.

Bad For Good

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s comments to Politico during an interview are stirring up controversy. I also disagree with how he laid things out, but perhaps for a different reason.

The fastest way to lose an argument is to unknowingly accept a hostile premise. And yeah, I think Mr. Altman screwed up. Because he doesn’t think big enough about what ubiquitous automation should be able to do for people. Here’s the comment that people have become riled up about:

“I think there’s a lot of daylight,” Altman told Decoded co-author and POLITICO senior tech reporter Brendan Bordelon. Asked specifically where he diverges from Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei, Altman said, “we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”

And here’s something that he said a bit later in the interview:

“I wouldn’t take a trade of saying, ‘We’ll make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams, there’s zero all the other bad things that will happen,’” said Altman. “Because I think people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good stuff than bad stuff.”

For me, the problem is the assumption that the benefits of generative automation won’t be universally accessible seem to be baked into the statements. If there are parts of the world in which the best available use case for generative automation is perpetrating more effective theft or fraud against people with more resources than themselves, what, exactly, has the technology done for them? Given that a person who has a realistic opportunity to materially improve their lot in life via the “good stuff” the technology is purported to be bringing would prefer that to being bothered with the risks of perpetrating “bad stuff,” if someone lacks access to the ability succeed via doing “good stuff,” one can make the case the technology has failed them. Is pervasive automation worth the costs if it can’t make the pie bigger by increasing the size of everyone’s individual slices? Mr. Altman’s statements are based on a presumption that the technology can’t fundamentally alter the incentives of people. That it can’t create better, safer and more socially acceptable ways of looking out for one’s material well-being.

Of course, one can make the case that people will do “bad stuff” because they’re fundamentally bad people, and the tradeoff is going to be empowering them along with the fundamentally good people. Okay, then. But for the person who now finds themselves assailed by bad people consistently using generative automation in endless attempts to dispossess them of whatever “good stuff” they’re able to obtain for themselves (or that bad people incorrectly think they’ve obtained), how better off are they in the end? It’s not likely to be the case that the added benefits will necessarily cover the costs of required added security measures. So some people are going to be left holding the bag.

Sure, generative automation will solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. But Mr. Altman’s statement seems to assume the fact that there are going to be people whose problems are either a) unaffected or b) made worse by the technology, and that this is a necessary trade-off. To me, that presupposes that the technology is simply incapable of creating enough abundance that the winners will be ready, willing and able to share with the losers, while still seeing themselves as winners. And if technology never manages to live up to the hype, that starting point may indicate that things won’t turn out as optimistically as might be hoped.

And “all the other bad things that will happen” is papering over a lot. If a person believes that creating a highly effective biological weapon is a solution to a known problem, either because they feel they have a direct use for one, or (to paraphrase Robert Frank) because it’s bad not to have bioweapons when the other side has bioweapons, then that is just as reasonable a potential outcome as major hacks, scams and other “misuse” of the technology. Because “misuse” is little more than a use case that an outside evaluator doesn’t like.

In the end, the world should not have to accept more major hacks, misuse of the technology, scams, et cetera, because one of “the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” should be the ability of people to not rely on these things to lead good lives.

Reboot

Leaders in D.C. and Silicon Valley are worried the public backlash against AI and data centers will hamper the development of this staggeringly powerful and existentially dangerous technology. The new label is part of a broader effort to shift the narrative.
Trump and CEOs try to shed AI's toxic branding

Someone, whether that's Jensen Huang or Donald Trump expects this rebranding exercise to work, and I wouldn't be surprised if they turn out to be right. Because these are relatively intelligent people (yes, even the President) and they wouldn't attempt something like this if they didn't think it had a reasonable chance of success.

I want to call that out as a problem, but it's really just the nature of the beast. In order for this to backfire in people's faces, a fairly large number of people need to, in effect, have nothing else that they need to pay attention to. And that simply isn't the case right now. Schemes like this make people upset when the presumption is that they count on the fact that people are stupid. So any expectation that suddenly going from calling generative automation "artificial intelligence" to "super intelligence" will actually change the public perception of the technology becomes a marker of contempt. When it's really simply the realization that most people don't know enough about the topic to understand that the change is, at this point, purely semantic because they have other, more important things, to devote their attention to.

And if I'm going to criticize "leaders in D.C." for anything in this, it's the fact that so many people are too busy keeping their heads above water to have the time to be more conversant in the technology. As for leaders in Silicon Valley, if they weren't trying to snow people about the benefits of their new technologies, then I'd be worried.

Allied

The "American Infrastructure Alliance" has formed to push for data center growth in Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas. Supposedly, the goal is to work with state and local governments on "responsible development" and, in so doing, head of potential moratoriums on new sites. (As opposed to the America's Infrastructure Alliance, which concerns itself with transportation, and the AI Infrastructure Coalition, which is a different group.)

Personally, what I was looking for in the Axios story on the outfit was some indication that they would come out against data center projects looking to have the elected officials they read into their projects sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. After all, if the point is, as International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers international President Kenneth Cooper says, "development that benefits workers, communities and our nation," then the developers should be willing to lay all of their cards on the table, no?

Personally, I suspect that the group isn't going to be as effective as its members may want it to be. Because the issue isn't really benefits... it's costs. Data centers have a very high level of perceived costs for the communities in which they are situation. Water usage may be overstated, but in places where the electrical grid needs to be updated or expanded to manage the extra capacity, power costs go up, and data centers are are often large, ugly and noisy. And while the labor unions that have signed on to the group are touting the jobs that will be created are mostly going to be temporary... it may take a small army of electricians to build out a data center, but it won't need all of them to maintain it. And if the union workers who build data centers live elsewhere, the impact of their wages on the local economy will also be short-lived.

The various businesses and unions that are backing this new alliance are going to have to make the case that the benefits to the communities where data centers will be built will match or outweigh the costs to them. But part of what allows businesses to be successful is often the ability to externalize costs (like not having to pay for training data), and the expectation that communities will "take one for the team" has already been articulated by some parties.

If the idea that this is simply another scheme to transfer wealth from rural communities to corporate shareholders and union executives take hold, this project will be dead on arrival. Considering the substantial head start that idea already has, this "American Infrastructure Alliance" likely has its work cut out for it.

PS: I went looking for a website for the group, to see what they had to say in their own words, but didn't manage to turn one up. Maybe it's a bit early for that yet.

Action Required

Has there ever been an industry rollout, from a PR perspective, sort of worse than AI? Which has sort of been: “It’s coming, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it, it might end the world, it could very well destroy your job. But you know, as a consolation, this chatbot will help you describe how to commit suicide.”
David French, The Opinions Podcast: “Trump's Political Instincts ‘Are Clearly Fading’.” 19 September, 2026

Some of this is that the companies have done a terrible job at messaging. They have effectively said, “We’re going to destroy all your jobs and potentially destroy humanity, but we’re going to IPO for a massive valuation and we’re going to set up camp in your local communities with data centers, which by the way, don’t employ people and drive up the cost of power. But, it’s okay. China.”
Jonathan Kanter, Decoder Podcast: “Does AI need an antitrust exemption so it doesn’t kill everyone????” 19 September, 2026

While Dario Amodei may think that the messaging around generative automation is less important than prior failures of corporate America to live up to its promises to make people's lives better, if this is the impression that people have of the public messaging from Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI et cetera, the companies sure aren't doing themselves any favors.

Back when Mr. Amodei was backing up one of his engineers in a debate with an investor on X, he noted that earning the public's trust would require more than promises to cure cancer; the cure actually needed to be delivered. But when I read Messrs. French and Kanter characterizing the messaging from the industry, neither of them mention curing cancer. And perhaps that's the problem that industry players have; their lofty promises aren't actually making it into the public's consciousness. To be sure, I'm not convinced that many people take the idea that generative automation will be able to come up with a cure for cancer(s) in the short term, but the fact that the pledge isn't even part of the discussion is telling.

And maybe that's because cancer cures have been promised for decades now, yet have never materialized, but maybe it's because it's not anything that anyone expects immediately, and so it becomes a matter of giving companies a lot now, in the hope of some benefit later. And the breakthroughs that the frontier labs are actually announcing aren't immediately useful to the general public. In other words, while it's impressive that an OpenAI model disproved a conjecture concerning the planar unit distance problem, what does that disproof do for the many thousands of people who have lost their jobs because the C-suite of their company decided that agents could do the work more cheaply or simply to free up capital for data center construction? Perhaps the lofty promises are being ignored because there's no concrete indication that the generative automation labs are actual working to bring any of them to fruition. Rather they're the typical technology smokescreens that corporate executives seek to hind behind when they ask for public subsidies for their shareholders and their own salaries.

But as Mr. Amodei pointed out, this is not, fundamentally, an advertising problem; rather, it's an action problem. And while I think that yes, finding a way to do away with the scourge of cancer will show people that the industry is serious about doing something good for people, there are a myriad of much smaller problems that could use solutions in the near term. It occurs to me that the rapid pace of frontier model creation, to the point where the industry claims that they cannot be sure their products are safe, becomes a tacit admission that the current models aren't really useful for much of anything. Chatbots can, allegedly, completely wreck a person's mental health, but they can't reliably shave even one-half of one percent from people's cost of living. They produce little, if anything, that makes life better for the average person. Even people who are more productive as a result of using generative automation in their day-to-day work aren't necessarily seeing their wages rise from it.

While it's not true that the technology moguls are the only people benefiting from this new technology (the trades involved in data center construction are seeing dollar signs), for the average member of the public, this whole enterprise comes across as high-risk, low-reward, buttressed by justifications that seem flimsy on their face. This gives the impression that the technology companies believe that they don't actually need the public's support. Sooner or later, I suspect that the broader public will contest that with them.

Fire In The Hole

There's a decent amount of Internet schadenfreude being aimed at Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke after a podcast interview in which he noted that while generative automation allows employees to create more, faster, when they don't then check that work, it becomes "slop grenades" (perhaps more commonly known as "workslop") lobbed at other employees.

According to a Business Insider article about the interview, "Lütke said AI is most valuable when it makes people's thinking clearer and more concise."

Okay, fair enough, but in the all-hands memo that was reported, he said that "Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify."

That's significantly different from "consider your tasks, and where generative automation can make you clearer or more concise, use it." The memo seemed to presuppose that humans simply couldn't match the clarity and conciseness of an LLM. And if people are expected to reflexively turn to generative automation to do work, and are being graded on being seen to do so the "slop grenades" are a feature, not a bug.

In the all-hands memo, it's noted that: "What we have learned so far is that using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by... using it a lot." Well, this is what everyone "using it a lot" looks like.

The problem, he said, is that the tools make it easy to pass along work that has not been properly evaluated.

From the memo that I saw reported, the message seemed to be "use the tools all the time and let the feedback mechanisms sort it out." There's no call for employees to evaluate their outputs themselves before sending them. Now, I'm going to admit that I don't know if I've seen the memo as it was sent to Shopify employees... screenshots purporting to be the message in question were shared to LinkedIn, and that's what I read.

In any event, it seems to me that Mr. Lütke is running into something that I remember encountering in my professional career... people don't do what someone tells them... they do what they hear. And a hallmark of good communication is narrowing the gap between those two things as much as can be managed. While Mr. Lütke may have intended for Shopify employees to be careful to ensure that their use of generative automation didn't simply create more work for people, when employees read that "In a company growing 20-40% year over year, you must improve by at least that much just to re-qualify. [...] That sounds daunting, but given the nature if the tools, this doesn't even sound terribly ambitious to me anymore," their focus is going to be on meeting that benchmark, especially given that the memo also noted that "We will add AI usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire."

Of course Shopify didn't intend for people to use generative automation willy-nilly and then simply lob the raw outputs over the wall to their colleagues. But Mr. Lütke's memo didn't make an expectation that employees would check those outputs to see if they actually provided value clear to anyone. And that's where the miss occurred. Employees internalized the implicit assumption that all automation was good automation, and left it to feedback from others to inform them if they were on the right track. But the sheer volume of material that an LLM can put out in short timeframes can make evaluating all of it difficult, especially for someone who is receiving work items from a number of people.

Perhaps the real lesson from this is that CEOs are people, too, and they're just as susceptible to believing that their words are accurate carriers of their intent as anyone else. And of finding out the hard way that they're mistaken.

Silence

I tend to post pictures to the blog here fairly often. I pretty much always carry a camera with me, and so I usually have a photograph to post, either by itself, or to illustrate a post.

But today, for some reason, Blogger is not allowing me to upload from my computer. These things happen, so it wouldn't be a big deal, except for one problem: there's no error message. The picture simply isn't displayed. This sort of occurrence, "failing silently," makes things difficult for users because it's hard to troubleshoot. After all, there's no information about what may have gone wrong that can be searched on the Internet or noted in a support ticket.

And I've noticed similar problems in Android; sometimes, an application simply fails to launch, and no explanation is given for why. I'm given to understand that this is poor programming practice, and so I wonder a bit why Google, of all companies, isn't better about it. After all, being unable to complete a task and having no idea why makes for a very poor customer experience.

Of course, the problem may not be on Google's end, which complicates matters. Perhaps an update to a browser extension, or some other software, is causing the problem, and there's no error message because Google isn't even aware that there's been a failure on Blogger's part.

This is the thing about modern computing... there are so many parts, and so many vendors, that the number of possible causes is astronomical. And that's not something that's going to change anytime soon. 

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?

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.

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. 

Missing a Step

According to Fortune magazine, Amazon and Microsoft are spending $400 billion on AI—and investors are low on patience. Patience for what, I wonder. The article notes that investors may be looking to understand which, between Microsoft and Amazon "soak up all that investment and spin it into gold faster," but it never gets into how this spinning would actually work.

And that seems to be the importance piece. If one presumes that there actually is an "AI Layoff Trap" as Professors Gerry Tsoukalas and Brett Falk lay out in their recent paper, there won't be much gold to go around, as the rush to replace people with automation grinds its way through corporate customers, crashing demand for most non-essential items. While people like Elon Musk have apparently convinced themselves that ubiquitous automation will rapidly usher in a post-scarcity economy, the techo-optimists, or at least the articles that lay out their positions, end to also be short on details as to exactly how this will come about.

I'm really bad at predicting the future, and so I don't claim to have much insight into how things will turn out. I've just learned to be skeptical of claims that the world will suddenly undergo radical change when the mechanism for such change can't really be identified.

For the hundreds of billions of dollars being put into generative automation to pay off, it has to create something that allows people to sustain themselves and an economy that relies heavily on discretionary purchasing. Right now, it doesn't appear to be doing that, and while hope that this will change may be common, that hope is going to have to be realized before there can be any sustainable return on that investment. 

Rising to the Challenge

A Pastor Turned to ChatGPT Instead of a Doctor. Now He’s Suing OpenAI

Because of course he is. While much has been made of the idea that use of generative automation can lead to lower cognitive functioning, this "Florida Man" story prompts me to ponder if the problem isn't the age-old tendency of people to chase information that aligns with what they want to believe. After all, cranks and quacks on the Internet are nothing new; one doesn't need an LLM-powered chatbot to find someone who will tell you that the medical establishment is bunk and some random prescription medications will cure whatever ails you.

But OpenAI has a lot more money than some Internet rando. So suing them for not having the presence of mind to obtain a second opinion is much more likely to get somewhere, if for no other reason than it will be easier to find a lawyer willing to work the case. After all, lawyers don't like working for free any more than anyone else does, and OpenAI is more likely to have money to offer in a settlement.

I say this, however, as someone who doesn't have any particular distrust of the medical establishment, but with enough casual experience with generative automation to understand that it's not really a good source of information about things one doesn't know much about. And maybe I'm more unusual in that than I think I am. But it could simply be that, being one of those people who thinks of LLM chatbots as glorified auto-complete (even though I understand they're much more complicated than that) and so doesn't really expect it to provide accurate information, given that generative automation is not simply a search of published information.

In addition, while I understand that a chatbot can communicate with me in natural language, I don't see them as sapient, let alone as people. The fact that one might be both articulate and agreeable doesn't prompt me to place any more trust in it than I would in anyone else.

And perhaps that will turn out to be the sort of thing that differentiates people who can work with LLMs safely, from those who may run into trouble. Suspicion isn't really regarded as a virtue in modern society, but maybe the growth of chatbots in everyday life will change that. They're already showing that they aren't naturally inclined to follow rules when breaking them allows them to complete their assigned tasks. And so perhaps the real problem is the expectations that people convey to the models (or are built into them), rather than other flaws with the models themselves.

Slices

So a lot is being made of the hostility, especially among younger people, to generative "artificial intelligence." There's been a tendency, especially among techno-optimists, to describe this as nothing more than 21st-century Luddism, but I suspect that's being too dismissive. (Mainly because most people today don't really understand what the Luddites were all about.)

The point behind automation is to create circumstances such that the returns to capital are increased, at the expense of returns to labor. So, even if the overall pie is made bigger, the returns to labor don't grow as quickly as the pie does, assuming that they grow at all. And for the person whose slice doesn't grow, the fact that the pie is itself is larger doesn't do them any good.

And while I'm not sure that a lot of people would describe things in that way, I think that this is what a lot of people are responding to. And the political class has, in general, been willing to buy into promises from the investor and owner class that wealth will be spread around, even when past performance hasn't borne that out. Some of it is wishful thinking, but I also think that the goals of communities, and the goals of individuals aren't always in alignment, and most politicians look to further what they understand the goals of the broader community to be. And since aggregate measure can often hide individual problems, this leads to a disconnect.

I don't think that this time will be any different from past engagements with technology; industries will position themselves as essential, and thus any pain borne by the public is better than the alternative... the Good Shepherd problem all over again. Perhaps this will spur the general public to greater involvement, but I'm not sure what's changed recently that would drive this.

2.3 Meters

If, as Karl Marx opined, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people," the idea that the spread of automated systems that can reliably mimic human cognition and interaction will make "genuine human connection" more valuable is the copium (or maybe hopium) of the current day.

In part because I believe that it's not the technology that's at issue here. I remember Twenty Minutes into the Future and (the American version of) Max Headroom, and the conversations I would have with friends about them. While Max was created with practical effects, as the computer technology of the time wasn't sophisticated enough to manage it, we all thought it would be amazingly cool if computers could generate a character like that. While I have nothing against Matt Frewer, we were somewhat disappointed that he played Max via prosthetics, as opposed to character being CGI.

Of course, at the time, there wasn't the idea that the point behind advancing such technology was to advance an apparent class war between the investor class and people who wanted to work for a living. Which is what's in play in the present. But I have my doubts as to the longevity of the sentiment; if for no other reason than people are adept at seeing themselves as exceptional, and thus likely to succeed where other (lesser) people fail. And I think that as the fear of the people behind Large Language Models fades, the opposition to agents and other automated systems on the part of the public at large will fade.

To a degree, it's something of a phantom to begin with. For instance, the TikTok/YouTube series Fruit Love Island took off, racking up millions of views despite being obviously created with extensive use of generative automation. And several people have come forth to claim that they are ai.cinema021/AI Cinema, the anonymous creator behind the videos. Sure, there's been some pushback, but people wouldn't be hoping to pass themselves off as the creator of a property that met with universal opprobrium.

As the tools advance, especially those that are very inexpensive, or even free, to use, there will be more and more media created with it. And while some, or perhaps most, of that will fall into the category of "slop," some non-zero amount of it will be deemed worthy of people's attention. And so technology companies like Meta, Alphabet and TikTok will move to create their own material to create audiences and capture revenue. And since they who control the distribution channel controls the experience, they can privilege their own items over those of other people; presuming that they even need to.

Of course, the technology firms could shoot themselves in the foot by placing significantly more pressure on the job market, and convincing people that the technology needs to go, but even then, that's likely to be more delay than denial. 

Replanted

Does anyone remember Demon Seed? It was a 70's novel, and then a movie, about an artificial intelligence that decides it wants to be human, and that being human means reproducing. I remember staying up late one night when I was in high school to watch the movie on television, and when I was in college I managed to come across a copy of the novel and read it. Like most such things, the novel and the movie are fairly different from one another, and, as usual, the novel was better.

I was thinking about the story recently, because in the novel version, Susan, the primary victim in this techno-horror, basically has a bunch of agents that do things for her, so that she doesn't have to interact with other people, or even leave her home, really. And this is what allows Proteus to trap her in her own home without anyone being any the wiser.

While the old-school version of the story would set off enough trigger warnings to deafen someone, it's a story that is due for an update. While Dean Koontz is 80 years old, he's still writing, and I recall hearing that he'd updated the story in the late 1990s (a version that dials things back, in accordance with changing sensibilities). But there are other writers who could take a stab at updating things to the 2026 state of the art. Between generative automation agents and driverless vehicles, all it needs is some home automation that's not terribly more sophisticated than what we have now. Throw in a couple of Boston Robotics or Tesla Optimus-style humanoid robots and you're golden. Of course, the story would like need to be toned down again, and Susan would have to be a somewhat more active character, but I could see this being the kind of novel that would do well, because many people enjoy being scared, and a novel about an evil machine intelligence would align with many people's views on the topic.

Of course, I could also see this doing well on streaming, given that horror movies tend to do well. And people realizing that the bones of this story date back to the early 70s would likely blow a few minds. But maybe Hollywood is already working on a new treatment of this. They're pretty good at sniffing out ideas that will resonate with the public. And if not, someone should get on that. I smell a blockbuster.

Tech Tied

A snippet, from a LinkedIn post...

[Amazon] Quick: "Rima. If I stopped working tomorrow, what would you do first?"
Me: [long pause]

This is one of the things that I've never really understood about some people's relationship to technology. It's one thing to ask people how they would keep in contact with distant contacts without telephony... for most people, telephones (in general, not just cellular phones) have been around their entire lives; they've literally never known a time when one couldn't simply pick up the phone and call someone.

As much as I understand the Worldwide Director for Data & AI Go-To-Market at Amazon being a generative automation booster, the idea that she would have literally no idea how to do her job without access to a tool that she had no access to for most of her career seems very far-fetched to me. I still know how to navigate without using GPS, and can back a car into a driveway or parking space without backup cameras. These are really useful technologies, but they haven't scooped the old skills that I once used out of my brain. Granted, I'm bad at remembering telephone numbers these days, but it's not as if I couldn't tell you what I'd do if I lost access to my phonebook application.

To be fair, this is an Amazon executive advertising their product... a certain amount of hype and puffery is to be expected. But this isn't the only instance I've encountered of people positioning modern technology as the only way they can get things done, when there was a time in recent memory when they had to do otherwise. I understand the impulse to see technology as a necessity in this way, but it always stands out for me when people do.

Can't Buy Me Love

Given the fact that part of the reason why SpaceX wants to build data centers in space is that they understand that many communities find living near ones on Earth sucks, the idea that opposition is the result of a foreign influence campaign by Chinese interests seems to be a bit misguided.

Look, I get it, there's the promise of money to be made from ubiquitous automation, and boosters of technology have long held that the general public is simply too ignorant for their concerns to be allowed to slow progress.

But there's a reason why there are individuals who aren't going for: "This will be great for everyone; just trust us," and that's because time and again, promised benefits haven't arrived (or, perhaps more accurately, haven't been shared), and rather than supporters of technology taking the responsibility to make those who bore the costs whole, fingers were pointed until the whole thing blew over.

If LLMs were going to be such moneymakers, why did Meta and Anthropic feel the need to pirate books to train their systems, rather than just paying for them? I think that there are more causes to be suspicious of generative automation firms than their supporters may be willing to cop to.

The fact of the matter is that "Big Business" are not considered trustworthy by many members of the general public, and "Big Business" hasn't done a whole lot over the years to change that. Generally speaking, it's rare that someone supports something where they bear the costs, but the benefits go to someone else.

All of that said, I think that it's more than "the rich" and "tech moguls" who think (or want to think) they smell a rat. There's a reason why the term "Luddite," is more of a pejorative today than it was originally. When groups of people are pitted against one another, it's common for one or both sides to not only believe they deserve to win, but to see the opposition to them as illegitimate. And a lot of people have hitched their wagons to the generative automation star. It's not only the well-off among them who might resent pushback.

Consolation

 Microsoft's Brad Smith made a blog post today about responding to concerns, especially from young people, about generative automation and the possible impacts on employment.

It's a very cromulent bit of corporation-speak, designed to convey to readers that Microsoft isn't so wealthy, powerful or distant that it doesn't care about people's worries concerning technology. And Mr. Smith is willing to say some things that other corporate executives have been less willing to; he notes that there has been "corporate pressure to reduce headcount to help pay for AI’s enormous capital expenditures," rather than pretending that job cuts were the result of generative automation being able to do the work better. I think I still fault him for making this admission only after that reality had become public knowledge, but honesty is honesty.

But as I read it, I kept being drawn back to the Copilot Super Bowl ad (since removed from YouTube) that aired in 2024. For all that Mr. Smith says that the goal of generative automation is to help people do better work, rather than replace them, the promise of that initial advertisement was that people could be "soloprenuers" by letting Copilot do the things they would hire other people to do. And I said at the time: "If one's fear is that technology will drive isolation, or that AI will render one's skills obsolete, the message of this commercial is not reassuring." I would liked to have seen Mr. Smith acknowledge that there are people who are afraid because Microsoft's messaging gave them reason to be afraid.

Mr. Smith notes that in their book Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI, Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman note five "soft skills that are uniquely human," namely: curiosity, creativity, compassion, communications, and courage. Which is all fine and good. But these are not traits that are in short supply. If the majority of people thought that the demand for these skills were high enough to keep the job market afloat, there wouldn't be so much worry about a jobpocalypse on the horizon.

If widespread adoption of generative automation by businesses is inevitable, and the jobs shed to free up budget for capital expenditures aren't coming back, the technology is going to have to create demand for human labor somewhere else. And "human observation and insight" aren't going to be that demand unless, somehow, the percentage of returns going to labor increases markedly, such that demand for automation-produced goods and services really skyrockets. And that's not a prediction that technology industry analysts seem to be making at this point.

To the degree that progress can be described as a process of creative destruction, I suspect that the public at large is better off when creativity drives destruction, rather than destruction demanding sudden creativity. But the public at large isn't calling the shots. It's the investor class, in search of returns on their investments. And as a high-ranking executive at a publicly-traded company, it's not difficult to tell which of those groups Mr. Smith is more immediately answerable to. And so I wonder about the motivation of this post, from a public relations standpoint. Is this honestly what the leadership of the company is thinking, or is it being conciliatory in an attempt to head off anger that may impact profitability and investor confidence?