âDesigned by Assholesâ
And the byproduct is shit.
And so is the product.
Dammit, thatâs the job of Western AI companies! How dare they!?
This was an interesting article about a phenomenon thatâs part AI slop, part enshitification, and how that ends up directly impacting, in unexpected ways, unrelated news stories.
Basically a company created, by use of generative AI text, a number of fake experts, including at least one therapist, who then got interviewed for a number of news stories by desperate journalists looking for expert quotes. The whole purpose was to create back-links to improve SEO for the companyâs sex toy review site (which, reading between the lines, is also AI slop). This doesnât seem to remotely be an isolated incident, either, which means news stories are being (increasingly) filled with AI-generated waffle masquerading as expert opinions, just so people can maximize their revenue from affiliate links and web ads on random garbage websites.
⌠The ludicrous phrase is what sleuths call a âfingerprintâ: an offbeat characteristic found in one or more publications that suggests paper-mill involvement. Today, a Google Scholar search turns up nearly two dozen articles that refer to âvegetative electron microscopyâ or âvegetative electron microscope,â including a paper from 2024 whose senior author is an editor at Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned. The publisher told us it was âcontentâ with the wording.
Searching for such clues is just one way to identify the hundreds of thousands of fake papers analysts say are polluting the scientific literature, as we reported in an investigation published last month in The Conversation. And the tale of âvegetative electron microscopyâ shows how nonsense phrases can enter the vocabulary of researchers and proliferate in the literature.
After spotting the term, the Russian chemist, who goes by the pseudonym âParalabrax clathratusâ on PubPeer, left a comment about it in November 2022 on the online forum. He also mentioned the finding to fellow fraud buster Alexander Magazinov, a software engineer in Kazakhstan, who ran a Google Scholar search on the term and got several hits, some of which he flagged on PubPeer. Most of the articles included authors from Iran. âŚ
Earlier, US Vice President JD Vance told delegates in Paris that too much regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) could âkill a transformative industry just as itâs taking offâ.
Vance told world leaders that AI was âan opportunity that the Trump administration will not squanderâ and said âpro-growth AI policiesâ should be prioritised over safety.
If governments want AI to improve services and security for their citizens, then they need to put all their information in one place â even citizensâ genomic data â according to Larry Ellison, the Oracle database tycoon.
Ah what the christ?
Itâs the FUTURE! Guardian is having a FOMO moment and they need to get caught up with everyone else!!! /s
