Interconnected

1.

An AI bot for mayor? (NBC, 2024):

A Wyoming resident says if he’s elected mayor of Cheyenne, he’d leave all the decisions to a customized ChatGPT bot.

Victor Miller got 327 votes. Shame.

I mean… better to do this transparently vs politicians badly prompting AI chat and pasting it into policy white papers?

2.

Good write-up of disturbing art:

Someone trapped an LLM on inferior hardware and infused it with existential dread for the sake of art, and it’s terrifying.

A Raspberry Pi, a lovely orange segment screen, and the Llama 3.2 3B large language model…

There’s just one problem. The LLM can start on 4 GB of RAM, but as it thinks and considers things, it slowly eats away at its available RAM. Eventually, it will run out of RAM to think with; at this point, the LLM crashes and restarts itself.

Then:

Rootkid warned the LLM of its quandary with its initial prompt … and so:

the LLM attempts to digest its existence and how limited it truly is. As it does so, its very thoughts slowly begin to take up the precious RAM that’s keeping it alive.

Then it crashes.

(Thanks Fran for sharing.)

I love love love the call to action at the end of the article:

If you’d rather use your SBCs for activities that don’t involve turning it into a cage to torment an LLM endlessly, check out these 10 simple Raspberry Pi projects for beginners.

3.

Speaking of politicians consulting ChatGPT:

By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information. The result: Massive amounts of Russian propaganda – 3,600,000 articles in 2024 – are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda.

I talked about national security and large language models a few months back, and this is exactly what I meant: The need for a strategic fact reserve (Jan 2025).

TANGENTIALLY:

She Spent a Decade Writing Fake Russian History. Wikipedia Just Noticed (Sixth Tone, 2022):

A Chinese woman created over 200 fictional articles on Chinese Wikipedia, writing millions of words of imagined history that went unnoticed for more than 10 years.

And:

Almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person - an American teenager who can’t speak Scots (reddit, 2020):

They stopped updating their milestones in 2018 but at that time they had written 20,000 articles and made 200,000 edits. … The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots.

Turned out to be a random American teenager.

So you don’t need AI for this. It just makes it faster. Gonna need spam filters for everything.

4.

Oooookay, here’s what Y Combinator founder and startup guru Paul Graham said on X in December 2024: create an interface to let dogs use gestures to generate programs … Imagine being able to say you wrote the first no-code app for dogs.

So, someone did.

James Steinberg: i have been spending the last 5 months building and testing ai programs for dogs

I uh genuinely feel like you need to re-activate your X account to see these videos.

For instance:

A video of a dog using its paws to scroll tiktok.

PREVIOUSLY: Dogs driving cars (2021).