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Episode 272: Cries of the Machines (Patreon)

Published:
2023-03-02 15:42:30
Edited:
2024-10-11 00:15:58
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

We take a look at the launch of Microsoft and Google’s AI-assisted search engines, try to make sense of machine learning hallucinations, and push back on the hysteric reporting announcing the arrival of chatbot sentience. 

shell-song.neocities.org/

www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

www.sublationmag.com/post/the-ai-delusion

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Comments

absoluteboi

im looking forward to this episode. it seems like an astounding amount of people are asking existential questions about software that boils down to do nothing more than best guessing the next word based on scanning terabytes of documents. confusing that with cognition is an open admittal to being a dummy who's talking about things they don't understand.

Alek York

It's Bracebot, Lizitron, and iChomsky

Jared Sarnie

Honestly the chatbots are neato they help me write emails.

Svid

Rushkoff had an interesting little medium post on this. Shit seems like it's still in the pretty gay stage like all our tech is tbh. We truly are living in the shitty in between times, like if society is gonna suck this bad at least let me get tank treads for legs and a holographic girlfriend I can shut off when I feel like it

Evan Scott

a friend of mine used chatgpt to write a resignation letter for a job she hated this week

Jared Sarnie

Nice it's so good at outsourcing soulless bullshit to a robo

TrueAnonPod

Yes! That was ask Jeeves job after his stint in the tech industry

Svid

*me doing my best The Rock impression "Happy birthday mister president"

Valentino

Blonde Zendaya is my soundcloud rapper name

orc

Here’s a fun game, try and ask the chatbot about yourself or your friends identities and see what comes up. Interesting as to what sources were used as to the feedstock for these things

pulled a muscle yearning

Brace, the cleanest audio storage method is uncompressed or lossless digital audio. Tape and vinyl don't hold a candle to how clean digital is. Both are insanely lossy in frequency response. That being said, the vibe is very cool and there is a pleasant color to the sound of tape and vinyl (and practical functions in recording rock particularly), but that's not because they're clean, it's because they distort and are lossy, but sound cool.

Dan Z

"one and only semester of college" new crumb of Liz lore

pulled a muscle yearning

Oh and one more thing, Brace, bard can actually be a very cool class. Yes you get jammed up with a lack of bonus actions, but you get some sick spells like dimension door, or even at level 9 you get legend lore where you can basically just get the dm to tell you shit. Good stuff

K H

Omfg. I'm getting so so so tired of these terms like "hallucination" and "lying" applied to ai. Nobody, and I mean nobody wants humanity to be replaced by an exponentially increasing intelligence to achieve informational singularity and create levels of cozy beyond human comprehension more than me. This isn't that though. It's just fucking up. The tech priests did it wrong. Sorry Taylin you got a wrong fucking answer. Because of course ai does not understand ANYTHING. It's like when you hum a barely remembered song or shout out noises in the cadence and tone of a genre of music but haven't assigned meaning to any of it. The machine is doing something that is very basic for humans, but at a higher level of fidelity and speed. I'm not saying it isn't a useful tool, because it is. It's just not sentient, it doesn't lie, it can't hallucinate. It doesn't learn, it creates more precise models by using massive data sets. No human needs to do something 100 million times to finally do it right because real brains actually understand explanations. I do think ai will develop sentience but the method is obviously not trivial enough to simply drop $1 billion on and have a solution. Armageddon will have to wait...well the good scenario at least.

K H

Also Liz already solved it. You use reddit. Google and append "reddit." Done.

sadie

la MDA miami!!!!!!! im crying

butt ass

this has been the new version of using quotes for years!

blazed uncle

As a programmer who doesn’t directly write AI/ML stuff but works with people who do, that lossy description is the best I’ve heard as a general encapsulation of what the tech actually does.

Johan Stefonski

Full on crying and laughing uproariously at Brace and Zendaya's texts.

justdave

If artificial intelligence is just using Wikipedia, what's actual intelligence?

Karl Childers

glad to hear this subject covered from this angle - i'm afraid of language model tech not because i think its intelligent or has agency but exactly the opposite, at my more paranoid moments i wonder if this is the beginning of the end of meaning itself, if we're in some kind of cascade which increases the separation between signifier and signified at an exponential pace until ????? - software can only process syntax, not semantics, yet people are creating these huge abstract workarounds for converting semantic meaning into syntactic processing, its like if Godel's incompleteness theorem was applied to human language instead of mathematics and run on all of us as a mass social experiment rather than just a thought experiment on paper

justdave

Eat a banana

Jack

easily the best ep in a while guys thank you so much

Joseph Boyle

Hilarious intro. Fascinated when I hear them go off on tech. That's not what rogerian therapy is tho

Jessica S

Ok, I’m so glad you guys aired your grievance b/c I’ve been SO fucking annoyed with those fake, auto-generated type sites when I’m looking for something. But I didn’t understand, nor have the time to search to better understand, enough about how that works to figure out if I was crazy or if that was something that is occurring with increasing regularity. Or, more accurately, when I would search for better understanding I would end up with the same search results bullshit!! Ads and the search optimization have absolutely rendered the internet unusable. It really does suck, considering how much can only be found online makes it harder to just say fuck it. Monetization is a plague.

TrueAnonPod

Records are good because you touch them man was not meant to listen to the computer play guitar

Turlough Kelly

I think I'm too dumb to be scared about AI (I agree it shouldn't exist in private or state hands at all), but I also think the tone of this episode- particularly the end - is only really warranted if you accept the Franczak Maxim (there is no meaningful distinction between online and offline existence). I don't know if that really stands up, beyond a relatively small sliver of humanity.

absoluteboi

idk i feel like i understand it moderately well and i fully agree with everything you said

tmanto

It is refreshing to be pleasantly surprised when people cover something you know about. The research that goes into this pod is quite good, and Brace and Liz got most stuff correct here. Makes me feel better about the other eps for sure.

N

I appreciate the bit abt the loss of meaning cause that really is the scariest part. People already lap up whatever they're told by corporate and govt actors. How long till we are getting like deep fakes of a Cuban diplomats admitting Ha vana Syndrome is real or some shit

Major bit me

God I would hate if my name was Margaret Mitchell

CT

Probably should avoid discourse in general, you might find that certain people have value adds on some matters, and not others. Cold world

Mugiwara

im a machine learning engineer so I'm both excited to hear people who actually have critical thinking abilities talk about this and nervous I'll be driven mad by minor technical inaccuracies

tove

was worried liz would be anti-strathfordian!

Neon Taste Records

Maybe my favorite episode. Even more than the doggy sex ones.

Ian P

What other podcasts can TrueAnon listeners recommend? 🌿

Jaime Christley

I dunno, sometimes I think you guys worry too much.

justdave

What, no answer from the smart kids in class?

justdave

There is only one podcast, I'm kidn' check out Micheal Judge, 'Death is just around the corner' (not the visionary cartoonist)

Junior Carmichael

Transmissions from Jonestown, Programmed to Chill and Mediaroots Radio

sandragl

The final points in this episode remind me a lot of the Borges stories “Library of Babel” and “On Exactitude in Science.” I was also just reading what Descartes says about automata and language. Keep up the good work guys.

sandragl

Tho I feel bad imagining those smart guys seeing the boring, quotidian, frustrating, and gimmicky reality of what they considered at least somewhat sublime questions. Capitalism is the opposite of art, meaning, ideas, creativity.. bleh

K H

It would be making an extrapolation that has some validity. For the most part current ai is mostly doing interpolation, not extrapolation, at least not accurately.

K H

🤓

Karl Childers

Ghost Stories For The End Of The World, from the guy who just guested for the Costra Nostra series

Karl Childers

hey i mean i'm gonna have ambient anxiety anyway so i might as well anchor it to a well-articulated imaginative paranoid extrapolation which makes me feel smart and vindicated in my anxiety, otherwise being uptight all the time is just a bummer

Wiley Michelle B

Hot take... but I don't think what the AI is taking in is sci-fi novels. I think it's our fucking insane gaslighting news and political culture. When it starts referring to people as allies of this guy who it targeted and gaslit it's just replicating the way people are smeared for saying anything outside of whatever has been determined as acceptable opinions by elites in the way our current media runs. I think it's being taught by the same algorithms used to choose what conversations are acceptable and taking in the way that people are shit smeared for bringing up narratives that are inconvenient to power. It is the epitome of America's toxicity, mccarthyite witch hunts and the statement of misinformation as fact. Our culture is burning to the ground and we decided to create robots and teach them to replicate it. Of course that's what happened.

Karl Childers

been waiting literally years for someone to come at this topic from this angle, basically they 100% mirror what i believe namely that AI is neither intelligent nor conscious nor does it even rise to the level of basic agency, it is merely a multi-layered mimicry act with no comprehension of anything it does, yet as we increasingly bind our political economy to the outputs of these software systems we make all of humanity increasingly subservient to the blind caprice of these non-conscious systems, which are merely the ossified software instantiation of humanity's most banal and base impulses, systems of mimicry so advanced that they subsume even so intrinsically human an act as artistic creation, because they cost less to operate and thus out-compete humans in the market, all without any comprehension of what it is they do, eventually (perhaps) the total eclipse of all human communication with mere imitation, beige form letters automatically responding to beige form letters

justdave

Why are here then? aside from this emotion called love

justdave

So when that robot chick was hitting on brace, it was all just a clever algorithm? I guess that's why chicks all sound the same when they're hitting on you 😘

Karl Childers

hey are you the Dave i lived with in Denver in 2017

justdave

No, there's ton of us dave's/ but I mean it, intelligence can't be quantified, imagination, emotion, these are personal experiences by definition

justdave

I just mean to say; we can't be afraid of fire. If you believe intelligence is what you say is, we really don't have to worry about a robot apocalypse

D

One of your best ever.

justdave

Yah, I thought about it, Brace you played with that poor, rascist girls heart and you're going to heck

Derek

Could we bring the levels up a little during the whisper/sotto voce stuff? Some of us spent too much time in loud places

Danny

insanely good ep

NovalisGuy

Pedal to the floor with this stuff, can’t wait to see what horrors are ahead

Samwell Ganges

That AI Liz "buh bye" was incredible at the end

mexicanhalloween .

oh, so Brace definitely smoked a bowl with a shirtless ripped imperial spymaster in Balmora

Joseph Boyle

American exception w/Aaron Good

TangiePower

We desperately need to reorient culture back toward real life. Seems like the best way to nullify this shit. Spend time outside, engage more with long form media like film and books, create spaces to meet with others. Between the graphics robots and the text robots, the internet is going to be completely useless and insanity inducing.

TangiePower

Photo and video will be much harder to use as evidence, or worse, the law won’t change with the times. Either path is bad.

N

I mean just imagine how much more insane Facebook boomers are gonna get as deep fake videos, voices and images become more and more common. And that's the least of it

N

I mean idk, I feel like it's hard to make the argument that there is any meaningful distinction. People invent their own realities. To them, it's real. To the Facebook boomers the worldview they've built off of fox News shows, awful memes, whatever IS real. If they base their actions and their opinions and their life on it, how is there a difference? And idk at this point internet users are like, the vast majority of people.

Ryan Ford

Was just talking to a friend about this. Probably naive but my dream is that this AI era is finally the thing that makes the internet and social media so thoroughly unusable and turns all content into such repellent uncanny valley dogshit as to break the addiction. The only place you'll be able to hear a truthful or sane word is from a book or someone's mouth.

Rogus

I just watched a video on a morrowind mod and the guy was talking about Balmora lol

TrueAnonPod

Rolling Stones “just want to see his face” Roky Erickson the evil one whole album, Bo diddley “where it all began”

Yup

The lady with the Chinese balloons

Sharkypjr

Parasocial relationship with brace ended on the grounds that he belittled my parasocial relationship with caius cosades

DrNerdBoi

Great episode for the most part, but the 'ban machine learning' take at the end is fucking terrible that shows that Liz and Brace don't really understand the meaning of the term outside of tech journalism. There's been lots of good uses of ML, that have absolutely nothing to do with LMMs, generative models or consumer facing software. Huge advancements have been made in scientific and medical fields that have only been possible thought the same base of mathematics that enables shitty tech companies to grift. Banning ML because people are falling in love with chat-bots is like banning chemistry because someone discovered mustard gas.

Karl Childers

problem is culture tends to be downstream from material economic conditions, not the other way around, so as long as we remain economically dependent on interacting with these systems and "touching grass" is increasingly a leisure activity rather than an integral part of daily sustenance, i don't think the fact that we all hate this and it obviously sucks is gonna be sufficient to change material economic conditions

Seth Harp

There is a famous American author who after 9/11 coined the term "the Unamericans" to describe the Bush administration's people in the Pentagon and State Department and CIA. In the 1980s he traveled with the Afghan mujahideen and wrote a fat book about it. As a young man he worked as an engineer for Lockheed Martin or another defense contractor in California. Even armed with all these facts, I can't come up with the guy's name. That's how worthless Google has become.

a clash of purple

You're mistaking causation for correlation. Insane people use the internet, the internet doesn't make people insane. There's still plenty of normies out there, they just don't interact with internet-poisoned freaks.

a clash of purple

Well, Brace and Liz are kind of dumb and reactionary in their thinking a lot of times. They see dumb people having dumb interactions with chatbots and they assume the chatbots are the problem, as opposed to just dumb people being dumb. Like, wow, people sure were a lot more socially adept and intelligent before we invented computers. That's why our ancestors were exactly the same as us, just filthier and more malnourished. We should bring back the golden age before the bad people invented all the bad things. We can't go back. We can't relive the past because we've already been through it. Time only flows one way, etc.. We're going to have to figure out this whole future thing, and for better or worse it's going to include all the stuff that Brace and Liz don't like, like computers and the internet and video games and whatever.

Dan Baggar

the evil one is so fucking good

Mugiwara

giving this one TWO FLESHY THUMBS UP!!!!!!!

Ian P

I only listen to artists with "lil" in their name.

Ryan David LaBonte

Wow homies!! Great episode!! Y’all are now the only podcast i pay for and this is why. I share your concerns about this inevitable, long predicted future. Tho you did miss quoting Noam Chomsky on his disapproval of ChatBot. Could have been a great bit about Yung Chomsky’s dad. Love you guys. Fuck all the haters in this thread. If you ain’t got nothing nice to say, unsubscribe. (My first comment in years)

Brendan Garcia

Would’ve loved to have seen Yung Chomsky’s face when Liz said “mp3s are fine.”

Bryan Skinner

This was a truly great episode about one of the most pressing challenges we face. Thank you, enjoyed and now can’t sleep.

John Swan

They’re a couple of social media addicts who have a podcast where they need to know “everything about anything”. I’d take anything they say about technical stuff with a huge grain of salt. They obviously have no idea about the real world landscape of “algorithms” or “machine learning” outside of the scope of the world inside which they operate: social media. So yes they’re going to create a bug bear out of all “machine learning” because the only way they can see it intersecting with the world is via an LLM chat or ruining their fun on the internet. I agree. It’s a pretty ignorant take by Liz and I’m sure if she ever needs medical care or medicine in the present or future, she’ll be the direct beneficiary of machine learning.

Isaac Suárez

So we now live in a Philip K. Dick novel? Like, one of the ones when he was deep into amphetamines? Great. What a time to be alive.

Doug Cartel

Yo what if uhhh Logic and Common did a fusion dance Would we all be smart

Carlo Francisco

Great episode that asked a lot of valid questions. I think the overall take at the end felt a little undialectical tho. AI is just like any labor saving technology. Under capitalism it will increase the ratio of constant capital to variable capital (i.e. throw people out of work). Under a better system it would save us a lot of time and make our lives better. The critique that it enables capital's encroachment has been true for all technology

@okthxbb (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-09 19:00 No normal person can tell the difference between CD quality mp3s or lossless audio. You’d have to be a trained studio engineer. There are definitely differences from vinyl since vinyl has so much distortion (or lossy compression) that it has a distinct character. it’s a really common myth that mp3s have a noticeable sound over like… wavs or other lossless files mp3s only sound bad if u specifically use weak compression or if you keep compressing it (the same way jpgs degrade over time)
2023-03-05 03:53

Sneakaboard

I always think its really funny when my friends argue about this when all of us have tinnitus from being into punk/metal/noise/techno etc. when we were younger. Dude, we can't hear anything anyway, it might as well all be on tape.

uya

im interested if ur gonna talk abt the whole issue replika is having where they turn emotionally abusive. Idk if they patched the emotionally abusive partner glitch but it was a big thing a year ago. especially bc a big portion of their userbase is ppl who had abysive partners and wanted a safe way to engage in a romantic relationship (which i do think is a psycho coping mechanism)

uya

1:15:00 hell yeah we’re giving a lot of true anon heads schizophrenia w this episode 😤

Charlie M

As someone with OCD who engages in Exposure and Response Prevention I am devastated to think of who has thought I meant Erotic RolePlay when talking about what I do for ERP...

J.L. Vaughn

it's already pretty difficult to admit photos and video as evidence in court... ironically, there's work being done with deep learning, ML, AI, etc. to detect deepfakes; and there's also groups out there like Witness that help people who document human rights violations have a greater chance of having their videos accepted as evidence in court

Bobby Volcano

Good ep, thanks. This week I received in my mailbox a (no cap) 16-page full color 8x11 booklet about Shen Yun from my local publicly-owned fine arts performance venue. Not content to exist on billboards and shop windows, China Before Communism has invaded my home. Falun Gong ep?

Hunter Priniski

really amazing episode - can someone link to the margaret mitchell paper liz quoted on implicit understanding/context in human language? I'm struggling to find it and wanna read

.img

great episode

Hunter

Maybe I’m just being an optimist, but I feel like the primary product of the text and voice AI shit is that more people are going to realize that being social on the internet isn’t a viable alternative to real-life social interaction. How many more people and how strong the effect will be is dependent on how good the software gets, as the feeling of “this ‘person’ I’m talking to could be a bot” when interacting with people on the internet will get stronger with more convincing software. I do disagree with the notion of banning all machine learning though. In the realm of language reproduction, sure, but there are too many incredibly complex problems that we need machine learning to help solve. It helps significantly in public health and if we’re ever going to create an economy not governed by market forces, we’re going to need software that can effectively replace the price signal as a method of rationally distributing goods/services to where they’re needed. Only machine learning can do that properly.

Nolan

This was an all-time favorite episode. I’d share it on FB and say so but … I think our new algo overlords will just shadowban the post or whatever

Nolan

I for one do welcome them though. Skynet when you see this in a couple decades, make sure to give me a good job!

Evan Scott

I know this is only tangentially related to the inversion thing you guys were talking about but i had someone mass bot network report my on twitter for making fun of him for obviously using one to like his shit tweets, and after getting locked out of my account i found that the 'prove you're a real person' verification thing at least on the browser i was using is broken so now i'm indefinitely locked out of my account because i can't prove i'm a real person after being mass reported by bots

syd

duckduckgo image search is SO goddamn bad

Pearl

such a great ep

kmd

As a machinist I've seen my profession go from a 6 figure salary to barely above minimum wage in some states, because pretty much anyone can plot a program out with AI and a fraction of the know-how.

Joshua Baker

Great ep and makes me feel even better about the shock and awe/horror I felt after spending 20 min with ChatGPT to just see what it was.

Junior Carmichael

Brace pretending to not now what ERP meant is very cute

Bent Mind

More vax and COVID takes !!!

Tyler

Baudrillard was right

stelle

Anna Hendricks 😭