A lot of people in this thread seem to dismiss the threat of Trump using nuclear weapons.

I guess now is a good time to remind everyone that during Trump 1.0, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley took steps to prevent Trump from misusing the country’s nuclear arsenal.

The pertinent question is if Trump 2.0 has someone looking to intercept any orders from Trump to launch nuclear weapons.

Imagine how silly it might have sounded to suggest that at one point most people would carry super powerful computers in their pockets, back when it took an entire room to do very basic computing.

They were being pretty vague, but it could be something like “25 characters after every comma used, put a vowel. 25 characters after that vowel, put a space. 25 characters after that space, put a period.” (Except much more complex than what I made up.) The point is to string together a text pattern that is so exact that it can’t be just a coincidence.

The “watermark” is the text, so when you copy the text, you’re also copying the watermark. It’s also why they say it might not be conclusive if the text output is manually edited, or the output is too short.

Not for nothing, I think these types of endeavors are going to have unintended consequences. Despite them flat out saying that the lack of a watermark doesn’t mean it wasn’t AI generated, I think it’s very plausible that the proliferation of watermarks will lend credibility to anything without a watermark.

They’re talking about the ads in podcasts put there by the podcasters. Not ads put there by Spotify.

I actually really like the technology that has been collectively lumped together as “AI”. I think it’s fairly useful now, and suspect we’re at the beginning of the curve for this technology, and it will only continue to improve, even as it becomes more efficient. I understand this is a wildly unpopular stance in these parts, judging by the avalanche of downvotes I get for having this opinion.

What I don’t like is feeding tons of information about myself to a giant tech company. I run a local LLM on my phone and another on my (fairly decent) computer, and sometimes I use duckduckgo’s front end, which anonymizes prompts.

As for agents, it’s pretty much as you say. I just am not ready to have an LLM take action without my direct supervision, because I’m confident that between flaws in the LLM and flaws in how I give it direction, something will go sideways.

If your loved one is diagnosed with cancer early that would have been missed by a human, that’s a fucking benefit, is it not?

I’m sick of luddites.

If you have any specific constructive criticism or corrections for me, I’ll happily read them. Otherwise, it seems more like you’re avoiding addressing what I’ve said and just looking to insult me, which I’m sure was not your intent.

As I said elsewhere, that’s like saying the internet is just websites (and apparently for some people, that’s all it is).

However, it’s irrelevant, Doctorow may have wanted to just discuss chatbots, but that doesn’t mean that’s all I’m allowed to discuss. I’ve tried to make it clear that I’m not just talking about chatbots. If I wasn’t clear enough on that point, I apologise

Now that this has been cleared up, do you have anything further to discuss?

You seem very passionate about this topic, but you’re not really adding much to the discussion.

Don’t worry, its coming across loud and clear that AI could cure cancer and you’d still think it was better to have cancer than use AI. I get it. AI = bad, full stop. Message received.

There are studies that show that LLMs (chatbots) perform as well or better than human physicians.

I’m not suggesting getting rid of physicians, though. This is a tool for humans, not a replacement.

Which was my earlier point. He is wrong when he equates AI with nothing more than chatbots.

I’ve read all your comments so far

I’m flattered. Did you read the first one where I said it was reductive to equate AI with chatbots?

You are talking about a different thing than I am. The American healthcare system is garbage with or without AI, but AI is helping the medical field. Getting a more accurate analysis of an MRI scan is objectively a good thing, for example, even if the healthcare system that performed the scan is garbage.

The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.

I can’t vouch for that other person’s anecdote, but it seems entirely plausible that an LLM chatbot would be able to better diagnose an issue than a search engine, or even a human doctor, especially if the underlying issue was something like an autoimmune disease, which are notoriously difficult to diagnose.

One of the big flaws in the medical profession (and, really, most professions) is that once you are out of school, nothing forces you to keep learning as the field advances. This potentially, and counterintuitively, results in gaps in knowledge that increase the longer a doctor has been practicing. LLMs, with access to the newer medical information and with the ability to receive and output natural language, do make good tools for diagnosis.

AI, as it turns out, is also way better at analyzing MRI scans and x-rays than humans.

An old-fashioned Google search can point you to more information, if you’re curious about how AI has advanced the medical field.

I don’t disagree that the term AI has shifted significantly in the last 4 years or so, but I was actually meaning it in the other direction, as in, there is more to generative AI (what people are calling “AI” these days) than just chat bots.

The world is full of people who insist that “AI is changing everything” but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they’re pretty sure that AI will change everything.

If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country’s chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country’s ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.

He is definitely pretending that change is either on or off.

Are CEOs jumping the gun on how quickly they adopt AI into workflows? Definitely. However, there’s a big difference between “AI isn’t at a threshold where it is disruptive” and “AI isn’t disruptive”. Or, to belabor the metaphor: CEOs are jumping the gun, but the race is about to start and they’re on the correct track.

I generally respect this guy’s opinion (I probably use the term “enshitification” multiple times a week!), but pretending that “AI” and “Chabot” are interchangeable terms seems wildly reductive, and the subtle presumption that the process of changing is a binary changed/non-changed situation instead of a curve is just ignorant.

If the internet was “turned off” after 4 or so years not much would have changed, either.

If the government asks, they typically need a warrant. (There are exceptions, but they’re fairly narrow). Is there a specific example you’re thinking of?

This scenario, though, is Snapchat volunteering the information. It wouldn’t really make much sense to require the government to get a warrant to recieve a tip, would it?

And shouldn’t we applaud the practice? Sure, in this scenario it was a false positive, but if this student teacher were actually planning to do what she joked about and Snapchat sat on that information, I suspect many of the people poohpoohing Snapchat would be angry that they didn’t inform law enforcement.

I have no idea why people are using Snapchat in 2026; it was never as private or discreet as it pretended to be, as you could just take a picture of the “self deleting” message with another device. However, it sounds like people still using it need to demand E2EE direct messages. It worked for Facebook.

we must make the implied right to privacy explicit

I would be interested in reading more about how you imagine this might work.

To be up front, I don’t consider unencrypted messages on someone else’s server to be “private” at all; Snapchat can obviously see everything anyone sends unencrypted on their app. So, that’s where I’m starting from.