I love the EFF, but I wish people in power had been actually listening to the things they’ve said over the years… They have been one of the more thoughtful organizations when it comes to technology and public policy… But I guess they’re too woke or whatever.
By careful analysis of historical photos, we have estimated that London consisted of approximately 15% Big Bens by area.
I notice it still has problems with rendering clock faces.
The manifesto also claims he had no friends and did not want any. He reportedly planned the act for about six months, allegedly using ChatGPT as an aid.
Well the name “Big Ben” does imply the existence of other, smaller Bens, doesn’t it? They must have been lost to time.
Please spay and neuter your Big Ben’s.
This was just posted by @tbretc.bsky.social on another platform. The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a ‘summer reads’ feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?
I got curious, so I looked up the second title since it kind of sounded like a reasonable name for a book, even if not by Andy Weir.
And that’s how I ran into this:
Which is also on Amazon:
So, apparently Isaac Asimov is still writing new books, in 2025… and even entire series of them:
Definitely oddly written, and that sounds like a pretty ambitious summary for a book that is listed as being only 12 pages long. If I didn’t know better (*cough*), I’d suspect it was an AI-produced hallucination of a story. Interestingly, if I ask Google about “the last algorithm asimov”, the AI overview actually picks up on the problems:
And in trying to disclaim AI, they’ve somehow managed to make it worse.
Man, there are a ton of other great roasts in the replies.
So the guy who created this slop admitted to it and apologized for it, saying there was no excuse for it, but that obviously doesn’t absolve the news organization for being willing to buy and distribute this slop without checking it.
As willing as the guy is to accept 100% of the blame, there’s more than enough to spread around.
The 404 Media piece. What a shitshow the internet is so rapidly becoming!
Other articles in the Heat Index insert have what appear to be AI-generated sections as well. For example, in an article called “Hanging Out: Inside America’s growing hammock culture,” Buscaglia quotes “Dr. Jennifer Campos, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Colorado, in her 2023 research paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.” A search for Campos in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography does not return any results. While it’s not exactly clear why the AI said this, the only mention of “Jennifer Campos” on the University of Colorado’s website is about the graduation of a student named Jennifer Campos, who works in advertising. The same article also mentions a “2023 Outside Magazine interview” with Brianna Madia, the author of Nowhere for Very Long, a book about van life. “A hammock is basically my most essential piece of furniture,” Buscaglia quotes her as saying. Outside interviewed Madia in 2019, but hammocks were not discussed. Outside also did an article about her favorite van life gear in 2017, and she did not mention hammocks. The quote Buscaglia included does not show up on the internet outside of his own article. There are examples like this throughout the section, and several of them have been pointed out by the journalist Joshua J. Friedman on Bluesky.
“… was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom.”
They printed it, ipso facto they approved it.
And your Small and Medium Bens by the look of that Londiniumiumiumium.
AI generated slop reading lists?
I wish such a large proportion of those I see weren’t at this stage.
And not only student papers.
And not just undergrads.
And not just queries by faculty.
Oh no, I get queries from students looking for readings they can’t find, I reply “sorry but they are kind of like real articles in sometimes real journals by real sounding authors who somehow don’t exist on the LoC authorities or WorldCat or Google Scholar etc, because they are AI chum”.
So one of my students last year, bless them, wrote to the editor of a high ranking journal with a slop reading lists asking what was going on. They got a sniffy email back about how they have the highest standards of AI use. They also spammed me with stuff about how they were the most trusted scholarly society in their field and their policies.
Dude, I don’t care.
It’s slop. Slop everywhere.
