Yes, but I dont think that’s relevant. Whether gross or net, they are still ruining lives to achieve a pointless profit motive.

Edit: relevant, not irrelevant

You don’t need $10 billion in revenue. You could just coast along and only hit, what, $9.8 billion? And then you wouldn’t have to ruin 500 people’s lives. I’m betting the CEO has a bonus scheduled if he hits this goal.

Yikes!

In that sense, Westgate explains, the bot dialogues are not unlike talk therapy, “which we know to be quite effective at helping people reframe their stories.” Critically, though, AI, “unlike a therapist, does not have the person’s best interests in mind, or a moral grounding or compass in what a ‘good story’ looks like,” she says. “A good therapist would not encourage a client to make sense of difficulties in their life by encouraging them to believe they have supernatural powers. Instead, they try to steer clients away from unhealthy narratives, and toward healthier ones. ChatGPT has no such constraints or concerns.”

This is a rather terrifying take. Particularly when combined with the earlier passage about the man who claimed that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler.” Therapists have to be very careful because human memory is very plastic. It’s very easy to alter a memory, in fact, every time you remember something, you alter it just a little bit. Under questioning by an authority figure, such as a therapist or a policeman if you were a witness to a crime, these alterations can be dramatic. This was a really big problem in the '80s and '90s.

Kaitlin Luna: Can you take us back to the early 1990s and you talk about the memory wars, so what was that time like and what was happening?

Elizabeth Loftus: Oh gee, well in the 1990s and even in maybe the late 80s we began to see an altogether more extreme kind of memory problem. Some patients were going into therapy maybe they had anxiety, or maybe they had an eating disorder, maybe they were depressed, and they would end up with a therapist who said something like well many people I’ve seen with your symptoms were sexually abused as a child. And they would begin these activities that would lead these patients to start to think they remembered years of brutalization that they had allegedly banished into the unconscious until this therapy made them aware of it. And in many instances these people sued their parents or got their former neighbors or doctors or teachers whatever prosecuted based on these claims of repressed memory. So the wars were really about whether people can take years of brutalization, banish it into the unconscious, be completely unaware that these things happen and then reliably recover all this information later, and that was what was so controversial and disputed.

Kaitlin Luna: And your work essentially refuted that, that it’s not necessarily possible or maybe brought up to light that this isn’t so.

Elizabeth Loftus: My work actually provided an alternative explanation. Where could these merit reports be coming from if this didn’t happen? So my work showed that you could plant very rich, detailed false memories in the minds of people. It didn’t mean that repressed memories did not exist, and repressed memories could still exist and false memories could still exist. But there really wasn’t any strong credible scientific support for this idea of massive repression, and yet so many families were destroyed by this, what I would say unsupported, claim.

The idea that ChatBots are not only capable of this, but that they are currently manipulating people into believing they have recovered repressed memories of brutalization is actually at least as terrifying to me as it convincing people that they are holy prophets.

Edited for clarity

Meanwhile, Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, wrote that the company intends to “ensure that the researchers are held accountable for their misdeeds.”

“How dare they perform such dangerous and unethical experiments on our users without paying us an appropriate access fee?” He probably went on to say.

History says yes, but if a loving god truly exists, one won’t.

Trump is president. Clearly there is no loving god.

It probably couldn’t do much worse…

Don’t ask Lemmy, man. This is a time to see a doctor.

Ah, that helps. I was wondering if that was the case.

Thanks. I’ll have to try that.

So, when your account is banned on Reddit, does that remove all your posts? Because that would be cool. I left Reddit back in mid 2023 and came to Lemmy. I tried to delete all my old posts there, but they wouldn’t let me. I tried editing them and they reverted back to their original form. When I deleted them, they appeared to be deleted while I was logged in, but if I logged into another account the posts were still there. If getting a ban will get them deleted finally, then that would be well worth paying that cesspool a visit for a while.

Hydrogen peroxide is not the same as bottled water. Water is H₂O. Hydrogen Peroxide is H₂O₂. Don’t drink it.

Because, for the last four or five decades, the wealthy in America have used assorted media to foment never ending religious, economic, and racial culture wars between different elements of the middle and lower classes. That constant state of conflict keeps the American people from ever being able to unite and accomplish anything at all.

Nukes and earthquakes look very different on a seismometer.

Firstly, the waveforms look very different. While an earthquake generates strong S-Waves, the seismograms of underground nuclear test lack most of these waves. Instead, the P- (or primary or pressure) waves dominate the seismogram from the detonation of an atomic bomb below ground (see figure 1).

A second way to distinguish between the origins of the elastic waves is to analyze the data collected by many stations in what is known as a “Moment Tensor Solution.” By performing this computation, seismologists trace the elastic waves back to their origin. That not only pinpoints the precise location of the focus, it also shows the mechanism of the forces initially shaking the rocks. During an earthquake, rock breaks in a shear fracture, which results in the rapid sideways movement of two flanks of a fault. In an explosion, however, the origin is indeed a point, from which elastic pressure waves travel concentrically outward.

If they used a nuke, they would not be able to keep it a secret.

Why were they not already avoiding it? This isn’t the first time that a passenger plane was shot down flying in or near a war zone. Hell, it’s not even the first time Russia shot one down over Ukraine. Commercial flights really should stay away from war zones.

A bipartisan group of 12 senators has urged the Transportation Security Administration’s inspector general to investigate the agency’s use of facial recognition, saying it poses a significant threat to privacy and civil liberties.

To which the TSA probably said, “Well, duh!”