Comment by mavsman
6 hours ago
To me, this quote just about sums it up:
> The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product.
As someone who has been well aware of this mechanism for quite some time, I still feel icky anytime I re-read the details of it.
What a time to be alive.
People think they're interacting with an "intelligence," when actually they're just getting a maximally optimized Weizenbaum feed. We're living through the sloppification of the human mind.
See e.g., https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-chatbots-are-beco...
Could you define (or link) to what "Weizenbaum feed" means/references? Too obscure for me but I'm interested. Thanks.
Likely a reference to ELIZA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
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humorously, my regular iPhone on a residential home network failed the cloudflare AI bot detection and i can’t read that article
People don't believe me that Cloudflare blocks more humans than bots. They see in the dashboard "number of bots blocked" and it's like their brain turns off.
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What's the old quote from WW2?
Something like that.
Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this "scam"/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.
Being highly convinving is one of the things on that list.
Nobody is denying that it's effective. They're denying intelligence
A programming contest has a problem where given N < 10000, do something hard like come up with the number of primes less than N
You can come up with all sorts of algorithms that do intelligent things. But the most effective solution is to use metaprogramming to make a massive switch statement that contains all the answers
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It was Berlin and not Tokyo, I believe. Germany kept producing newsreels until the very end. Many of them are now on Youtube, a very interesting watch on how to frame things positively.
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Wow, that quote goes hard.
I’m reminded that almost no one beyond a select few knew high up in the military and around the emperor knew how badly the Japanese were defeated at Midway.
Paternalistic. Arrogant. Shameful. And deeply engrained in the Japanese cultural zeitgeist (of the early-mid 20th century).
Edit: I guess it’s commonly attributed to a German citizen, but their cultures mirrored each other. Fascism falling under the weight of its own propaganda.
Or both, you know. An intelligence that also spies on you
Why is it so black and white?
How are you so dumb at this point in the game? It’s not “intelligent”…
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Whenever I say something like “that’s a cool feature, but to do it you would have to build spyware”, everyone else is just like “the cat is out of the bag ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. (I don’t build spyware, or work on projects that do).
It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons. People see these collaborators from different wars and regimes and think “I’d stand up against the bad guy”… well I’ve got news for you if you build spyware, you are not the person you think you are.
This is the best retort to the bag-escaping cat ever:
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...
"Nothing is worse to the demise of a society, than people who want to convince you that the cat is out of the bag and will not go back in, while the cat is being violently shook out of the bag at the same time."
A great quote, thank you for sharing. It captures much of the five stages of denial (summarized below) in a much pithier form.
There's nothing in the bag.
The cat will never get out of the bag.
It wouldn't be a problem if the cat was out of the bag.
We cannot possibly keep the cat in the bag.
Putting the cat back in the bag is not worth trying.
Motion to start a political platform for cats in bags. Our message is simple: Put the cat in the bag. Keep the cat in the bag.
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No, the greatest is from the Sweet Smell of Success: "The cat's in the bag. And the bag's in the river."
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> It’s a real tragedy of the commons
Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.
We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.
Turns out the entities you control / regulate less, tend to do things that are less in your interest and more in their own.
The government has few uses for total surveillance, and almost all are obviously bad. Private enterprise has a million uses, most of them various degree of bad, but as a society we've been blind to this kind of badness for many decades now - for at least as long as lying in the face of your fellow humans and trying to hurt them materially has been considered a respectable profession.
Well, currently the free market is the government, while the nominal government is something less powerful than that.
Well, some people care and some don't. The people who care don't get to work on the technology.
I'm pretty unhappy with this, but are ChatGPT or Facebook really "the commons"?
They're each in different grey areas that were previously the commons.
Facebook didn't invent "talking to friends" or "showing adverts", but made itself "the place" hard enough most of the advertisers and most of the people intermediate through it.
OpenAI didn't invent "asking questions and recieving answers", not even "from an agent who knows which sites to search on your behalf"; but it is competent enough that I might have it read 50 times as many pages in a day as I myself would have read, and the sites' owners don't get real eyeballs looking at ads during this. (In my case, adblock even if I did it manually; but apply this massive increase in page hits to everyone who has their LLM research stuff).
I think the internet in general is a commons and I should be able to browse it without being spied on.
There should be general standards for what individual apps and websites should be allowed to do. There should be an expectation that the purpose of an app is what it does, i.e. a social connection app shouldn’t be an ad platform that suffers users insofar as they provide useful data to sell to advertisers.
Common people work there and built the tools. At any point, they could have chosen not to. Or told the boss guy it wasn't plausible. At the end of the day, we're choosing and building the world we're in, while also loudly complaining about what we choose to do.
Blaming a corporation takes away all the agency the workforce has.
I think any free platform with a billion people on it is, de facto, a commons. It would be great if we as a society acknowledged this and had come up with some better means of stewardship because the status quo is obviously heinous, but we've been happy to hand over absolute control of public discourse to a few trillion dollar tech companies.
> It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons.
When I ask people about things like this, I hear a lot of "If I don't build it, someone else will"
My goal isn't just to refuse to build this stuff, it is actively to resist the people who are.
I don't have much influence though
Your issue is you are defining spyware too broadly. This is not spying on users, but rather 2 companies partnering and sharing data to result in either a better ads system or better understanding on how ads are performing. This is a positive value to society and the commons. Wasting space in a site or app with an ad that won't convert is the true tragedy of the commons. It's a waste of time and money for all parties involved.
Can't you see? We're just trying to build a better cigarette! Flavored to your specific tastes! You'll thank us, you'll see!
No ad has ever converted me yet the ad networks keep showing me ads.
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A lot of the Meta/Google folks jumped ship to Openai/Anthropic. This kind of work is expected
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