Flutterby™! From 2025-12-01 to 2025-12-08

Thanks, Google AI, that's helpful.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

How long until we see J1772 plugs in our houses? My car charger can boil water really fast (YouTube video). Dude gets a UK 240v 3k watt tea kettle, and, with a side track into Saudi Arabia's electrical code and NEMA junction boxes, and various different liquid volume measurements, uses a car charger...

With a diversion into putting 6kW into a 1.5kW tea kettle...

[ related topics: Movies Automobiles Video Real Estate ]

Darrell Owens: The Fire Department vs. Traffic Safety Advocates

A firefighter sympathetic to the fire officials argued to me that traffic calming slowed the fire department’s ability to respond to fires. But firefighters and EMT affiliates spend far more time collecting bodies from car accidents enabled by car-oriented road design than they do fighting structural fires. Between 2010 and 2022, structural fires in Berkeley injured an average of 2 people per year, while between just 2017 and 2022, traffic accidents injured or killed an average of 694 people annually. (Report here). This is proportionally true of most cities in the United States. This month, a cyclist was hit and killed on one of the streets fire officials want to keep free of street festivals.

[ related topics: Bay Area Law Enforcement Automobiles Pyrotechnics Graphic Design ]

Oh, fucking charming, Homebrew has somehow destroyed my PGVector install, so my Postgres database is now unusable.

Have I mentioned in the last 15 minutes how much I hate this miserable excuse for a platform?

[ related topics: Open Source Databases ]

Fired up Firefox to retrieve an old password, and it's claiming that a one-off password used only for Facebook was part of a breach on September 30, 2023?

I've changed it, but I'd expect that'd have gotten more press than it apparently did, can't find anything on such an incident...

Sensing a pattern here, Google...

[ related topics: Photography ]

OMG, Google, I fucking hate you.

(Ctrl-G quits the current operation in Emacs, to have that suddenly be toggling Gemini is about the most obnoxious thing that could possibly occur.)

[ related topics: Photography ]

Installed VLC on my phone because I finally got fed up with what Google has been doing to the Android music player that's become YouTube Music, and holy shit what a revelation it was to have a tool that does what I want it to do, and isn't just a big funnel to get me to pay more money.

[ related topics: Music Currency ]

Republican mayor in Kansas facing deportation over voter fraud

A recent profile of Ceballos, written by Roy Wenzl for The Wichita Eagle, revealed that the 54- year-old did not understand that as a Mexican immigrant, he was not eligible to vote in U.S. elections, which he has been doing since 1991. Ceballos also said he “probably” voted for Kobach and President Donald Trump multiple times, because he instinctively chooses the candidates with an “R” next to their name while voting.

Kansas mayor charged with alleged voter fraud; state leader says ‘hundreds’ more cases expected

The point in that latter article is made that even though this is a handful state-wide, in this case it was an election in a town of 2,653, where a vote or two can swing the results.

[ related topics: Law Current Events Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

GOP lawmaker turns heads with odd fundraising pitch about furries

Rep. Tom Barrett (R-MI) sent out a bizarre fundraising call to action for his supporters on Friday, headlined, "the furries are coming for me."

"I'd heard of furries, but to be honest, I didn't think they were real. Then one filed to run against me for Congress," stated the email. "Samuel Smeltzer, whose furry name is Elyon Badger, announced he's running against me, in costume, on a far left progressive platform."

‪Elyon113‬ ‪@elyon113.bsky.social‬ noted:

This is going from the dumbest, to the funniest timeline so fucking fast. 😂😂😂

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Heinlein Sports ]

noé ‪@celechii.itch.io‬

last week i remembered that macOS lets you set your own icons and that *I* have the power to delegitimize the professionalism of the software that runs on my machine, so here's a thread of the 16 new icons i've made so far

i really forgot how fun it was to just sit down and make art for myself :')

As I said on my re... what the fuck are they on BlueSky, skeets? ... of this thread: This entire thread is absolutely beautiful, and I'm torn between "Fuck MacOS, I don't want to put any energy into it" and "my Mac could look so much better" (even though, functionally, it so lags Linux... except for Logic Pro).

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering Art & Culture Macintosh ]

Quinn Rhodes on Genderbent: Loving masculinity when men are in crisis

Figuring all of this out – slowly accepting that I do not have to feel guilty for how good it felt to be a man – was my masculinity crisis. In some ways, the wider quote-unquote “crisis of masculinity” is eerily similar.

Quinn Rhodes (he/him) @onqueerstreet@mastodon.social noted:

@girlonthenet I want to clarify that I wasn't tying to make this all about me, more to express that I get where the 'men are trash' sentiment comes from, because we let men like this define what it is to be a man, and that version of masculinity *is* trash.

Woooh! 8 out of 10 on today's Rule34dle!

https://rule34dle.vercel.app/

Since it's December, I can note this: I don't want a lot for Christmas...

Abolish parking minimums and upzone those brownfields, let's get some shit built!

Mx Amber Alex (she/it) @amberage@eldritch.cafe

The key words "AND MAKE IT FAST", "ABSOLUTELY NOT", and "LISTEN HERE YOU LITTLE SHIT" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

Osma Suominen @osma@sigmoid.social

@amberage The key words "MUST (BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T)", "SHOULD CONSIDER", "REALLY SHOULD NOT", "OUGHT TO", "WOULD PROBABLY", "MAY WISH TO", "COULD", "POSSIBLE", and "MIGHT" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 6919.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6919.html

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

Retro computer folks: where an I most likely to pass on a TI 99-4a to someone who will appreciate it?

Google Discover is testing AI-generated headlines and they aren't good. Whoever could have guessed?

For instance, one rewritten headline claimed "Steam Machine price revealed," but the Ars Technica article's actual headline was "Valve's Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one." No costs have been shared yet for the hardware, either in that post or elsewhere from Valve. In our own explorations, Engadget staff also found that Discover was providing original headlines accompanied by AI-generated summaries. In both cases, the content is tagged as "Generated with AI, which can make mistakes." But it sure would be nice if the company just didn't use AI at all in this situation and thus avoided the mistakes entirely.

Via @researchbuzz.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Artificial Intelligence ]

annaf @annaf@climatejustice.social

What I want to say to these AI guys is, ok you could create an existential threat, so what? We've already got nuclear weapons, war, climate change, ecosystem destruction, and you're adding another one. It proves that the super rich (mostly white, mostly men) are so stupid they will create things that can destroy themselves and everyone else just to look big. If that's the pinnacle of technological genius in your view, then we're done. So do what you want, I will slow hand clap you on our way to extinction. #AI #Extinction

[ related topics: Interactive Drama History Guns Artificial Intelligence Race Global Warming hubris ]

A Decade Long Study Shows Cycling Helps Older Adults Live Longer Healthier Lives

If you’re looking for yet another reason to hop on your bicycle today— especially if you’re in your 60s or beyond—new research out of Japan has delivered a big one. A 10-year study from the University of Tsukuba has found that older adults who cycle regularly aren’t just feeling better day-to-day—they’re actually living longer and avoiding long-term care at significantly higher rates.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Theater & Plays Television Sports Education Pedal Power Bicycling Model Building ]

Business Insider: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending trillions on AI data centers will pay off at today's infrastructure costs.

"It's my view that there's no way you're going to get a return on that, because $8 trillion of capex means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest," he said.

That article is pulling from the podcast portion of The Verge: IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says there is no AI bubble after all, which from the text sounds like he's happily pushing the quantum computing bubble.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Long COVID takes $1 trillion global economic toll each year, analysis suggests

A brief communication published last week in NPJ Primary Care Respiratory Medicine outlines the substantial economic burden of long COVID worldwide, estimating that persistent symptoms after COVID infection cost the global economy roughly $1 trillion each year, or roughly 1% of global gross domestic product.

Via.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Economics ]

Oh, hey, a business model for AI: Anthropic: AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits

Going beyond retrospective analysis, we evaluated both Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5 in simulation against 2,849 recently deployed contracts without any known vulnerabilities. Both agents uncovered two novel zero-day vulnerabilities and produced exploits worth $3,694, with GPT-5 doing so at an API cost of $3,476.

Via Metafilter.

So assuming the API cost isn't a loss leader (hahahaha), the benchmark is over the period of 2020 to 2025, we have a model for AI ROI...

[ related topics: Currency Artificial Intelligence ]

Among the things that surprised me in today's Timdle, the Suez Canal opening, and the US crossing 300M residents.

https://www.timdle.com/daily

Kohler Can Access Data and Pictures from Toilet Camera It Describes as “End-to-End Encrypted”

Claimed end-to-end privacy doesn’t fully conceal your rear-end data

Via.

[ related topics: Photography Privacy Cryptography ]

Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas. The source I got this from, @jenniferplusplus@hachyder m.io said "what's that popping sound", but it also sounds a lot like the layered capabilities aren't much of a draw:

The sales figures suggest enterprises aren’t yet willing to pay premium prices for these AI agent tools. And Microsoft’s Copilot itself has faced a brand preference challenge: Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft salespeople were having trouble selling Copilot to enterprises because many employees prefer ChatGPT instead. The drugmaker Amgen reportedly bought Copilot software for 20,000 staffers only for them to ignore it in favor of OpenAI’s chatbot.

This is also interesting, because I have this general vibe that OpenAI is getting its ass kicked by Google.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]

From the creators of Oglaf, though this one is mostly SFW, some notes on owning a pony. For the horse-y people in my feed.... https://www.patreon.com/posts/pony-club-144777978

My VLC wrapped for 2026: Top artist was "Unknown Artist", top album was "Unknown Album".

Single top track was "Vocal Warmup 2.mp3".

[ related topics: Music Art & Culture ]

I've been seeing the posts about RAM, and not quite understanding what was up (especially given that "DDR" will always mean "Dance, Dance, Revolution" to me), but allison @aparrish@friend.camp noted

you know i'd never stopped to consider how annoying tulip mania must have been for folks who just wanted to grow a few pretty flowers in their front garden

about Ars Technica: After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers

The surprise announcement from Micron follows a period of rapidly escalating memory prices, as we reported in November. A typical 32GB DDR5 RAM kit that cost around $82 in August now sells for about $310, and higher-capacity kits have seen even steeper increases.

Yikes, especially since 32G seems to be the absolute minimum for a computer these days...

Edit: Pivot to AI weighs in.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Flowers Gardening ]

Darkness fell, like a cliche in a room full of poetry majors.

Interesting both for work, and for thinking about environments and platforms like Emacs: Jack Rusher at Strange Loop 2022: Stop Writing Dead Programs.

I found a taker for the TI99-4a that came into my life, but in pondering the joy of the BASIC environment I was reminded of a lot of the Seymour Papert and Alan Kay ideas that made their way into this talk, about how a great environment isn't just about being able to inspect the state at a given place, but to play with it and let it continue.

My primary environment these days has been XCode, and the problems with Apple's direction on software process are well documented, but as conditional breakpoints are apparently broken and it's harder to change values than it was with CodeView or SoftICE back in the day, I've been pondering this even at my level.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Nature and environment Software Engineering Writing Work, productivity and environment ]

Ars Technica: In comedy of errors, men accused of wiping gov databases turned to an AI tool

US DOJ: Two Virginia Men Arrested for Conspiring to Destroy Government Databases.

The indictment:

16. On February 18, 2025, at approximately 4:58 p.m., MUNEEB AKHTER issued commands that deleted a DHS production database containing U.S. government information. The database was hosted on a Company-1 server in the Eastern District of Virginia.
17. On February 18, 2025, at approximately 4:59 p.m., MUNEEB AKHTER asked an artificial intelligence tool, “how do i clear system logs from SQL servers after deleting databases.”
18. On February 18, 2025, at approximately 5:14 p.m., SOHAIB AKHTER stated aloud, “They’re gonna probably raid this place,” to which MUNEEB AKHTER replied, “I'll clean this shit up.” SOHAIB AKHTER responded, “We also gotta clean stuff up from the other house, man.”

[ related topics: moron Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Artificial Intelligence Databases Real Estate ]

We are taking care of the neighbor's cat, which means he gets lots and lots of scritches.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Sagebrush Repair: Buying a good laptop. Not a new laptop, a good one. Notes on used business laptops.

Via David Gerard.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

lyra's epic blog: SVG Filters - Clickjacking 2.0. In which someone sets out to recreate Apple's "Liquid Glass" interface for the web, and ends up discovering a whole new class of iframe exploits.

Via

[ related topics: Apple Computer Weblogs tolkien Invention and Design ]

The COVID vaccines are good for you: JAMA: COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults Aged 18 to 59 Years in France

Via.

Æ. @aesthr@wandering.shop

Last week in a seminar we discussed a text that was largely about sexual violence, including mass rape during war. Heavy stuff.

One student admitted they had not read the text but worked off a ChatGPT summary.

They had no idea the text was about sexual violence. ChatGPT withheld that information.

This wasn’t just a minor error nor a typical LLM hallucination.

About a third of the text, arguably its most important part, went completely ignored because it didn’t match OpenAI’s content policies

[ related topics: Sexual Culture History ]

This is fascinating to me because the calculus (and, indeed, the linear algebra) I was taught was so much drudgery and remembering rules, and it took other means to build a better intuitive feel for what was actually happening.

Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org

Found this article thanks to a Reddit comment. Every day or so there's someone asking in math reddits what "dy/dx" means or why there's a "dx" in the integral notation, and then an army of people come out of the woodwork to push the orthodoxy of limits like some stockholm syndrome prisoners... And a small number of people point out that nonstandard analysis is actually a real thing and works... Anyway, back before I was born Sullivan did an actual experiment on teaching

The paper is The Teaching of Elementary Calculus Using the Nonstandard Analysis Approach Kathleen Sullivan (Wayback Machine link) from The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 83, No. 5 (May, 1976), pp. 370-375

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2318657

[ related topics: Mathematics ]

LinkPro: eBPF rootkit analysis

LinkPro targets GNU/Linux systems and is developed in Golang. The Synacktiv CSIRT names it LinkPro in reference to the symbol defining its main module: github.com/link-pro/link-client. The GitHub account link-pro has no public repositories or contributions. LinkPro uses eBPF technology to only activate upon receiving a "magic packet", and to conceal itself on the compromised system.

(eBPF is the "extended Berkeley Packet Filter")

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Bay Area Clowns ]

Interesting: SkoBots — A Wearable Language Revitalization Robot for Indigenous Languages

Which I found via dylan @dylan@dair-community.social's note:

Speaking of data collection, a detail I always look for in projects like this is the data: where does it come from? Who benefits from it? Who decides how it's used? I can't find specific info on their methods, but I think their stated principles are spot-on:

"We will never own recordings, we will never publish them, we will never profit off of them. It will always be up to the discretion of the communities we work with and we always defer to them."

[ related topics: Robotics Work, productivity and environment Community ]

Chuck Wendig — Vital Cat Update

It’s time to talk about my cat. To which you might be saying, “Chuck, I didn’t know you had a cat!” and I’d respond with, “I didn’t know I had a cat either.” But Google — the preeminent search engine! — knows otherwise, courtesy of its wonderful, never-ever- inaccurate “AI Overview,” which is totally not a piece of shit that just makes up information willy-fucking-nilly.

[ related topics: Machinery Artificial Intelligence ]

Wired: AI slop is ruining Reddit for everyone draws extensively from a friend who was okay with using their Reddit name, but was quoted anonymously.

[ related topics: Quotes Artificial Intelligence ]

Valerie Roney @vlrny@disabled.social

A friend, while having an existential meltdown, just said:

"I think I'm grieving for the future."

And dayum! That pretty much sums up all the feels rather poetically, eh?

[ related topics: Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Masonry: Things You Won’t Need A Library For Anymore is an article on the excesses of CSS, or a good rundown of all of the things you don't need JavaScript or other hacks (wacky-ass background images) for, or that can now be laid out more cleanly in CSS and HTML.

[ related topics: Language Books ]

I am getting more and more pissed off at Apple: Wi-Fi settings "Copy Password" does not appear to be working, and I can't find another way to see it.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Work, productivity and environment ]

Ben Werdmuller's Friday links included notes about the New Public Local Lab announcement of their community engagement platform Roundabout. In the sign-up form they ask you to write a bit about how and why you'd like to bring their platform into your community, and I wrote the following:

I have been chronically online since the '80s, started an ISP in the '90s to expand my online community and cross that with my in-person community, and sociology grad students call me up to chat about being one of the early bloggers (still am). Over the years I've participated in various community email lists.

I accidentally helped found Petaluma Urban Chat (urbanchat.org), a 501c3 which works to educate and advocate on housing to meet community needs, alternatives to car mobility, sustainable municipal finance, all in the face of needing to adapt to climate change.

I'm even a Nextdoor lead, though I mostly ignore those duties, because...

I *hate* that I'm enriching Nextdoor through trying to bring some sanity to their horrific engagement bait. My reasonable neighbors have fled their platform.

I used to believe that online created fantastic communities, which is why I worked to bring the physical world online, but discovered that mostly I just was one of many people whose work destroyed those online communities.

So these days in my spare time (yes, I'm employed) working on building real-world physical communities, but I see a need for better communication, for better neighborhood level organizing, and, despite all of the evidence and experience to the contrary still believe that it may be possible to use online tools to do such things.

And the few Signal groups that are forming up don't seem up to the task.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Automobiles Community Real Estate Global Warming ]

I always thought this was the hallucination of stoners: Scientists reveal why red wine gives you the worst hangovers

A team of scientists at the University of California discovered that there is a nutrient called ‘quercitin’ in red wine that actually stops your body from processing alcohol.

UCLA Health: Research suggests quercetin linked to red wine headaches

UC Davis: The Conversation: Why Does Red Wine Cause Headaches? — UC Davis Research Points to Compound Found in Grapes' Skin

Inhibition of ALDH2 by quercetin glucuronide suggests a new hypothesis to explain red wine headaches

Endogenous and exogenous mediators of quercetin bioavailability.

[ related topics: Weblogs Health Nature and environment Invention and Design Current Events Wines and Spirits California Culture Education ]

Shann on Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

Using ethics but only recreationally.

[ related topics: Ethics ]

Your regular reminder that businesses run loyalty programs because they make more money with them, consumers use loyalty programs because they're willing to trade privacy for being made more money from.

So privacy has negative market value.

[ related topics: Privacy Consumerism and advertising Currency Economics ]

That this is the sole suggested reaction pic, that shows up when I think I'm trying to send a photo, says something about Android messages.

(And if I could totally turn off reaction pics, I would, because I do not want to send this message by accident.)

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Interactive Drama Photography Robotics Television Embedded Devices ]

Wow, the Alan Dye hatred is big on the inkernets: Spyglass: Live and Let Dye (Via)

[ related topics: Apple Computer User Interface Theater & Plays ]

I ran across links to this article, Financial Times: Insurers retreat from AI cover as risk of multibillion-dollar claims mounts, about AIG, Great American, and WR Berkley backing away from AI coverage, but it's paywalled, so I went searching for the headline, and it's interesting how this current media push is being spun, with a week before that stories about startup insurers stepping in to cover risks that the major companies don't want to touch: Insurance companies are trying to avoid big payouts by making AI safer

“We’re in an era now where the losses are really here and happening; that’s one thing. The second thing is that insurers are now actually starting to exclude AI from their existing policies,” Dattani said. “So it feels pretty certain that we’re going to need some solution here, and we need people with skin in the game who can provide third- party oversight. That’s where we see the role of insurance.”

Ernst & Young: How can responsible AI bridge the gap between investment and impact?

Almost every company in our survey (99%) reported financial losses from AI- related risks, and 64% experienced losses exceeding US$1 million. On average, the financial loss to companies that have experienced risks is conservatively estimated at US$4.4 million.1 That’s an estimated total loss of US$4.3 billion across the 975 respondents in our sample.

And now traditional insurers stepping back: Major Insurers Want Out of AI Coverage as 'Black Box' Risk Grows:

The industry has good reason to be spooked. Google's AI Overview falsely accused a solar company of legal troubles earlier this year, triggering a $110 million lawsuit. Air Canada got stuck honoring a discount its chatbot completely invented after a customer took the airline to small claims court. Most dramatically, fraudsters used a digitally cloned executive to steal $25 million from London engineering firm Arup during what appeared to be a legitimate video conference.

[ related topics: Games Aviation moron Law Current Events Journalism and Media Currency Artificial Intelligence Video Conferences Economics Real Estate Photovoltaics ]

AskMeFi question about Duck Duck Go results shows the summary for the Wikipedia result, that I've replicated, as:

Williot Swedberg is a Swedish footballer who plays for Celta Vigo and the Sweden national team. He started his career at Hammarby IF and was named one of the best young talents in 2004 by The Guardian.

What Wikipedia actually says is:

In October 2021, Swedberg was named as one of the 60 best young talents in world football born in 2004, by the English newspaper The Guardian.

[Emphasis mine]

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ gives the same bogosity, so this is probably something that's crept in from Bing. https://www.startpage.com/ gives a shorter summary.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Journalism and Media Television Sports ]

CNN: What the heck is going on at Apple?. Talking about the recent exodus and possible departure of Tim Cook:

The changes come as critics say Apple, once a tech leader, is behind in the next big wave: artificial intelligence. For one of the world’s most valuable tech companies, a change in leadership could mean a change in how it conceives, designs and creates products used around the world every single day.

Ondřej Surý @ondrej@sury.org observes:

@briankrebs Yeah, we need more "falling behind" from Apple, not less :). I am happy that Apple did not jump on the FOMO bandwagon.

My uneducated guess is that they have a lot of telemetry from their devices and they probably see how many people did disable the use of LLMs on their devices.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Food ]

Whoah: Houston Chronicle: A mysterious Texas surveillance network told police to search his truck. Watch how it went wrong. Texas cops making up bullshit excuses for traffic stops in order to try to frame people is hardly news. Doing so on the basis of WhatsApp chats using information from sooper s3kr1t information centers allegedly doing behavior analysis is next level creepy.

Formed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, fusion centers are federally recognized, state-run intelligence-gathering hubs where police from local, state and federal organizations team up to gather and distribute intelligence. Texas boasts eight of the secretive facilities, more than any other state. In court filings, Bexar County said the Schott intelligence came from “the Laredo Fusion Center” — a location not on any official list.

[ related topics: Movies broadband Current Events Law Enforcement Machinery ]

Norway did the math: Arm Ukraine to win, or pay double when Russia does.

The report arrives as a direct challenge to the Trump administration’s 28-point peace plan, which the authors argue misreads what is required for a stable Ukraine and Europe. A Russian partial victory would force Europe into a massive rearmament program to deter further aggression, amounting to €1.2-1.6 trillion over a four-year period. Equipping Ukraine to win would cost €522-838 billion over the same period—roughly half of that amount.

Europe's choice Military and economic scenarios for the War in Ukraine Corisk Report Series No 12, 2025 November 2025

DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.29662.70725

[ related topics: Software Engineering History Mathematics Economics ]

This video clip of a Tesla Optimus humanoid robot knocking over a bunch of water bottles and falling over, apparently as its operator removes their headset before shutting the robot down in a stable state, is giving me the giggles.

[ related topics: Robotics Video ]

Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence Myra Cheng, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Sunny Yu, Dyllan Han, Dan Jurafsky

However, participants rated sycophantic responses as higher quality, trusted the sycophantic AI model more, and were more willing to use it again. This suggests that people are drawn to AI that unquestioningly validate, even as that validation risks eroding their judgment and reducing their inclination toward prosocial behavior. These preferences create perverse incentives both for people to increasingly rely on sycophantic AI models and for AI model training to favor sycophancy.

Via

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]