The part that’s being ignored is that it’s a problem, not the existence of the hallucinations themselves. Currently a lot of enthusiasts are just brushing it off with the equivalent of boys will be boys AIs will be AIs, which is fine until an AI, say, gets someone jailed by providing garbage caselaw citations.

And, um, you’re greatly overestimating what someone like my technophobic mother knows about AI ( xkcd 2501: Average Familiarity seems apropos). There are a lot of people out there who never get into a conversation about LLMs.

I prefer carrying the plastic over carrying a tracking deivce everywhere with me. Then again, I’m one of those weirdos that also still carries cash.

(Note that I’m not saying you should ditch your phone—your priorities are doubtless different from mine—just that for me the tradeoff is not acceptable.)

And it’s a sad, sad day when the situation in xkcd 908 looks like an improvement over even one of the commercial offerings.

had to restore from backups onto a brand new Google business account

Thus proving that they learned nothing from the experience.

Companies should be sued for false advertising if they claim that their streaming service allows you to “buy” or “own” anything (unless their service includes non-DRM downloads for permanent offline storage). All you’re buying is temporary use of their rental network and library. Which is fine if that’s what you wanted and knew you were getting, but a problem if you were expecting something else.

That assumes all the trees survive. A lot of them apparently don’t.

I seem to recall that scarring around the electrodes, which eventually causes them to stop functioning, is a known failure mode of older experiments along similar lines. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t hold out much hope for this iteration.

I just hope the patient doesn’t take any long-term damage from the implant.