by ghuntley on 6/8/25, 4:41 PM with 10 comments
by delichon on 6/8/25, 4:46 PM
I miss the good old days when Kirk could disable a malfunctioning AI with a logic bomb.
by Terr_ on 6/8/25, 8:07 PM
> "Let me guess," said Moist. "The postmen had to work too hard?"
> "Oh, postmen always work too hard, sir," said Groat, without blinking. "No, what got people worried was finding letters in the sorting tray a year before they were due to be written." [...]
> Moist moved a little closer to the machine and peered into the machinery. He could just make out, at the heart of the glow, a little wheel. It was turning, slowly. [...]
> "Three and a bit, that's the ticket. Only Bloody Stupid Johnson said that was untidy, so he designed a wheel where the pie was exactly three. And that's it, in there."
> "But that's impossible!" said Moist. "You can't do that! Pi is like... built in! You can't change it. You'd have to change the universe!"
> "Yes, sir. They tell me that's what happened". [...]
> Words spilled out of Mr Groat like stashed mail from a crack in the wall. Sometimes the machine had produced a thousand copies of the same letter, or filled the room with letters from next Tuesday, next month, next year. Sometimes they were letters that hadn’t been written, or might have been written, or were meant to have been written, or letters which people had once sworn that they had written and hadn’t really, but which nevertheless had a shadowy existence in some strange invisible letter world and were made real by the machine.
by ednite on 6/8/25, 5:24 PM
It reminds me of a recent conversation I had with a friend who went on a family road trip and decided to turn the ride into a Spanish practice session for the kids. Seemed innocent enough… until they started using an AI chatbot to help with translations.
At first, it was helpful. Then it got creative. Very creative.
Suddenly, “Where is the bathroom?” became something like " follow the dark path to the eternal chambers of mystery" “And “Please pass the salt” morphed into something about offering sacred minerals to the goddess priestess.
Needless to say, I strongly advised them to stick to Google Translate next time. Sometimes you want a translator, not a hallucinated poet on your road trip.
Thanks for sharing.
by to11mtm on 6/8/25, 6:50 PM
I see the problem here, the AI immediately tapped into decades of people ranting about CUPS.
by jwcacces on 6/8/25, 7:34 PM
by temp0826 on 6/8/25, 7:07 PM
by TomMasz on 6/8/25, 7:00 PM
At least that part of it is normal.
by satisfice on 6/9/25, 1:47 AM