The sum of some human knowledge. Wikipedia is strongly west-biased in its content, and more explicitly anglo-biased. There's loads of information it hasn't even an inkling of.

Note: this is not Wikipedia's fault. I'm just addressing the "all human knowledge" thing that people keep using when describing Wikipedia. It's not.

Primary sources are unreliable too. Ask, say, Dole about its history of killing workers who strike for more money...

A very scary number of people do.

In Summer 2024 I was in Canada visiting family. On the way I stopped by Whistler and went up with my SO in the ... whatever you call those suspended car things on wires that take you up mountains. (Too lazy to look it up.) A bunch of people in their '20s were asking ChatGPT about things to do in Ottawa (apparently their next stop) and calling out the things that ht was recommending.

I recognized about 1/3 of the named restaurants, specifically, as places that had closed. But these people were asking ChatGPT about them and thus getting hallucinated information.

The problem is conflating a technical term "Artificial Intelligence" which is a specific field of study that is just incredibly poorly named (the name came about from aspirational beliefs of the early founders of the field) with what common conversation views as artificial intelligence.

In a very technical sense of topical taxonomy it is correct to call LLMs "Artificial Intelligence".

In any other use of language, calling LLMs Artificial Intelligence is falling for a scam.

ChatGPT didn't get the information somewhere. This is because ChatGPT doesn't have "information" in the first place. ChatGPT has a large database of sentence structures, in effect. And it follows random paths through that to make its output. And somewhere in its language structures it has "5%" near "fees" and happened to use that this time.

Yes. Feigning incomprehension of a hateful joke or statement and forcing them to come out and say it is a powerful technique for putting bigots and their ilk on their back feet.

And if you can then deliver a haymaker that's extra-satisfying!

Oh that's easy! I just ensure I have no emotions to harm!

<< >>

Ironically copyrighting the prompt is legally sound. The prompt is the only work of human creation in the process.

The output of the prompt should not be protected by copyright, though.

That was covered by the court's generation of more images using the same model and prompt. A poem is an entire work. It is the art work. If you type the poem twice you get the same poem:

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偏见蒙眼盲
无知恨中华
若知龙之美
悔恨泪满颊


  

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偏见蒙眼盲
无知恨中华
若知龙之美
悔恨泪满颊

  

See?

But if I write the same prompt into, say, Perplexity twice watch what happens: "Write me a jueju in Classical Chinese that criticises people who use AI slop and call it art. Make sure that the contrast point is in place. Then translate that jueju into English, focusing more on the poetic qualities than literal translation."

First run:

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## 绝句：讥AI伪艺

画屏新巧出机声，  
点墨无魂似鬼行。  
人手一挥真意在，  
虚光何敢唤丹青。

### English Poetic Translation

On screens, new wonders birthed by code appear,  
Yet soulless strokes drift ghostlike, insincere.  
A human hand—one gesture, spirit shown;  
How dare mere light call itself art alone?

  

Second run:

 undefined

    
**绝句**

画意千年笔下生，  
今朝机器乱涂成。  
人心未动空称艺，  
一片虚声满世鸣。

**English Translation**

For ages, art was born from living hands—  
Now, soulless engines smear the canvas dry.  
No heart has stirred, yet “art” is what they claim;  
Empty applause, a hollow world’s reply.

  

There's barely any resemblance between the two poems, despite the prompt being identical. And here's the thing: that prompt is approximately the same size as the poem. Could you get a very precise poem output that's a direct match for exactly what you intend to communicate? Maybe. (I personally doubt it, but I'm not going to come out and say it's not possible.) If you can, though, create a prompt that generates poems that are all very close to each other I suspect it's a lot more work than, you know, just writing a fucking poem would be.

Personally I think this is a really good acid test that the judges devised to decide how much "human input" there was in the work to see if it qualifies as "art". Kudos to them!

P.S. I upvoted you to counter the downvotes. You're a victim of a campaign and I'm feeling in a generous mood today after a nice long weekend.

Heard from whom? How much of the money? Which questionable people? Vaguebook much?

They, like most western institutions, don't accept any currency I have access to nor any payment medium I can use.

So, no.

Would I?

Yes. Every time I see some political/corporate whack job take potshots at Wikipedia with threats or with calls to brigade it, I would give up something in my monthly mad money spending and put it on Wikipedia. It's not a perfect institution by a long shot, but it's faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar better than any institution filled with political whack jobs.

I thought of two more things I don't "get" the hype of over my long weekend.

1. Scotch. I don't get it. I honestly don't understand the appeal. To me it has approximately the same flavour profile as Listerine. I love me some bourbon. I don't mind rye. (I haven't tried Irish yet, but from what people tell me I'll probably enjoy it.) I take on challenging liquors from all around the world and enjoy them: Aquavit, Ouzo, Akpeteshie, Baijiu (in almost all of its bewildering and challenging forms including the dreaded Maotai), Mezcal, Cashew Feni and so on. But Scotch just leaves me cold with an impression of something between Buckley's Mixture and, as mentioned, Listerine.
2. Video games. There's a few video games I enjoyed back in the day: Super Mario Bros. Joust. Defender. Ms. Pacman. And when I'd worked up the nerve, Sinistar. (Still the most terrifying game I've ever played.) Later on on the PS I enjoyed Bushido Blade and ... I think it was call Crash Team Racing? Something like that? So it's not as if I hate video games. I just honestly don't get how they can be "addictive"; how they can be someone's entire life.

Vinyl gives you better dynamic and frequency range than CDs. Like if you play Genesis' "The Firth of Fifth" on CD there's a segment that sounds like the bass is being run through some extreme distortion effect. It isn't. It's just being played at an extremely low frequency that the CD can't properly catch, so you're getting distortion artifacts from it. Playing the same passage on vinyl, however, assuming you have equipment that isn't low-end trash, and assuming you have decent amplifiers (note the plural) in the loop, and are playing them out of good speakers, will give you an undistorted bass note so low that you can barely make it out ... if you're young. (People my age can't hear it at all.) But whether you hear it or not you will feel it echoing through your chest cavity.

But that right there is the problem. Count the costs. You'll need an upper-middle-end turntable to start with. Then you'll need an equivalent grade pre-amp. Then you'll want a power amp that's even better (because the switching noise of a lesser power amp will be very audible with a sustained, loud bass note that low). And you'll want speakers that can actually reproduce that frequency at all. (Most can't.) So you're talking low thousands of dollars of kit minimum. To hear about 15 seconds of a single song in all its glory.

That's a bit stupid.

And that's over and above the problems you've already state: that note will play gloriously perfectly on the second playing (the first playing will be slicing away some of the artifacts of vinyl production first). Then you'll get ... maybe a dozen plays of good quality bass that you will feel more than hear deep inside of you. And then it starts going away.

Thousands of dollars. To hear 15 seconds of a single song. Maybe a dozen times.

I mean sure, I guess, if you've got the thousands of dollars to blow, and are willing to constantly buy and buy and buy the same album over and over again, you be you, but I personally have much better stuff to spend my money on. (Like actual musical instruments.)

Oh, and if you're buying vinyl to play on a turntable that puts the audio out on Bluetooth for Bluetooth-enabled speakers? Just burn your money. It's a better use of it.

My SO has long rants about blockchain and the people who think it is useful. My own, completely non-technical, criticism is "so you're saying privacy is enhanced by putting every transaction ever onto a permanent, unalterable public ledger?"

I use nothing but handmade soaps. My main soap is Aleppo soap (from Syria) with a backup soap that's a goat milk soap (from Xinjiang). I occasionally splurge and get some "sugar soap" from Thailand.

Bacon is a subset of pork belly. I love pork belly. But there's so many more ways to prepare it than curing it and optionally smoking it. Indeed my favourite way of eating it involves steaming it.

As for the marketing campaign, like the de Beers campaign, it dates back a lot farther than people think today. The beginnings of baconmania traces back to the 1920s. One of the pioneers of PR directed a campaign that included finding 5000 doctors willing to say that a "heavy" breakfast was healthy for you and that bacon and eggs were a perfect breakfast food. This was then presented in media as "scientific consensus" and thus began the age of bacon for breakfast.

That's how things stood until the 1960s. Bacon and eggs was a standard breakfast food. Pork sales were doing well, and pork bellies were a nice piece of extra income. But then the reputation for red meat started to slide. By the '70s all red meats started to slide, and the added anti-fat movement cause pork sales to tank across the board. Various pork marketing boards started making deals with fast food restaurants to push bacon as a way to boost pork bellies at least. They partnered with restaurants to create recipes that involved bacon as a "versatile ingredients" instead of just breakfast food. Bacon on salads. Bacon on sandwiches. Bacon here, bacon there. And with this, paired with, naturally, a whole lot of money poured into marketing (costs split down the middle with the partnered restaurants) the beginnings of baconmania started.

By the mid-80s, with the establishment of the National Pork Board, baconmania truly took hold as said board pushed pork in all its forms (anybody remember "The Other White Meat"?) both as a "lean" alternative to beef and shoving bacon into anything imaginable (chocolate cookies, say) as some kind of "flavour treat". This marketing campaign started to ramp up just in time for the arrival of public Internet and thus were the seeds planted for the bacon insanity today.

Baconmania is a cynically manipulated set of marketing campaigns that dates back a hundred years and is going strong, rivalling "A Diamond is Forever" for effectiveness and endurance.

I've played music for fun pretty much from my childhood and while now the nature of the fun is different, it is still fun and about as much fun as it used to be. (The secret in my case is to pick up new musical instruments along the way and rediscover the fun in new ways.)

It took me almost three years to work up the nerve to get past the smell and try it.

Now the smell is something I look for because I know something really good is right behind it.

Are you an ambi-turner?