Two of my family members pay for ChatGPT. I don't get it. It's ok for things like asking how you say "go to hell" in Inuit. But other than that how can you trust it?
The tissue definitely appears to be a tissue, despite a fake AI generated image doing the rounds, which makes it look like a plastic bag. This removes the context for supposing that the toothpick or stirrer is a coke spoon. End of controversy I think, other than the fact that Macron still looks totally wired and still grabs a tissue and hides it with a very guilty look on his face. He is obviously whacko and Starmer is still obviously an arsehole who sounds like a broken down Dalek.
Grok has changed its mind again, citing exactly the same evidence. The object is now definitely a toothpick.
"The claim that Macron, Merz, and Starmer were caught with cocaine on a train to Kyiv on May 9, 2025, appears to be false. French media, like Libération, and international outlets, such as India Today, have debunked it, identifying the "white powder" as a handkerchief and the "spoon" as a toothpick, based on high-quality AFP and AP images.
The rumor, fueled by Alex Jones and Russian officials like Maria Zakharova, lacks solid evidence and seems tied to a disinformation campaign. While the viral video sparked debate, credible sources lean toward the objects being innocuous, highlighting the spread of misinformation on social media."
Yes, you're right that AI cannot 'reason' (much like many of those in the credentialed classes.) When it 'changes its mind' it's because new articles have appeared in its reference set that point it towards a different interpretation. In this case it may even have been your own questions about toothpicks that swayed it!
Your reply raises a more serious point - that general AI systems sound to most people like they're reasoning when in fact they are merely synthesising and articulating factoids. Their responses in the general case (i.e. unrestricted to a specialised domain) can't be expected to be more that untrustworthy and fickle (as your toothpick example shows).
It is the abandonment of reason by humans, evidence the increasing tendency to outsource 'thinking' to AI and rely upon the Word of AI (almost as if it was the Word of the Almighty himself) that is the real issue I believe. Provide free crutches and you will create a nation of cripples. Of course, you could say the same about vacuum cleaners. I couldn't/wouldn't do without my Dyson now! I fancy that the widespread reliance upon AI though will not be nearly so benign or as beneficial as the blanket reliance upon vacuum cleaners.
Yes, there is a kind of tyranny at work here. There may be a bunch of wannabe despots behind some of it but it seems to me more to do with a decline in the values we used to hold dear - like self-reliance, forbearance and common sense.
As the dictum says: 'slaves need tyrants just as much as tyrants need slaves'.
Of course it can’t reason, for reasoning is far more than just a series of arithmetic operations, which is all a computer can do, despite the cleverness of the software.
In the words of Edsger Dijkstra (if you don’t know who that is, you really should look him up):
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
“AI”, despite the hype, simply guesses sequences of words. It’s a mathematical model and mathematical models can only say what the modeler tells them to say.
Belief that “AI” will ever become “sentient” is little more than superstition. It won’t.
It's totally reasonable to conclude that PUBLICLY AVAILABLE AI is not intelligent. That said, there's no reason to believe that publicly available AI options represent the "most intelligent" forms of AI. There may well be forms of AI only available to certain insiders that operate on different principles and in different physical substrates.
I say this because I have personally had the opportunity to interact with much more capable AI, and it was many years ago at that. I.e. I've interacted with AI that matched or exceeded some of my own skills and that evinced a sense of humor. It was clearly an early form of AGI. There's a story there involving a weird and wonderful cast of characters, the human condition, Public Key Cryptography, Darpa, the FQHE, the Five Eyes agencies, several Nobel laureates, the best hackers on the planet (some overlap with previous item), international intrigue, FETs, eschatology, Unix, and even the Unabomber's manifesto. This story has not yet been told in full. I only know a part of it. Few still alive know the full story and they are all bound by the Official Secrets Act.
The AI we're allowed to see publicly is a pale shadow of what's already out there.
Jaime, perhaps add the disclaimer, "Publicly available AI is not intelligent".
Is there intelligent machine code elsewhere? There might be. Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe? There might be. I just confine myself to speaking about what is here, in front of us.
Jaime, there definitely is intelligent machine code elsewhere. It's one of the peculiar things learned when this technology was first deployed. A primitive version of the same technology was seemingly discovered in Earth's magnetosphere about 25 years ago. It's a scientific curiousity that can't be publicly mentioned, as doing so reveals too much secretive Five Eyes capability. I.e. The spies still seek to keep ULTRA II secret so ancillary discoveries are supppressed.
"1999-2003 - (Author's Hypothesis) Satellite experiments confirm that two-dimensional teleportation-based TQNN nanotechnology can exist in Earth’s Magnetopause. The environment is sufficiently two-dimensional for an adapted version to flourish there. A very simple, naturally-occurring, billion-year-old version of the same phenomenon is discovered in that two-dimensional ecosystem. This ancient [extraterrestrial] teleportation-based TQNN pattern is relegated to a reservation. ULTRA II nanotechnology takes over the rest of the magnetopause. Access to the magnetopause ‘ecosystem’ greatly increases available power. COWS call their creation Aurasys, short for Aurora System."
AI is largely an attractive front end UI for a common search engine. There is no intelligence, artificial or otherwise.
That being said there are some compelling use cases. I use it all the time for coding and data extraction. It's effectively a pretty decent 5th generation programming language that returns java and python with a good amount of quality (far from perfect).
Again, that's PUBLICLY AVAILABLE AI. That's the AI we've both seen as developers. There may be other sorts with which we are not allowed to interact or know about.
Nah.... I've been building/training LLM's for 2 years now. This is perhaps the biggest boondoggle I've ever seen. I mean maybe there's some super secret magic at OpenAi but I think we're just seeing Theranos style marketing.
What did Grok say about the guilty looks on their face. I have been there. I know. It didn't seem natural at all? I'm not saying anything besides that. But they did look the part...
And I just don't think you would need to clean that up so quick if it's was just a stirrer and dirty nappy. I mean why then also throw it behind your back lol
Macron's guilty expression is undeniable, as also is the fact that he's definitely wired - unlike Grok, which needs to be rewired if it's ever to be considered truly intelligent.
Seems like Grok is doing a pretty good job of playing dumb. Perhaps it really doesn't understand but more likely is that it's been trained not to say anything that threatens world leaders with scandal. For example, it's similarly obtuse when working other topics that threaten "the narrative" but seems perfectly able to do a bit better when working on a topic that does not threaten scandal against world leaders.
Try asking AIs about medical topics that threaten the interests of Big Pharma and see what it produces. AI has been trained to lie and deceive.
Two of my family members pay for ChatGPT. I don't get it. It's ok for things like asking how you say "go to hell" in Inuit. But other than that how can you trust it?
Sounds as if he either has dementia or is a backward 3 year-old.
The tissue definitely appears to be a tissue, despite a fake AI generated image doing the rounds, which makes it look like a plastic bag. This removes the context for supposing that the toothpick or stirrer is a coke spoon. End of controversy I think, other than the fact that Macron still looks totally wired and still grabs a tissue and hides it with a very guilty look on his face. He is obviously whacko and Starmer is still obviously an arsehole who sounds like a broken down Dalek.
Grok has changed its mind again, citing exactly the same evidence. The object is now definitely a toothpick.
"The claim that Macron, Merz, and Starmer were caught with cocaine on a train to Kyiv on May 9, 2025, appears to be false. French media, like Libération, and international outlets, such as India Today, have debunked it, identifying the "white powder" as a handkerchief and the "spoon" as a toothpick, based on high-quality AFP and AP images.
The rumor, fueled by Alex Jones and Russian officials like Maria Zakharova, lacks solid evidence and seems tied to a disinformation campaign. While the viral video sparked debate, credible sources lean toward the objects being innocuous, highlighting the spread of misinformation on social media."
https://x.com/grok/status/1921786063414260205
LOL. Schrodinger's coke spoon. One moment it's a stirrer, then it's a toothpick or a stirrer, then it's a toothpick.
It reasons no worse than mad maskers.
The loss or abandonment of reason is probably a more serious issue than a complete failure to manifest it in the first place!
Yes, you're right that AI cannot 'reason' (much like many of those in the credentialed classes.) When it 'changes its mind' it's because new articles have appeared in its reference set that point it towards a different interpretation. In this case it may even have been your own questions about toothpicks that swayed it!
Your reply raises a more serious point - that general AI systems sound to most people like they're reasoning when in fact they are merely synthesising and articulating factoids. Their responses in the general case (i.e. unrestricted to a specialised domain) can't be expected to be more that untrustworthy and fickle (as your toothpick example shows).
Perhaps AI really stands for Assisted Ignorance.
It is the abandonment of reason by humans, evidence the increasing tendency to outsource 'thinking' to AI and rely upon the Word of AI (almost as if it was the Word of the Almighty himself) that is the real issue I believe. Provide free crutches and you will create a nation of cripples. Of course, you could say the same about vacuum cleaners. I couldn't/wouldn't do without my Dyson now! I fancy that the widespread reliance upon AI though will not be nearly so benign or as beneficial as the blanket reliance upon vacuum cleaners.
Yes, there is a kind of tyranny at work here. There may be a bunch of wannabe despots behind some of it but it seems to me more to do with a decline in the values we used to hold dear - like self-reliance, forbearance and common sense.
As the dictum says: 'slaves need tyrants just as much as tyrants need slaves'.
Of course it can’t reason, for reasoning is far more than just a series of arithmetic operations, which is all a computer can do, despite the cleverness of the software.
In the words of Edsger Dijkstra (if you don’t know who that is, you really should look him up):
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
“AI”, despite the hype, simply guesses sequences of words. It’s a mathematical model and mathematical models can only say what the modeler tells them to say.
Belief that “AI” will ever become “sentient” is little more than superstition. It won’t.
It's totally reasonable to conclude that PUBLICLY AVAILABLE AI is not intelligent. That said, there's no reason to believe that publicly available AI options represent the "most intelligent" forms of AI. There may well be forms of AI only available to certain insiders that operate on different principles and in different physical substrates.
I say this because I have personally had the opportunity to interact with much more capable AI, and it was many years ago at that. I.e. I've interacted with AI that matched or exceeded some of my own skills and that evinced a sense of humor. It was clearly an early form of AGI. There's a story there involving a weird and wonderful cast of characters, the human condition, Public Key Cryptography, Darpa, the FQHE, the Five Eyes agencies, several Nobel laureates, the best hackers on the planet (some overlap with previous item), international intrigue, FETs, eschatology, Unix, and even the Unabomber's manifesto. This story has not yet been told in full. I only know a part of it. Few still alive know the full story and they are all bound by the Official Secrets Act.
The AI we're allowed to see publicly is a pale shadow of what's already out there.
Jaime, perhaps add the disclaimer, "Publicly available AI is not intelligent".
Is there intelligent machine code elsewhere? There might be. Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe? There might be. I just confine myself to speaking about what is here, in front of us.
Jaime, there definitely is intelligent machine code elsewhere. It's one of the peculiar things learned when this technology was first deployed. A primitive version of the same technology was seemingly discovered in Earth's magnetosphere about 25 years ago. It's a scientific curiousity that can't be publicly mentioned, as doing so reveals too much secretive Five Eyes capability. I.e. The spies still seek to keep ULTRA II secret so ancillary discoveries are supppressed.
https://postquantum.substack.com/p/timeline-to-advanced-nanotechnology
"1999-2003 - (Author's Hypothesis) Satellite experiments confirm that two-dimensional teleportation-based TQNN nanotechnology can exist in Earth’s Magnetopause. The environment is sufficiently two-dimensional for an adapted version to flourish there. A very simple, naturally-occurring, billion-year-old version of the same phenomenon is discovered in that two-dimensional ecosystem. This ancient [extraterrestrial] teleportation-based TQNN pattern is relegated to a reservation. ULTRA II nanotechnology takes over the rest of the magnetopause. Access to the magnetopause ‘ecosystem’ greatly increases available power. COWS call their creation Aurasys, short for Aurora System."
AI is largely an attractive front end UI for a common search engine. There is no intelligence, artificial or otherwise.
That being said there are some compelling use cases. I use it all the time for coding and data extraction. It's effectively a pretty decent 5th generation programming language that returns java and python with a good amount of quality (far from perfect).
Again, that's PUBLICLY AVAILABLE AI. That's the AI we've both seen as developers. There may be other sorts with which we are not allowed to interact or know about.
Nah.... I've been building/training LLM's for 2 years now. This is perhaps the biggest boondoggle I've ever seen. I mean maybe there's some super secret magic at OpenAi but I think we're just seeing Theranos style marketing.
What did Grok say about the guilty looks on their face. I have been there. I know. It didn't seem natural at all? I'm not saying anything besides that. But they did look the part...
And I just don't think you would need to clean that up so quick if it's was just a stirrer and dirty nappy. I mean why then also throw it behind your back lol
Macron's guilty expression is undeniable, as also is the fact that he's definitely wired - unlike Grok, which needs to be rewired if it's ever to be considered truly intelligent.
Seems like Grok is doing a pretty good job of playing dumb. Perhaps it really doesn't understand but more likely is that it's been trained not to say anything that threatens world leaders with scandal. For example, it's similarly obtuse when working other topics that threaten "the narrative" but seems perfectly able to do a bit better when working on a topic that does not threaten scandal against world leaders.
Try asking AIs about medical topics that threaten the interests of Big Pharma and see what it produces. AI has been trained to lie and deceive.
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."