#automated support

[raccoonfink]

pro tip

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI can’t do your job

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can't do your job:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/amid-job-cuts-doge-accelerates-rollout-of-ai-tool-to-automate-government

If you pay attention to the hype, you'd think that all the action on "AI" (an incoherent grab-bag of only marginally related technologies) was in generating text and images. Man, is that ever wrong. The AI hype machine could put every commercial illustrator alive on the breadline and the savings wouldn't pay the kombucha budget for the million-dollar-a-year techies who oversaw Dall-E's training run. The commercial market for automated email summaries is likewise infinitesimal.

The fact that CEOs overestimate the size of this market is easy to understand, since "CEO" is the most laptop job of all laptop jobs. Having a chatbot summarize the boss's email is the 2025 equivalent of the 2000s gag about the boss whose secretary printed out the boss's email and put it in his in-tray so he could go over it with a red pen and then dictate his reply.

The smart AI money is long on "decision support," whereby a statistical inference engine suggests to a human being what decision they should make. There's bots that are supposed to diagnose tumors, bots that are supposed to make neutral bail and parole decisions, bots that are supposed to evaluate student essays, resumes and loan applications.

The narrative around these bots is that they are there to help humans. In this story, the hospital buys a radiology bot that offers a second opinion to the human radiologist. If they disagree, the human radiologist takes another look. In this tale, AI is a way for hospitals to make fewer mistakes by spending more money. An AI assisted radiologist is less productive (because they re-run some x-rays to resolve disagreements with the bot) but more accurate.

In automation theory jargon, this radiologist is a "centaur" – a human head grafted onto the tireless, ever-vigilant body of a robot

Of course, no one who invests in an AI company expects this to happen. Instead, they want reverse-centaurs: a human who acts as an assistant to a robot. The real pitch to hospital is, "Fire all but one of your radiologists and then put that poor bastard to work reviewing the judgments our robot makes at machine scale."

No one seriously thinks that the reverse-centaur radiologist will be able to maintain perfect vigilance over long shifts of supervising automated process that rarely go wrong, but when they do, the error must be caught:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

The role of this "human in the loop" isn't to prevent errors. That human's is there to be blamed for errors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/#is-also-a-human-in-the-loop

The human is there to be a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

The human is there to be an "accountability sink":

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

But they're not there to be radiologists.

This is bad enough when we're talking about radiology, but it's even worse in government contexts, where the bots are deciding who gets Medicare, who gets food stamps, who gets VA benefits, who gets a visa, who gets indicted, who gets bail, and who gets parole.

That's because statistical inference is intrinsically conservative: an AI predicts the future by looking at its data about the past, and when that prediction is also an automated decision, fed to a Chaplinesque reverse-centaur trying to keep pace with a torrent of machine judgments, the prediction becomes a directive, and thus a self-fulfilling prophecy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

By firing skilled human workers and replacing them with spicy autocomplete, Musk is assuming his final form as both the kind of boss who can be conned into replacing you with a defective chatbot and as the fast-talking sales rep who cons your boss. Musk is transforming key government functions into high-speed error-generating machines whose human minders are only the payroll to take the fall for the coming tsunami of robot fuckups.

This is the equivalent to filling the American government's walls with asbestos, turning agencies into hazmat zones that we can't touch without causing thousands to sicken and die:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#dirty-data

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

Image: Krd (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DASA_01.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

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Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[ovaryacted]

Randomly ranting about AI.

The thing that’s so fucking frustrating to me when it comes to chat ai bots and the amount of people that use those platforms for whatever godamn reason, whether it be to engage with the bots or make them, is that they’ll complain that reading/creating fanfic is cringe or they don’t like reader-inserts or roleplaying with others in fandom spaces. Yet the very bots they’re using are mimicking the same methods they complain about as a base to create spaces for people to interact with characters they like. Where do you think the bots learned to respond like that? Why do you think you have to “train” AI to tailor responses you’re more inclined to like? It’s actively ripping off of your creativity and ideas, even if you don’t write, you are taking control of the scenario you want to reenact, the same things writers do in general.

Some people literally take ideas that you find from fics online, word for word bar for bar, taking from individuals who have the capacity to think with their brains and imagination, and they’ll put it into the damn ai summary, and then put it on a separate platform for others so they can rummage through mediocre responses that lack human emotion and sensuality. Not only are the chat bots a problem, AI being in writing software and platforms too are another thing. AI shouldn’t be anywhere near the arts, because ultimately all it does is copy and mimic other people’s creations under the guise of creating content for consumption. There’s nothing appealing or original or interesting about what AI does, but with how quickly people are getting used to being forced to used AI because it’s being put into everything we use and do, people don’t care enough to do the labor of reading and researching on their own, it’s all through ChatGPT and that’s intentional.

I shouldn’t have to manually turn off AI learning software on my phone or laptop or any device I use, and they make it difficult to do so. I shouldn’t have to code my own damn things just to avoid using it. Like when you really sit down and think about how much AI is in our day to day life especially when you compare the different of the frequency of AI usage from 2 years ago to now, it’s actually ridiculous how we can’t escape it, and it’s only causing more problems.

People’s attention spans are deteriorating, their capacity to come up with original ideas and to be invested in storytelling is going down the drain along with their media literacy. It hurts more than anything cause we really didn’t have to go into this direction in society, but of course rich people are more inclined to make sure everybody on the planet are mindless robots and take whatever mechanical slop is fucking thrown at them while repressing everything that has to deal with creativity and passion and human expression.

The frequency of AI and the fact that it’s literally everywhere and you can’t escape it is a symptom of late stage capitalism and ties to the rise of fascism as the corporations/individuals who create, manage, and distribute these AI systems could care less about the harmful biases that are fed into these systems. They also don’t care about the fact that the data centers that hold this technology need so much water and energy to manage it it’s ruining our ecosystems and speeding up climate change that will have us experience climate disasters like with what’s happening in Los Angeles as it burns.

I pray for the downfall and complete shutdown of all ai chat bot apps and websites. It’s not worth it, and the fact that there’s so many people using it without realizing the damage it’s causing it’s so frustrating.

[spacedocmom]

29/01/2025 Doctor Beverly Crusher @SpaceDocMom Incoming Transmission…

If you happen to find yourself mutating into a lizard or having unexpected lizard babies - be it while stationary or at Warp 10 - that's something you can come to me about for complete care and to know all of your options. No judgement, just support. emojis: black heart, blue heart, masked, spoon, lizard

[drdougdouglass]

The only dangerous criminals invading Los Angeles, causing violence are Kristi Noem and I.C.E. .

We're all praying she and Cricket are reunited very soon.

[stjohnstarling]

Several years later, Facebook has been overrun by AI-generated spam and outright scams. Many of the “people” engaging with this content are bots who themselves spam the platform. Porn and nonconsensual imagery is easy to find on Facebook and Instagram. We have reported endlessly on the proliferation of paid advertisements for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, and ads for electricians and roofers who appear to be soliciting potential customers with sex work. Its own verified influencers have their bodies regularly stolen by “AI influencers” in the service of promoting OnlyFans pages also full of stolen content. …

Experts I spoke to who once had great insight into how Facebook makes its decisions say that they no longer know what is happening at the platform … “I believe we're in a time of experimentation where platforms are willing to gamble and roll the dice and say, ‘How little content moderation can we get away with?,'” Sarah T. Roberts, a UCLA professor and author of Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, told me.

Very good and troubling article. If Meta - one of the richest companies in the world - is giving up on moderation, what does it mean for the dying, cash-strapped website we’re all on?

[abathurofficial]

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[cosmogyros]

Me, logging onto ReverbNation and seeing this: "Uh-huh. Sure. I know how these music-promotion websites work. I somehow doubt this is as impressive as it sounds..."

I click "View My Chart Rank" and see...

...so I'm the top of the charts for the "Americana" genre, in Berlin. A genre-and-location combo in which there are apparently only two artists competing. What did I tell you?

/laughs in jaded, world-weary indie music artist

[skeletalheartattack]

i haven't played minecraft in years, but with the armadillo winning the vote, i think about how wolves don't really have much going on in terms of their utility. like anytime i tame a wolf, i end up just kinda keeping them sitting at home.

i think if mojang really does feel like wolves are deserving of armour, with the addition of armadillos, they really need to update wolves to be more useful as companion mobs, because personally... i never feel the urge to bring a wolf with me when im going out to do things, especially if it involves combat.

like, what do dogs do best? fetching stuff and digging, right? like i wish that i could just mill about with a wolf and they track a scent or something and start digging into the dirt and then proceed to bring you that item. like it could range from rarely digging up iron nuggets to digging up vegetables or whatever, yknow. combine the fetching stuff with combat and you wouldn't have to manually pick up stray arrows or items from mobs your wolf kills.

the only other thing i wish you could do with wolves is automate their health in some way, like give more utility to the bowl item so you can place it down for them to eat from so you don't have to constantly manage their health by looking at their tail. just minor quality of life stuff i guess.

idk, that's just my thoughts. i do like wolves in minecraft, they just feel rather lacking with the way some new mobs have so much going on, like the sniffer and allay and so on.

[mohaiminul978]

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[mfcl3780cdw]

i would like to apologize to every grumpy old person that i (internally) accused of being afraid of change because they didn't want to blindly jump onto the next half-baked tech trend

i get it now

[rotisseriesrevenge]

man wdym this wasnt some fucked up dream

me getting up today and checking my phone and seeing not even an automated email from staff

[blaze-art]

Me: Oh boy! I can't wait to roleplay on this blog I have spent so much time setting up! All the thought and care that went into-

Tumblr: Bitch you thought! Get deleted motherfucker!

Me: WHAT?! Why?

Tumblr: Spam :)

Me: What about it said to you it was spam?! Ok ok, fine, I've sent a repeal, now give me my blog back.

Tumblr: ...

Me: Tumblr it's been two days where the fuck is my blog?

[sparrowdigit]

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[taraxippos]

Companies using """"""""AI"""""""" chatbots in place of customer service (usually with a veneer of pretending you are actually speaking to a real person, which might not be so immediately obvious to more tech illiterate people) pisses me off so bad because they are just SO fundamentally useless. The only information it can tell you is information more efficiently communicated with a FAQ page, and information that is Wrong because current chatbot technology is, in fact, not even slightly 'intelligent' and pretty damn bad at giving accurate answers to anything but the simplest questions.

Like there's no point to it besides hoping onto the flashy artificial 'intelligence' gimmick and paying for less customer service work hours, and so many companies will not only have this feature but make their actual customer service prohibitively difficult to find (and usually involving a labyrinth of automated phone menu systems that you have to navigate correctly in order to get to a person). Makes me want to kill.