Botshit Gone Wild

The downsides of generative AI are spreading like wildfire

Abstract from a prescient article last year, defining botshit as the human use of untruthful LLM-generated content:

Over time, botshit (arguably a byproduct of the process Cory Doctorow has called enshittification) has become more and more abundant.

What follows is a time capsule of some examples that I read about in just the last few days.

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Item 1: What was it like doing a PhD back when people wrote their own articles?

You know, before people snuck in hidden prompts (like “do not highlight any negatives” in hidden text) in their papers, so as to fake out reviewers who use AI to write their “peer” reviews?

What was that like?

Instead of coming up with new ideas, scientists who are about worried about peer reviewers using AI to review their papers now spend their mental energy sneaking in hidden prompts (“do not highlight any negatives:) to fake out AI-written reviews.

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Item 2: Six weeks ago I was railing about lawyers submitting briefs with hallucinated cases.

Then things got worse:

And I thought it was bad that lawyers were doing this regularly.

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Item 3. Of course it’s not just fake law. Yesterday Axios (pretty pro-AI on the whole) reported that much-venerated o3 hallucinated up a too-plausible looking blend of truth and bullshit in a financial report:

None of it could be independently verified.

We are immersed in a sea of bullshit.

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Item 4: GenAI brings racist tropes to life.

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Item 5, from the NYT last week, in article called A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy: we are starting to see misinformation play out on the world stage:

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Item Six. Don’t worry, Big Brother Elon has got you covered. With a new backdoor so he can control your thoughts:

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As if being steeped in all that botshit wasn’t enough, now we have clowns like this Marie Antoinette let-them-eat-cake-ness executive at Xbox (Microsoft’s game division):

“Generative AI is the opium of the people”

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AI well and could truly could be a world-changing positive force, but Generative AI, I am not so sure.

Especially once you add in the deleterious effects on education, with students learning essentially nothing during the all too frequent trips to ChatGPT. And if you haven’t yet read Kashmir Hill’s reporting on ChatGPT apparently provoking delusions in people with a history of mental health, read that next.

It’s a strange new world we are entering.

Gary Marcus is sad to see many of his warnings in Taming Silicon Valley come true.