#Google's Bard

[lenbryant]

Bard Writes A Sonnet For The Occasion

I asked Google's Bard A.I. to write a sonnet about King Charles III's coronation. Here is the result:

Me: Please write a sonnet about King Charles III and his coronation.

Bard: Sure, here is a sonnet about King Charles III and his coronation:

A new king ascends the throne today,

A new era begins for all the land.

He is young and strong, and full of grace,

A beacon of hope for all to stand.

He will lead us through these troubled times,

And guide us to a brighter future.

He will be a just and fair ruler,

And he will always put the people first.

We are lucky to have him as our king,

And we should all pledge our loyalty.

He will be a great king, and he will make us proud.

Long live King Charles III!

[tutorialinhindi]

Google introduces 'Bard,' its AI chatbot powered by AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This experimental conversational AI tool, based on Google's LaMDA technology, aims to provide accurate responses to user queries. Currently in testing with select users, it's set to become widely available after the trial phase.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The “3,000,000 truck drivers” who were supposedly at risk from self-driving tech are a mirage. The US Standard Occupational Survey conflates “truck drivers” with “driver/sales workers.” “Trucker” also includes delivery drivers and anyone else operating a heavy-goods vehicle.

The truckers who were supposedly at risk from self-driving cars were long-haul freight drivers, a minuscule minority among truck drivers. The theory was that we could replace 16-wheelers with autonomous vehicles who traveled the interstates in their own dedicated, walled-off lanes, communicating vehicle to vehicle to maintain following distance. The technical term for this arrangement is “a shitty train.”

What’s more, long-haul drivers do a bunch of tasks that self-driving systems couldn’t replace: “checking vehicles, following safety procedures, inspecting loads, maintaining logs, and securing cargo.”

But again, even if you could replace all the long-haul truckers with robots, it wouldn’t justify the sky-high valuations that self-driving car companies attained during the bubble. Long-haul truckers are among the most exploited, lowest paid workers in America. Transferring their wages to their bosses would only attain a modest increase in profits, even as it immiserated some of America’s worst-treated workers.

But the twin lies of self-driving truck — that these were on the horizon, and that they would replace 3,000,000 workers — were lucrative lies. They were the story that drove billions in investment and sky-high valuations for any company with “self-driving” in its name.

For the founders and investors who cashed out before the bubble popped, the fact that none of this was true wasn’t important. For them, the goal of successful self-driving cars was secondary. The primary objective was to convince so many people that self-driving cars were inevitable that anyone involved in the process could become a centimillionaire or even a billionaire.

- Google's AI Hype Circle: We have to do Bard because everyone else is doing AI; everyone else is doing AI because we're doing Bard.

[everyones-least-favorite-bard]

so ive succumbed-

[anewp0tat0]

I am so passed April fools cause life hard and busy but I hope we're still in a silly mood ;;v;;

(very belated) April Black Butler Animo Black Arts Magazine- Ciel Dies.

I really needed to participate in this months mag for 2 reasons, 1) because I missed doing last months mag even though the prompt that I had pitched since day 1 of me joining (wild west) was finally selected... and I didn't even get to participate. so I'm bummed. and 2) because I actually also am mostly responsible for conceiving this prompt and I am proud of myself(as well as everyone else who participated hahaaa) for having an idea. so yes.

I also got to do the cover this time.

[jermasquirma]

I asked Google’s Bard AI for some classic Jerma catchphrases

[nixcraft]

Are you a content creator or a blog author who generates unique, high-quality content for a living? Have you noticed that generative AI platforms like OpenAI or CCBot use your content to train their algorithms without your consent? Don’t worry! You can block these AI crawlers from accessing your website or blog by using the robots.txt file.

Web developers must know how to add OpenAI, Google, and Common Crawl to your robots.txt to block (more like politely ask) generative AI from stealing content and profiting from it.

-> Read more: How to block AI Crawler Bots using robots.txt file

[melyzard]

Time for a new edition of my ongoing vendetta against Google fuckery!

Hey friends, did you know that Google is now using Google docs to train it's AI, whether you like it or not? (link goes to: zdnet.com, July 5, 2023). Oh and on Monday, Google updated it's privacy policy to say that it can train it's two AI (Bard and Cloud AI) on any data it scrapes from it's users, period. (link goes to: The Verge, 5 July 2023). Here is Digital Trends also mentioning this new policy change (link goes to: Digital Trends, 5 July 2023). There are a lot more, these are just the most succinct articles that might explain what's happening.

FURTHER REASONS GOOGLE AND GOOGLE CHROME SUCK TODAY:

Stop using Google Analytics, warns Sweden’s privacy watchdog, as it issues over $1M in fines (link goes to: TechCrunch, 3 July 2023) [TLDR: google got caught exporting european users' data to the US to be 'processed' by 'US government surveillance,' which is HELLA ILLEGAL. I'm not going into the Five Eyes, Fourteen Eyes, etc agreements, but you should read up on those to understand why the 'US government surveillance' people might ask Google to do this for countries that are not apart of the various Eyes agreements - and before anyone jumps in with "the US sucks!" YES but they are 100% not the only government buying foreign citizens' data, this is just the one the Swedes caught. Today.]

PwC Australia ties Google to tax leak scandal (link goes to: Reuters, 5 July 2023). [TLDR: a Russian accounting firm slipped Google "confidential information about the start date of a new tax law leaked from Australian government tax briefings." Gosh, why would Google want to spy on governments about tax laws? Can't think of any reason they would want to be able to clean house/change policy/update their user agreement to get around new restrictions before those restrictions or fines hit. Can you?

SO - here is a very detailed list of browsers, updated on 28 June, 2023 on slant.com, that are NOT based on Google Chrome (note: any browser that says 'Chromium-based' is just Google wearing a party mask. It means that Google AND that other party has access to all your data). This is an excellent list that shows pros and cons for each browser, including who the creator is and what kinds of policies they have (for example, one con for Pale Moon is that the creator doesn't like and thinks all websites should be hostile to Tor).

[divorcedwife]

i thought this would be an easy question to answer? is this information really not available... sad

[macmanx]

According to a forthcoming report from The Authors Guild, the median income for a full-time writer last year was $23,000. And writers' incomes declined by 42% between 2009 and 2019.

The advent of text-based generative AI applications like GPT-4 and Bard, that scrape the Web for authors' content without permission or compensation and then use it to produce new content in response to users' prompts, is giving writers across the country even more cause for worry.

"There's no urgent need for AI to write a novel," said Alexander Chee, the bestselling author of novels like Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night. "The only people who might need that are the people who object to paying writers what they're worth."

[annerbhp]

I asked google bard for fanfic reccomendations and one of your fics turned up lol

You know what's been amusing (horrifying) me about all this AI stuff lately is just how wrong it all is? Which, if it was all just wrong, it would be a funny failed experiment. But it's even worse. On the surface it gets just enough right to lend it some false sort of legitimacy, but I have never once seen any AI answer a question where it gets everything right. There is always one big error or many big errors. And it's one of the scariest things about AI produced "knowledge" because there is nothing here that tells us about it's certainty of the various "facts" it is providing. These answers put solid facts right next to complete misinformation. It places information from peer-reviewed sources right next to internet rumor and group-think conspiracy theories. So what skills do we, the average reading and knowledge seeker, need to be able to engage with technology like this in a way that can counter this harm? Especially because I know this sort of thing isn't going to go anywhere? I'm pretty sure it's here to stay.

Like, let's be real. I couldn't give less of a crap that google bard clearly has no idea what my fic is about. That's not the point. My ego will survive perfectly fine. But what if people start turning to AI for real knowledge that will influence and form truths for people around real issues in the world? What happens if these sites are where people go for knowledge?

Let's look at some silly examples that we can easily fact check, just to get a sense of how wrong all this stuff can be.

I went to chatgpt and asked it "tell me about the fanfiction author Annerb". This is what it spewed out:

"Annerb is a pseudonym used by a fanfiction author known for writing in the Harry Potter fandom. While the author's real name is not publicly known, Annerb has gained a significant following for her imaginative and well-written stories.

Annerb is particularly well-known for her epic fanfiction series, "The Changeling," which follows the character of Harry Potter as he discovers he is actually a changeling - a child of the Fae. The series spans over 1.5 million words and is known for its intricate plot, rich world-building, and well-developed characters.

In addition to "The Changeling," Annerb has written several other popular fanfictions, including "Ghosts of the Past," "The Debt of Time," and "The Sum of Their Parts." Her writing style is often praised for its attention to detail, strong character development, and engaging storytelling.

Annerb has also been involved in the fanfiction community as a beta reader, offering feedback and assistance to other writers. Despite her popularity, Annerb remains relatively private and has not revealed much about her personal life or identity."

It's like that old game two truths and a lie here. Or more like one truth and ten lies and five misunderstandings. Hope all those other hardworking authors don't mind that I've stolen credit for all their fics! (I regenerated it a few times, and it claimed I wrote for fandoms I've never even seen the source material for.)

Or how about this one. I asked it "What is wangxian?" (one of my latest otps.)

"Wangxian is a term that refers to a fictional romantic relationship between two male characters named Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian in the novel "Mo Dao Zu Shi" by Chinese author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. The novel was later adapted into a popular Chinese animated series and live-action television series.

The term "wangxian" is a combination of the two characters' names, with "wang" being a part of Lan Wangji's name and "xian" being a part of Wei Wuxian's name. Fans of the series often use the term to refer to the romantic relationship between the two characters.

It is important to note that while the relationship between Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian is depicted as romantic in some adaptations of the novel, including the animated series, it is not explicitly stated as such in the original novel."

First two paragraphs? Not so bad. Pretty accurate for the most part. That third paragraph? Really fascinating that it's even there and also completely factually incorrect. While the live-action tv show never explicitly states that it is a romantic relationship thanks to censorship, the original novel includes multiple explicit sex scenes between the two characters and they also end up married? Like, actually married? So why is this "important to note"? Why does the so-called "legitimacy" of the ship even factor in? Is this just a scraped up reflection of discourse? Or at worst, a reflection of larger biases reflected in internet "knowledge"?

I know you probably sent me that screencap just as a fun mention of my fic popping up somewhere, for which I thank you. It was nice of you to think of me.

At the same time, these are the things I just can't help thinking about as truth becomes even harder to see day by day. Walk carefully, my friends.

[daz4i]

OKAY I'M DONE!!!!!!

this isn't every single character bc some i have a very shaky grasp on so i just skipped them

for some. i had a funny/angsty idea for an aspect and then went with it (for example: kouyou with light). there might be a better option but i like this one

i mostly used one blog for reference bc it has very convenient lists, but i tried to cross check with others as well jic

if you disagree with my takes that's perfectly fine 👍 i will admit i'm no expert on classpects lol and i encourage you to make your own post of this sort, if you'd like :)

if you wanna make art/fics/anything else inspired by any of these...... please tag me in it.......👀👉👈

that being said. here's my list of bsd classpects:

armed detective agency:

atsushi: page of breath

dazai: seer of void 

ranpo: heir of light

yosano: witch of life

kunikida: mage of time

kyouka: knight of space

kenji: sylph of hope

tanizaki: prince of mind

mafia:

akutagawa: maid of doom

chuuya: heir of blood

mori: rogue of life

kouyou: bard of light

higuchi: mage of heart

kajii: witch of mind

q: page of hope

odasaku: knight of space

decay of angels:

fyodor: bard of mind

nikolai: rogue of breath

sigma: page of blood

bram: mage of life

fukuchi: heir of time

chosen guild members bc i'm too lazy for everyone and idk enough about them:

francis: sylph of blood

poe: mage of mind

lucy: maid of space

hunting dogs:

tachihara: mage of blood

teruko: prince of life

jouno: sylph of rage

tecchou: heir of hope

others:

ango: maid of void

aya: witch of time

mushitarou: rogue of heart

bro the ada is the only one who has a chance of surviving this session fr

also if you're already here have some things that made me feel like i galaxy brained big time:

already posted abt it but, kyouka and odasaku being the same classpect (i knew i want them both to be space bc i thought it fit them and their vibe and patience. but then knight ended up being the best class option too. so)

jouno and tecchou being opposing aspects

^in turn, tecchou being the same aspect as kenji

kunikida and aya being the same aspect, and aya ending up a class that's considered "the same but stronger and more chaotic" than kunikida's

mori being a life player :) he's a doctor after all :)))) (tbh his personality fits a thief way more, but thieves are selfish while rogues work for the benefit of others. and i think that's a core thing about him. so!)

i had the doa trio's classpects locked and loaded in my brain for months now. i actually only made this list so i have an excuse to talk about them. i will not budge on these choices

ok that's it. if you wanna i can elaborate on specific choices but i'm way too lazy to explain every single one lol

[toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account]

"google bard" shut the FUCK up if I showed shakespeare ai "writing" he'd probably make a villain inspired by it & make a play w/ them in it just to end it by killing them

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google's chatbot panic

The really remarkable thing isn’t just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn’t links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar — even more remarkable is that Google agrees.

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/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Microsoft has nothing to lose. It’s spent billions on Bing, a search-engine no one voluntarily uses. Might as well try something so stupid it might just work. But why is Google, a monopolist who has a 90+% share of search worldwide, jumping off the same bridge as Microsoft?

There’s a delightful Mastodon thread about this, written by Dan Hon, where he compares the chatbot-enshittified front ends to Bing and Google to Tweedledee and Tweedledum:

https://mamot.fr/@danhon@dan.mastohon.com/109832788458972865

“At the front of the house, Alice found two curious characters, both search engines.

“‘I am Googl-E,’ said the one plastered in advertisements.

“‘And I am Bingle-Dum,’ said the other, who was the smaller of the two, and sported a pout, as to having fewer visitors and opportunity for conversation than the other.

“‘I know you,’ said Alice. ‘Are you to present me with a puzzle? Perhaps one of you tells the truth and the other lies?’

“‘Oh no,’ said Bingle-Dum.

“‘We both lie,’ added Googl-E.”

It just keeps getting better:

“‘This is truly an intolerable situation. If you both lie,’

“ — ‘And lie convincingly,’ added Bingle-Dum — 

“‘Yes, thank you. If that is so, then how am I to ever trust either of you?’

“Googl-E and Bingle-Dum turned to face each other and shrugged.”

Chatbot search is a terrible idea, especially in an era in which the web is likely to fill up with vast mountains of AI bullshit, the frozen gabble of stochastic parrots:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Google’s chatbot strategy shouldn’t be adding more madlibs to the internet — rather, they should be figuring out how to exclude (or, at a minimum, fact-check) the confident nonsense of the spammers and SEO creeps.

And yet, Google is going all-in on chatbots, with the company CEO ordering an all-hands scramble to cram chatbots into every part of the googleverse. Why on earth is the company racing Microsoft to see who can be first to leap off the peak of inflated expectations?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

I just published a theory in The Atlantic, under the title “How Google Ran Out of Ideas,” where I turn to competition theory to explain Google’s sweaty insecurity, an anxiety complex that the company has been plagued by nearly since its inception:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/google-ai-chatbots-microsoft-bing-chatgpt/673052/

The core theory: a quarter of a century, the Google founders had one amazing idea — a better way to do search. The capital markets showered the company in money, and it hired the very best, brightest, most creative people it could find, but then it created a corporate culture that was incapable of capitalizing on their ideas.

Every single product Google made internally — except for its Hotmail clone — died. Some of those products were good, some were terrible, but it didn’t matter. Google — a company that cultivated the ballpit-in-the-lobby whimsy of a Willy Wonka factory — couldn’t “innovate” at all.

Every successful Google product except search and gmail is an acquisition: mobile, ad-tech, videos, server management, docs, calendaring, maps, you name it. The company desperately wants to be a “making things” company, but it’s actually a “buying things” company. Sure, it’s good at operationalizing and scaling products, but that’s table-stakes for any monopolist:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/technical-excellence-and-scale

The cognitive dissonance of a self-styled “creative genius” whose true genius is spending other people’s money to buy other people’s products and take credit for them drives people to do truly bonkers thing (as any Twitter user can attest).

Google has long exhibited this pathology. In the mid-2000s — after Google chased Yahoo into China and started censoring its search-results and collaborating on state surveillance — we used to say that the way to get Google to do something stupid and self-destructive was to get Yahoo to do it first.

This was quite a time. Yahoo was desperate and failing, a graveyard of promising acquisitions that were gutshot and left to bleed out right there on the public internet as the dueling princelings of Yahoo senior management performed a backstabbing Medici LARP that had them competing to see who could sabotage the others. Going into China was an act of desperation after the company was humiliated by Google’s vastly superior search. Watching Google copy Yahoo’s idiotic gambits was baffling.

Baffling at the time, that is. As time went by and Google slavishly copied other rivals, its pathology of insecurity revealed itself. Google repeatedly failed to make a popular “social” product, and as Facebook commanded an ever-larger share of the ad-market, Google made a full-court press to compete with it. The company made Google Plus integration a “key performance indictator” for every division, and the result was a bizarre morass of ill-starred “social” features in every Google product — products that billions of users relied on for high-stakes operations, which were suddenly festooned with “social” buttons that made no sense.

The G+ debacle was truly incredible: some G+ features and integrations were great and developed loyal followings, but these were overshadowed by the incoherent, top-down insistence of making Google a “social-first” company. When G+ collapsed, it totally imploded, and the useful parts of G+ that people had come to rely upon disappeared along with the stupid parts.

For anyone who lived through the G+ tragicomedy, Google’s pivot to Bard — a chatbot front-end for search results — is grimly familiar. It’s a real “die a hero or live long enough to become a villain moment.” Microsoft — the monopolist that was only stayed from strangling Google in its cradle by the trauma of its antitrust dragging — has transformed from a product-creation company to an acquisitions and operations company, and Google is right behind it.

Just last year, Google laid off 12,000 staffers to please a private-equity “activist investor” — in the same year, it declared a $70b stock buyback, extracting enough capital to pay those 12,000 Googlers’ salaries for the next 27 years. Google is a financial company with a sideline in adtech. It has to be: when your only successful path to growth requires access to the capital markets to fund anticompetitive acquisitions, you can’t afford to piss off the money-gods, even if you have a “dual share” structure that lets the founders outvote every other shareholder:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004-ipo-letter/

ChatGPT and its imitators have all the hallmarks of a tech fad, and are truly the successor to last season’s web3 and cryptocurrency pump-and-dumps. One of the clearest and most inspiring critiques of chatbots comes from science fiction writer Ted Chiang, whose instant-classsic critique was called “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”:

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

Chiang points out a key difference between the output of ChatGPT and human authors: a human author’s first draft is often an original idea, badly expressed, while the best ChatGPT can hope for is a competently expressed, unoriginal idea. ChatGPT is perfectly poised to improve on the SEO copypasta that legions of low-paid workers pump out in a bid to climb the Google search results.

Speaking of Chiang’s essay in this week’s episode of the This Machine Kills podcast, Jathan Sadowski expertly punctures the ChatGPT4 hype bubble, which holds that the next version of the chatbot will be so amazing that any critiques of the current technology will be rendered obsolete:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/232-400-hundred-years-of-capitalism-led-directly-to-microsoft-viva-sales

Sadowski notes that OpenAI’s engineers are going to enormous lengths to ensure that the next version won’t be trained on any of the output from ChatGPT3. This is a tell: if a large language model can produce materials that are as good as human-produced text, then why can’t the output of ChatGPT3 be used to create ChatGPT4?

Sadowski has a great term to describe this problem: “Habsburg AI.” Just as royal inbreeding produced a generation of supposed supermen who were incapable of reproducing themselves, so too will feeding a new model on the exhaust stream of the last one produce an ever-worsening gyre of tightly spiraling nonsense that eventually disappears up its own asshole.

This is the last day (Feb 17) of my Australian tour for my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’ll be in Canberra at the Australian Digital Alliance Copyright Forum.

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

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

[Image ID: Tweedledee and Tweedledum, standing at the bottom of Humpty Dumpty's wall. Dee and Dum have the logos for Google and Bing on their chests. Humpty is about to fall and is being held up by a motley collection of panicking businessmen."]

[cryoverkiltmilk]

What does a paladin bring on his second date with a bard?

A bag of holding.

[starknesskenobi]

POV I live in Middle Earth and I just found out Sauron is hot

Me wearing the Chanel boots and a luxurious gown: “Just in case the great eye is being ever watchful”