#language confidence

[shanayasharma11]

https://oneinfini.com/courses/learning-english-made-easy

OneInfini's online course on learning English is taught by expert instructors who have years of experience in teaching English as a second language. With our course, you'll receive personalized instruction and feedback to help you achieve your language goals.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Supervised AI isn't

It wasn't just Ottawa: Microsoft Travel published a whole bushel of absurd articles, including the notorious Ottawa guide recommending that tourists dine at the Ottawa Food Bank ("go on an empty stomach"):

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1692233111260582161

After Paris Marx pointed out the Ottawa article, Business Insider's Nathan McAlone found several more howlers:

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-removes-embarrassing-offensive-ai-assisted-travel-articles-2023-8

There was the article recommending that visitors to Montreal try "a hamburger" and went on to explain that a hamburger was a "sandwich comprised of a ground beef patty, a sliced bun of some kind, and toppings such as lettuce, tomato, cheese, etc" and that some of the best hamburgers in Montreal could be had at McDonald's.

For Anchorage, Microsoft recommended trying the local delicacy known as "seafood," which it defined as "basically any form of sea life regarded as food by humans, prominently including fish and shellfish," going on to say, "seafood is a versatile ingredient, so it makes sense that we eat it worldwide."

In Tokyo, visitors seeking "photo-worthy spots" were advised to "eat Wagyu beef."

There were more.

Microsoft insisted that this wasn't an issue of "unsupervised AI," but rather "human error." On its face, this presents a head-scratcher: is Microsoft saying that a human being erroneously decided to recommend the dining at Ottawa's food bank?

But a close parsing of the mealy-mouthed disclaimer reveals the truth. The unnamed Microsoft spokesdroid only appears to be claiming that this wasn't written by an AI, but they're actually just saying that the AI that wrote it wasn't "unsupervised." It was a supervised AI, overseen by a human. Who made an error. Thus: the problem was human error.

This deliberate misdirection actually reveals a deep truth about AI: that the story of AI being managed by a "human in the loop" is a fantasy, because humans are neurologically incapable of maintaining vigilance in watching for rare occurrences.

Our brains wire together neurons that we recruit when we practice a task. When we don't practice a task, the parts of our brain that we optimized for it get reused. Our brains are finite and so don't have the luxury of reserving precious cells for things we don't do.

That's why the TSA sucks so hard at its job – why they are the world's most skilled water-bottle-detecting X-ray readers, but consistently fail to spot the bombs and guns that red teams successfully smuggle past their checkpoints:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851

TSA agents (not "officers," please – they're bureaucrats, not cops) spend all day spotting water bottles that we forget in our carry-ons, but almost no one tries to smuggle a weapons through a checkpoint – 99.999999% of the guns and knives they do seize are the result of flier forgetfulness, not a planned hijacking.

In other words, they train all day to spot water bottles, and the only training they get in spotting knives, guns and bombs is in exercises, or the odd time someone forgets about the hand-cannon they shlep around in their day-pack. Of course they're excellent at spotting water bottles and shit at spotting weapons.

This is an inescapable, biological aspect of human cognition: we can't maintain vigilance for rare outcomes. This has long been understood in automation circles, where it is called "automation blindness" or "automation inattention":

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29939767/

Here's the thing: if nearly all of the time the machine does the right thing, the human "supervisor" who oversees it becomes incapable of spotting its error. The job of "review every machine decision and press the green button if it's correct" inevitably becomes "just press the green button," assuming that the machine is usually right.

This is a huge problem. It's why people just click "OK" when they get a bad certificate error in their browsers. 99.99% of the time, the error was caused by someone forgetting to replace an expired certificate, but the problem is, the other 0.01% of the time, it's because criminals are waiting for you to click "OK" so they can steal all your money:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ema-report-finds-nearly-80-130300983.html

Automation blindness can't be automated away. From interpreting radiographic scans:

https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ai-could-safely-automate-some-x-ray-interpretation

to autonomous vehicles:

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/automated-vehicles-may-encourage-new-breed-distracted-drivers

The "human in the loop" is a figleaf. The whole point of automation is to create a system that operates at superhuman scale – you don't buy an LLM to write one Microsoft Travel article, you get it to write a million of them, to flood the zone, top the search engines, and dominate the space.

As I wrote earlier: "There's no market for a machine-learning autopilot, or content moderation algorithm, or loan officer, if all it does is cough up a recommendation for a human to evaluate. Either that system will work so poorly that it gets thrown away, or it works so well that the inattentive human just button-mashes 'OK' every time a dialog box appears":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/21/let-me-summarize/#i-read-the-abstract

Microsoft – like every corporation – is insatiably horny for firing workers. It has spent the past three years cutting its writing staff to the bone, with the express intention of having AI fill its pages, with humans relegated to skimming the output of the plausible sentence-generators and clicking "OK":

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-news-cuts-dozens-of-staffers-in-shift-to-ai-2020-5

We know about the howlers and the clunkers that Microsoft published, but what about all the other travel articles that don't contain any (obvious) mistakes? These were very likely written by a stochastic parrot, and they comprised training data for a human intelligence, the poor schmucks who are supposed to remain vigilant for the "hallucinations" (that is, the habitual, confidently told lies that are the hallmark of AI) in the torrent of "content" that scrolled past their screens:

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

Like the TSA agents who are fed a steady stream of training data to hone their water-bottle-detection skills, Microsoft's humans in the loop are being asked to pluck atoms of difference out of a raging river of otherwise characterless slurry. They are expected to remain vigilant for something that almost never happens – all while they are racing the clock, charged with preventing a slurry backlog at all costs.

Automation blindness is inescapable – and it's the inconvenient truth that AI boosters conspicuously fail to mention when they are discussing how they will justify the trillion-dollar valuations they ascribe to super-advanced autocomplete systems. Instead, they wave around "humans in the loop," using low-waged workers as props in a Big Store con, just a way to (temporarily) cool the marks.

And what of the people who lose their (vital) jobs to (terminally unsuitable) AI in the course of this long-running, high-stakes infomercial?

Well, there's always the food bank.

"Go on an empty stomach."

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

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/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

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

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

--

West Midlands Police (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/westmidlandspolice/8705128684/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[canisalbus]

.

[jessaerys]

sun visits the moon at spk headquarters and gets so so so sleepy

[royalarchivist]

[A sad violin song plays over an image of a sad hamster]

Pac: This doesn't have anything to do with me – I wear a blue sweatshirt, you're crazy, this mouse doesn't even have a sweatshirt, this hamster! [Reading chat] Am I a depressed hamster?

[ Transcript continued ↓ ]*

–

Pac: Actually– that's fine! I embrace that idea – of course I'm going to be depressed, are you crazy? [He hits his desk, then starts counting off people on his fingers] Fit is gone, Richarlyson is gone, Ramon is gone, Bagi and Empanada who were always there when we were there are also gone, I haven't seen them! It's just me and Tubbo, and sometimes Philza shows up.

Pac: I lost Chume Labs, I lost the Favela, I lost Murder Mystery, I lost Ilha Chume Labs, it's crazy! Look at how much I've lost, and I've gained nothing! Of course I'm going to be depressed, are you crazy?! How am I supposed to be happy?!

Pac: [Reading chat] "You have us Pac," that's true, thank you. No, that's true, sorry.

* NOTE: Please note that this is an incomplete transcript, as I was primarily relying on Aypierre's translation mod at the time and if I am not confident of the translation, I do not include it. As always, please feel free to add on translations or message me corrections.

[artbyzephra]

Feeling a little sick today, so figured I'd do some self-indulgent art of some of my favorite older pokemon designs. Contemplating setting up a Patreon or something similar to a room a project of sketching every single Pokemon, but maybe not too soon.

Pencil sketch, having a lot of fun working with pencils again!

[rox-of-iu]

my old blorbos are back in my brain

heart pirates my absolute beloved. shame theyre chillin somewhere in the ocean lol (do not mention the pre-time skip hats of penguin and shachi I'm still attached even tho its already been a million years since then)

anyway every time i remember that Law and Kid are assigned german and Scottish by Oda i gain one hundred years

[rollercoasterwords]

obsessed w the confidence of the people who comment fully in portuguese on my fics. never once have i said that i speak portuguese nor indicated that i can understand it yet there r multiple people out there leaving multi-sentence comments & sometimes even paragraphs in a language i do not speak. just fully confident that no language barrier will stop the message from getting across…i love u

[succulentsiren]

HOW TO HAVE A POWERFUL PRESENCE

1. Display confident body language. Straighten your spine. Hold your head up. Make eye contact when speaking to others. Do power poses. Take up space. Use your hands to help express what you're speaking about. Project your voice.

3. Take care of your appearance. Eat foods that make you feel energized and healthy. Cultivate a consistent skin care routine. Wash your pillows and makeup brushes regularly. Exfoliate your skin at least once a week. Take naps for less stress. Check in with yourself mentality.

5. Stop taking yourself so seriously. Most people are mostly focused on themselves, not fixating on judging you. They probably won't remember the mistakes you made as much as you do. So quit beating yourself up. (If there is someone hyper-focused on bullying you they are most likely trying to ignore something embarrassing about themselves. Bullies are the most insecure people within'. Remember that).

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Omg idk if you talk Spanish or if it’s just XXC, but with that little and wonderful doodle you gave me the amazing headcanon of XXC being bilingual and just randomly speaking Spanish out of nowhere and nobody understanding him

[TL: XXC says "don't do coke in the bathroom"]

Shout out to the Spanish speaking MXTX fans. I don't think this is remotely what you wanted. (bonus below cut, TW: Drugs)

[tj-crochets]

Hey y’all! I am once again attempting to help my dad identify an animal he saw on a walk (the last one turned out to be a woodchuck despite him describing it exactly like a pine marten lol) What kind of duck has a bright red head and a mostly white body? He described it as “bright red where a mallard is green”

[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.

[keithsautism]

I feel like Keith and Lance are both ND but in different ways. Keith is the kind of guy who would really like physical contact and words of affirmation as love languages. He's pretty good at telling Lance how he feels about him later in the series. He'd probably appreciate the lack of ambiguity and take things at face value/put trust in I love yous.

Meanwhile Lance grew up in a big family so they might not have had as much money. Receiving gifts was a really big deal for him growing up. I can imagine Keith giving Lance a cool blue shell he found at an alien market and being all confused, thinking Lance doesn't like it when he goes still. Like he wants to take it back and is disappointed that Lance doesn't like it. But he does, he's just a bit overwhelmed by the gesture. Trying to show why he thought getting some silly shell was a good idea, Keith meekly tells him to look at this pretty part of it, turning it over in Lance's hands, pointing out an opalescent part that's all different kinds of blues. Says it reminds him of Lance's eyes.

Lance says something like "How would you know what colour my eyes are" because eye contact is not Keith's forte, but there's no bite behind it, and Keith doesn't get the joke anyway, just looks nervous. Keith just says they're pretty, as if he couldn't not have noticed. Lance puts it down on his side table gently. Keith says "You don't like it?" Lance gives him a super tender kiss. They kiss for a while holding each other, and Keith hugs him, sighing with contentment into lance's shoulder. Says "Holding you feels like home" then Lance dies on the spot

[canisalbus]

I love the shape language for Machete and Vasco, how angular and pointy the former is VS how round and soft the other... It's so GOOD I adore that

Thank you! I like the contrast as well, it makes them very fun to draw together. I try to keep them visually distinct while still making sure that they look harmonious and complementary next to each other.

[luvcraze]

Do you realize that you can live the life you've always dreamed of? You can have your ideal job, wear your favorite fashion styles, and spend your days doing what you love. You know this, right? You have the power to shape your reality. You can choose to be surrounded by people who inspire you, who share your passions, and who make you feel valued. So why are you settling for anything less than what you truly want? Don't compromise your happiness for a second-rate version of what you could have. You deserve the best. You deserve joy. You deserve fulfillment. Trust that you can have it all.

Stop holding back. Don’t let doubt or fear keep you from reaching for your dreams. All you have to do is believe—truly believe—that you are worthy of everything your heart desires. Feel it. Live it. Let that belief guide you, and you'll see things start to change. You don't have to overhaul your life. Just focus on what brings you joy and let that lead the way. It's that simple.

So don't settle for less. Reach for what makes you feel alive. Create a life that reflects your highest aspirations. You deserve it, and it’s within your reach.

Go for it.

[transboyhalo]

Bad complained about being on the server alone and richas IMMEDIATELY popped up on the tablist