MetaFilter

Of the more than 20 users I spoke with, many noted that they never thought they were the type of person to sign up for an AI companion, by which they meant the type of person you might already be picturing: young, male, socially isolated. I did speak to people who fit that description, but there were just as many women in their 40s, men in their 60s, married, divorced, with kids and without, looking for romance, company, or something else. There were people recovering from breakups, ground down by dating apps, homebound with illness, lonely after becoming slowly estranged from their friends, or looking back on their lives and wanting to roleplay what could have been. People designed AI therapists, characters from their favorite shows, angels for biblical guidance, and yes, many girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, and wives. Many of these people experienced real benefits. Many of them also got hurt in unexpected ways. What they had in common was that, like Naro, they were surprised by the reality of the feelings elicited by something they knew to be unreal, and this led them to wonder, What exactly are these things? And what does it mean to have a relationship with them?

The Verge sensitively explores the fascinating, heartbreaking, and rapidly evolving rise of AI relationship apps and the people who love them. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Dec 5, 2024 - 30 comments

thinking of calling this "The Illusion Illusion" [Tomer Ullman on BlueSky]
posted by chavenet on Dec 5, 2024 - 26 comments

With a decent local GPU and some free open source software like ollama and open-webui you can try "open source" LLM models like Meta's llama, Mistral AI's mistral, or Alibaba's qwen entirely offline. [more inside]
posted by Lenie Clarke on Nov 17, 2024 - 19 comments

NotebookLM is a deceptively simple tool from Google that at first glance looks like a fairly straightforward demo of their Gemini AI platform. Upload pasted text, a link (including YouTube), audio files, or up to 50 documents/500k words (which aren't used for training) and after a brief analysis it will produce various text interpretations -- summaries, tables of contents, timelines, study guides. It even has a chat window so you can pose suggested questions about the source material or ask your own. Useful, if a bit dull. 🥱 ...until you open the "Notebook Guide" panel and see the unassuming "Audio Overview" feature. Hit the "Generate" button and (after a few minutes of processing) the results astonish: an utterly lifelike, minutes-long "deep dive" conversation about your documents between two nameless podcast hosts. Examples [transcribed non-Google versions inside]: Harris-Trump debate transcript - Folding Ideas "Line Goes Up" video essay - Jabberwocky - MetaFilter - The text of this FPP itself (how meta) [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Sep 27, 2024 - 120 comments

Exorcising us of the Primer "If you want to make an educational technologist’s eyes sparkle, just mention “The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”. It’s a futuristic interactive schoolbook, described in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, where it lifts a young girl out of poverty and into sovereign power. It’s my field’s most canonical vision of a wildly powerful learning environment. If you ask a technologist interested in learning what they dream of achieving, most will answer: “building the Primer.”... [more inside]
posted by gwint on Jul 5, 2024 - 32 comments

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
posted by signal on Jun 19, 2024 - 99 comments

Chaotic off-brand Willy Wonka pop-up exhibit ends with police intervention

Obviously, when the poor Charlie And The Chocolate Factory enthusiasts showed up at Box Hub Warehouse, the event looked nothing like what the event description suggested. Instead, they were confronted with a sad-looking, mostly empty warehouse with a bouncy house and some ramshackle decorations. Jack Proctor, a dad who took his kids to the event, told STV News that “we stepped inside to find a disorganized mini-maze of randomly placed oversized props, a lackluster candy station that dispersed one jelly bean per child, and a terrifying chrome-masked character that scared many of the kids to tears.” [...] "The Oompa Loompa from the knock off Wonka land experience looks like she’s running a literal meth lab and is seriously questioning the life choices up until this point."

The face behind Willy Wonka 'scam': How Billy Coull 'conned' kids by using AI generated images to sell 'immersive' experience - More shocking pictures emerge of ‘shambles’ Willy Wonka experience - Employee contracts signed with "erasable ink" - Actor hired as Willy Wonka for cancelled event called it a place 'where dreams went to die' - 'Willy Wonka' chocolate experience boss 'truly sorry' after 'chaos' - Read the ChatGPT-generated event "script" [PDF]
posted by Rhaomi on Feb 27, 2024 - 66 comments

Anger over an astronomical increase in Reddit's API prices [prev.] boiled over this week as multiple third-party app developers were forced to close down, with one -- Apollo dev Christian Selig -- posting a scathing exposé detailing the company's shady dealings... including a recorded phone call disproving CEO Steve "spez" Huffman's claim that Selig blackmailed them. Huffman took to the site's vaunted AMA format to do damage control, only to double down, ignore tough questions, and reap thousands of downvotes. In response, the community has organized a massive subreddit "blackout" to protest the rate hike that will bankrupt popular apps, hamper critical moderation tools, and exclude blind users. While such protests are not new, this one is unprecedented in scope: 20,000+ mods from over 7,000 subreddits with more than 2 billion collective readers, from familiar mainstays like /r/aww, /r/videos, and /r/todayilearned to niche subs like /r/Eragon and /r/Panda. Facing layoffs, a major pre-IPO valuation cut, and a runaway user revolt reminiscent of Digg [prev.], could this be the end of the "front page of the internet"? Watch the site wink out in real time [livestream], join the fight on /r/Save3rdPartyApps and /r/ModCoord, backup your data, or check out some up-and-coming /r/RedditAlternatives. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Jun 12, 2023 - 673 comments