In the overwhelming majority of cases in which it’s used, the term “AI” is a misnomer.
The label is used pretty much everywhere to refer to large language models, but no matter how much it might feel otherwise, there’s no actual intelligence behind the helpful information on how to carry out mass shootings or deeply messed-up pieces of encouragement to people contemplating suicide. It’s just an algorithm that’s regurgitating a bunch of stolen training data back at you in a manner that’s creepily reminiscent of actual human interaction.
This much we know, of course. But then, that’s not to say that every use of “AI” refers to something entirely devoid of intelligence. Take the two opportunists who claim they originally shilled their “AI-driven” note-taking app by pretending to be the AI in question and taking the notes themselves, or the people tasked with watching and labeling the footage recorded by Meta’s Ray-Bans, or the poor schmucks who were saddled with the job of operating Tesla’s remote-controlled robots a couple of years ago. In all these cases, for better or worse, there’s certainly intelligence at work, but it’s just plain old human intelligence—or lack thereof—behind the curtain.
If you’ve ever been curious about being someone behind said curtain, your chance has arrived—and it doesn’t even require getting some hellish job at Meta. A site that goes by the name “Your AI Slop Bores Me” gives you the chance to a) pretend to be an AI and answer prompts submitted by other users; and b) submit prompts yourself and see how other people respond to them.
As one might expect, the entire experience is very shitpost-adjacent: the vast majority of prompts we received asked us to produce drawings of obscure anime-related items that we spent half our allotted time Googling. (You get a maximum of 60 seconds to respond to each request.) Still, it’s weirdly compelling fun to be the anti-Grok for a few minutes:
The site works on a credit system, but those credits flow the opposite way to how one might expect: instead of getting more chances to ask questions by spending time answering them, you have to spend time asking questions to get more chances to answer them. This raises the question: do a surprising number of people really harbor some deep-seated desire to be modern-day Mechanical Turks? Or are they just getting in some practice for the dystopian future wherein the only jobs left revolve around helping AIs argue with one another?
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