Large AI companies themselves want people to be ignorant of how AI works, though. They want uncritical acceptance of the tech as they force it everywhere, creating a radical counterreaction from people. The reaction might be uncritical too, I’d prefer to say it’s merely unjustified in specific cases or overly emotional, but it doesn’t come from nowhere or from sheer stupidity. We have been hearing about people treating their chatbots as sentient beings since like 2022 (remember that guy from Google?), bombarded with doomer (or, from AI companies’ point of view, very desirable) projections about AI replacing most jobs and wreaking havoc on world economy - how are ordinary people supposed to remain calm and balanced when hearing such stuff all the time?

Oh man…

That is the point, to show how AI image generators easily fail to produce something that rarely occurs out there in reality (i.e. is absent from training data), even though intuitively (from the viewpoint of human intelligence) it seems like it should be trivial to portray.

Yeah, I don’t think that would fly.

“Your honour, I was just hoarding that terabyte of Hollywood films, I haven’t actually watched them.”

Bro are you a robot yourself? Does that look like a glass full of wine?

AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does,

If it’s in the same way, then why do you need the quotation marks? Even you understand that they’re not the same.

And either way, machine learning is different from human learning in so many ways it’s ridiculous to even discuss the topic.

AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from

That depends on the model and the amount of data it has been trained on. I remember the first public model of ChatGPT producing a sentence that was just one word different from what I found by googling the text (from some scientific article summary, so not a trivial sentence that could line up accidentally). More recently, there was a widely reported-on study of AI-generated poetry where the model was requested to produce a poem in the style of Chaucer, and then produced a letter-for-letter reproduction of the well-known opening of the Canterbury Tales. It hasn’t been trained on enough Middle English poetry and thus can’t generate any of it, so it defaulted to copying a text that probably occurred dozens of times in its training data.

Facebook (Meta) torrented TBs from Libgen, and their internal chats leaked so we know about that, and IIRC they’ve been sued. Maybe you’re thinking of that case?

Indeed, check the picture of the original flag I posted below

Well, you can calculate the areas of blue triangles easily since they’re right triangles, than just calculate pink+blue area and substract the blue area that you calculated previously, repeat for white+pink+blue.

assuming it’s a 3*6 grid

Yep

This comes off as stupid, that’s for sure, but Letterboxd is so tame about its monetisation it still feels unnecessary to complain about it.

And again in a year or so only a handful of tech nerds with few social connections will actually ditch it.

Sounds like Big Cable Elf propaganda.

This may be a bit too far outside the nominal topic of the comm, so feel free to report it and let the mods decide if it can stay up. (I’d report it myself but apparently can’t do it.)

The GIF in the OP is from the game Lemmings (1991).

you know what I’m talking about

But I literally don’t. Well, I didn’t but now I mostly do, since you explained it.

I get what you’re saying with regards to the isolation, this issue has already been raised when many left-wing people started to leave Twitter. But it is opening a whole new can of worms - these profiles that post AI-generated content are largely not managed by ordinary people with their private agendas (sharing neat stuff, political agitation, etc.), but by bots, and are also massively followed and supported by other bot profiles. Much the same on Twitter with its hordes of right-wing troll profiles, and as I’m still somewhat active on reddit I also notice blatant manipluation there as well (my country had elections a few weeks ago and the flood of new profiles less than one week old spamming idiotic propaganda and insults was too obvious). It’s not organic online behaviour and it can’t really be fought by organic behaviour, especially when the big social media platforms give up the tools to fight it (relaxing their moderation standards, removing fact-checking, etc.). Lemmy and Mastodon etc. are based on the idea(l) that this corporate-controlled area is not the only space where meaningful activity can happen.

So that’s one side of the story, AI is not something happening in a vacuum and that you just have to submit to your own will. The other side of the story, the actual abilities of AI, have already been discussed, we’ve seen sufficiently that it’s not that good at helping people form more solidly developed and truth-based stances. Maybe it could be used to spread the sort of mass-produced manipulative bullshit that is already used by the right, but I can’t honestly support such stuff. In this regard, we can doubt whether there is any ground to win for the left (would the left’s possible audience actually eat it up), and if yes, whether it is worth it (basing your political appeal on bullshit can bite you in the ass down the line).

As for the comparison to discourse around immigrants, again I still don’t fully understand the point other than on the most surface level (the media is guiding people what to think, duh).

I don’t have even the slightest idea what that video is supposed to mean. (Happy cake day tho.)

In 2005 the article on William Shakespeare contained references to a total of 7 different sources, including a page describing how his name is pronounced, Plutarch, and “Catholic Encyclopedia on CD-ROM”. It contained more text discussing Shakespeare’s supposed Catholicism than his actual plays, which were described only in the most generic terms possible. I’m not noticing any grave mistakes while skimming the text, but it really couldn’t pass for a reliable source or a traditionally solid encyclopedia. And that’s the page on the best known English writer, slightly less popular topics were obviously much shoddier.

It had its significant upsides already back then, sure, no doubt about that. But the teachers’ skepticism wasn’t all that unwarranted.

I think the academic advice about Wikipedia was sadly mistaken.

It wasn’t mistaken 10 or especially 15 years ago, however. Check how some articles looked back then, you’ll see vastly fewer sources and overall a less professional-looking text. These days I think most professors will agree that it’s fine as a starting point (depending on the subject, at least; I still come across unsourced nonsensical crap here and there, slowly correcting it myself).

I think that’s not possible. Wikipedia collects as little user data as possible, and providing a different UX in different countries sounds like it would already be too intrusive in that regard.

As far as I’ve seen they only generated one example summary, which is linked in OP. It’s not good, as Wikipedians have pointed out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#The_Dopamine_summary

Amen. Like, I get the initial annoyance with webp but it doesn’t even take this sort of essay to agree that it just is a good format. The only problem right now is that not all sites and software support it, but I hope that will be solved soon enough.

Thank you! This passage is again drawn from René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, and it outlines his method of radical doubt as a means to establish certainty in knowledge. While the reasoning is carefully crafted and influential in the history of philosophy, it still contains a few logical fallacies or reasoning weaknesses that can be critically assessed.

🔍 Identified Logical Fallacies and Weak Reasoning:

1. Hasty Generalization

“Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.”

• Why it’s a fallacy: The fact that the senses occasionally deceive (e.g. in illusions, dreams, or misperceptions) does not justify rejecting them entirely.
• Type: Hasty generalization – concluding that because something is sometimes unreliable, it must always be unreliable.

2. False Analogy

“…it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.”

• Why it’s a fallacy: Comparing senses (which are not agents but biological faculties) to people who deceive is not a valid analogy. People deceive with intent; senses make errors unintentionally.
• Type: False analogy – treating unlike things as if they were meaningfully similar.

3. Slippery Slope (Metaphorical)

“Once the foundations of a building have been undermined, the rest collapses of its own accord…”

• Why it’s a fallacy: This implies that if some foundational beliefs are doubted, then all other beliefs must collapse, without demonstrating that all knowledge is entirely dependent on those foundations.
• Type: Slippery slope – assuming that undermining one part inevitably leads to a total collapse.

4. Begging the Question (Circular Reasoning)

“My reason tells me… I should withhold assent from [beliefs] that are not completely certain and indubitable.”

• Why it’s questionable: Descartes is relying on reason to justify doubting everything else, including the faculties (like reason) he has not yet proven to be trustworthy. This risks begging the question, assuming the reliability of reason while attempting to prove everything else, including reason itself.
• Type: Begging the question – assuming what you’re trying to prove.

5. Inconsistency (Recognized, Not Fully Resolved)

“Yet although the senses sometimes deceive us… that doesn’t apply to my belief that I am here, sitting by the fire…”

• Why it’s a fallacy: Here, Descartes briefly exempts ordinary sensory experiences (like feeling warmth, seeing paper) from radical doubt—despite having just declared that any doubt justifies withholding belief. He later corrects for this in the next meditation (introducing the dream argument), but within this passage, it’s a moment of inconsistency.
• Type: Special pleading or internal inconsistency.

✅ Summary Table of Fallacies

Conclusion:

Descartes’ passage is methodologically rich, but from a logic and reasoning perspective, it contains:

• Several classic fallacies used to motivate extreme skepticism.
• Analogical and metaphorical reasoning that may be rhetorically persuasive but logically flawed.
• Self-referential assumptions that are philosophically problematic (and which he tries to resolve in later meditations).

Would you like a version of this reasoning revised to be more logically sound, or would you like help analyzing the next part of the Meditations?