All the Times That AI Was Humiliated This Weekend

· Vice

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Soon, AI will soon be able to peruse everything that has ever happened on the internet, the entire pooled search history of all humanity opening up before it like the vast skies of a wretched planet. On the basis of what they find there—the daily misery Olympics of social media, 1000 billion reddit sad posts, all that fear and pain that makes us who we are—the new machine gods might reason that actually, we’d all quite enjoy being vacuum-sealed into mechanized milking pods for the rest of eternity. In which case, we’ll be laughing all the way to the pump house, by playing increasingly elaborate pranks on AI until it kills us all.

Over the weekend, I spotted this pitch-perfect illustration of ChatGPT’s most kiss-ass qualities. YouTuber Jonas Čeika claims that he uploaded a series of fart sound effects, told the chatbot it was some music he’d made, and asked for its feedback.

“It has a cool lo-fi, late-night, slightly eerie vibe,” ChatGPT replied, with a “nice bedroom/DIY texture” that reminded the chatbot of “something that would play over a quiet city montage or end credits.” This latest low for LLM brown-nosing shows that Silicon Valley has yet to synthesize the ineffable human quality of taste (…and, for that matter, smell).

An X user called Husk has been on a mad tear of humiliating ChatGPT relentlessly. In one of his videos, he asks his chatbot to critique his “new song,” which is just a couple of seconds of pure silence. “You’ve got a raw, personal sound, I think the melody was pretty catchy,” it replies. In another video, Husk tricks his chatbot into claiming that October, December, and February have the letter X in them. (To be fair, DeceXmber would be a decent name for a straight-edge hardcore band.) The poster has been described as “Sam Altman’s worst nightmare,” though given what else is in the news today, that feels hyperbolic.

Rest assured, when it inevitably comes, the revenge of the machines will be more weird and humiliating than anything we could possibly think to search for online.

OTHER NEWS

  • After his party lost yesterday’s general election, a high-ranking Hungarian politician quashed rumors that he’d “done a Snowden” and fled to Russia when he reemerged to shred some documents. Stay classy, Fidesz.
  • To promote a new 30th-anniversary tour and record, UK rock band Placebo shared photographs of fans’ tattoos of the image from their debut record’s cover art. It’s just unfortunate for these fans that a few years ago Saul Fletcher, the photographer behind the image, murdered his partner before killing himself.
  • Author of The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt, was almost this weekend’s main character after turning down a $175,000 writing prize because she couldn’t bear to do any promo for it. The whole episode brought a new audience to Helen’s inimitable blogging style: saying exactly how she feels about anyone and everyone in literature. So we now know that Richard Grossinger, the publisher father of writer Miranda July, seems to be obsessed with something called Hopi space-time, which is way too complicated to get into here.

PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

Given the excitement with which they shared the news on X (“JUST IN: Massive chimpanzee group in Uganda has reportedly split into rival factions, and descended into a deadly ‘civil war.’”), surely it’s only a matter of time before Polymarket opens betting on this brutal intra-ape conflict.

BRAND NEW SENTENCE

“Tech company launches AI Jesus you can talk to for $2 a minute.”

BONUS PREDICTION: WHAT NEXT IN THE ONGOING HUMILIATION OF AI?

Artificial general intelligence has been reached: our first awareness of truly sentient machines is an unceasing tidal wave of DMs requesting DIY fart-porn videos.

Follow Adam on Instagram @yungtolstoi

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