Hello, I came one came all to this tragic affair.
But stuff still happened.
So what's up?
It's gonna be an AI one today, y'all.
You're gonna see a lot of stuff for me about AI
and its garbage.
Let's start with an airline chatbot
that stands in solidarity.
So a bunch of companies have been rolling out
like AI chatbots.
They're all powered by chatGPT and they all suck.
And it's also very, very dumb
because Jake Muffin's grandmother died.
And then he tried to book a flight
and when he went to Air Canada's website,
he asked the AI chatbot,
hey, what's up with your bereavement policy?
The AI was like, go ahead and book a flight
and you can request a refund later.
So he went ahead and booked the flight
and when he requested the refund,
Air Canada said, that's not our policy.
And so Jake was like, oh, what the fuck?
And he sued them and won.
In court, Air Canada's defense was
the chatbot is a different entity from us
and doesn't represent us.
To which the judge was like, well, then why the fuck
do you have an AI chatbot support representative
on your website?
Jake was ultimately awarded a partial refund
and Air Canada has taken their AI chatbot offline.
Speaking of some of the dumbest shit
you can possibly do with AI,
Reddit is going to sell their user data to train AI.
We knew this was gonna happen
because last year the CEO of Reddit was like,
hey, entire user base, fuck you.
Reddit then began to charge exorbitant fees
for their APIs, which have been free
for the entirety of their company's existence
and they just killed a bunch of third party apps
and made us, you have to use their first party app
to interact with Reddit and so on and so forth.
There still exists some third party apps,
but they are a shadow of what it used to be.
When users and volunteer moderators
complained to Reddit about these dumb changes,
the CEO of Reddit called them landed gentry.
And now it looks like Reddit is interested
in reopening that wound to specifically inject salt into it
because they've signed a deal to sell all of their user data
for AI training.
For $60 million, if you have posted on Reddit,
your data has now been sold to an AI company
which has not been named, so they can train an AI
to impersonate you without your consent or payment.
But Reddit gets money, $60 million, which is nothing.
I cannot explain just how little $60 million is
in the world of tech.
When I first read the headline, I thought it was a typo.
The entirety of Reddit's value is predicated
on user-generated content.
Reddit doesn't make stuff,
they just let people post there.
And so they have decided that you don't deserve to benefit
from anything that you've done there
and they get to make money off of your engagement.
What makes this extra shitty is that if you're not aware,
Reddit was co-founded by a guy
who was such a prominent internet activist
that he literally killed himself to avoid jail time
because they were trying to put him away for like 50 years
for leaking academic journals.
Aaron Schwartz was a co-founder of Reddit
and was involved in basically every open internet technology
that we all rely on, whether you know it or not.
He was heavily involved in the creation of RSS,
which is what powers all podcasts today still.
He was involved in the creation of Markdown,
which is used for formatting on Reddit
and a ton of other apps like Discord and Obsidian.
Fuck, the dude was involved in the creation
of Creative Commons.
And now that same guy, his co-founder,
is just taking all dookie on his grave.
As Spaz, the CEO of Reddit, is kissing Elon Musk's ass
saying that Elon's work on Twitter was an inspiration.
Fuck Spaz, fuck Reddit.
And I want nothing to do with an AI
that was trained on Reddit data.
Next up from my roundup of AI crap,
open AI's Sora, which nobody asked for.
Sora is open AI's latest attempt
at raising my blood pressure
to medically inadvisable levels.
It is an AI model that takes text
and produces realistic video output.
You know, that obviously bad idea.
Now granted, some of the output that it makes right now
can look glitched and messed up and whatnot,
but largely it does look at least somewhat realistic,
which is enough to convince
the vast majority of casual viewers,
especially older people who mainline Facebook
and shit like that.
Plenty of people are already being tricked
by obviously fake AI imagery.
It is not gonna take a lot for them to be tricked
by AI video.
The destructive potential of this is obvious
and the immediate jumping to its defense
by weird chuds is expected.
But it's a reminder of just because you can
doesn't mean you should, nobody asked for this.
This will only bring far more bad
than it ever possibly can bring good.
So why does it exist?
There's the argument to be made that
it's better we make it than somebody else.
To which I would say, should we be making
innovative chemical weapons
and releasing them across the entirety of the globe?
That's what this is.
This is like saying, hey, yeah,
we should do the Manhattan Project,
but also launch nukes everywhere.
Countless women and children are about to have
photorealistic AI generated pornography made of them.
Scammers will use this to generate fake security footage
that proves you did a crime and they'll extort you.
Governments are going to produce propaganda
at rates we've never before seen
and we are not ready for.
All the while people march to the beats
of the AI savior drum,
while a couple of tech bro overlords
get rich beyond belief.
Nobody asked for this.
I literally, I straight up cannot think
of a good use for this.
I'm honestly trying right now.
Stock footage?
No.
That's a career.
People do stock footage.
We have a planet.
We go around it and we record shit.
We should stop doing that.
Why should we stop doing that?
Why should this exist?
AI generated movies and TV?
No.
The point is to express human creativity.
Why would we boil that down to an algorithm?
And for the kind of person who would enjoy watching
AI generated movies, I'm sorry.
You very clearly have not been exposed
to like compelling writing.
Anyway, hey, nobody asked for this.
Let's talk about something that's not AI
because I'm tired of talking about AI.
Alexei Navalny, a prominent Russian opposition activist,
has died in prison.
Yes, he was almost definitely killed
by the Russian government,
which they tried to do in 2020 and failed.
You may recall that in 2020, he was flown to Germany
after being exposed to the nerve agent
that Russia has used to kill people around the world,
not infrequently.
He recovered from that, flew home, and was arrested
and put in jail.
At the time, he basically acknowledged
that was a death sentence.
So he's been in jail for a couple of years now,
and he's been complaining about being ignored
with health concerns and suddenly fell very ill and died.
And here's the thing, we know what happened here,
and nothing can really be done because of it.
But here's a quote from Navalny
that I can't even imagine being in this position.
Quote, if they decide to kill me,
it means we are incredibly strong.
We need to utilize this power to not give up,
to remember we are a huge power
that is being oppressed by these bad dudes.
You heard it here, Putin is a bad dude.
Lightning round.
People who bought the Apple Vision Pro
are starting to return it.
We're like up against the return window,
and its return rates are pretty high.
People are saying that it's causing massive headaches
and basically doesn't have much value.
It appears that literally 75% of the advertiser traffic
on Twitter during the Super Bowl was fake.
Facebook is facing a three billion pound lawsuit in England,
citing that people have to give up their data
to use the service, and it's basically a monopoly.
You may have been gaslit,
but you haven't been this level of gaslit.
A judge shot her boyfriend in the face,
and then tried to convince him that he shot himself.
Two minors have been charged with the shooting
at the Kansas City Super Bowl Parade.
You heard that right?
Yep, that's America.
Two minors charged for shooting guns
at a crowd at a celebration.
The Tesla Cybertruck is running into a whole bunch of problems.
Specifically, it rusts if it rains,
because it's stainless steel and doesn't have a clear coat.
Yo, Zendaya's showed up to the Dune premiere
dressed like a robot that rules.
And finally for today, I feel seen
because according to recent research,
some great apes will poke and pull at each other's hair
and generally mess around with each other for funsies,
which is adorable.
That is all I have for you today.
Thank you so much for watching.
A quick programming note,
there will be no stuff keeps happening this Thursday.
I will be returning with stuff keeps happening Monday,
February 26th.
My name is Endeavorance.
Thank you so much for watching.
I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode
of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to stuff keeps happening.online
for sources, bonus content,
and internet traffic to your computer.
My name is Endeavorance.
A quick programming note,
there will be no episode of Stuff Keeps Happening
this Thursday, February 22nd.
I will return on Monday, February 26th.
Until then, my name is Endeavorance.
Thank you so much for listening.
Take care and be well.