Basel Watfa 🇩🇪

Post-Syrian🔸 Universal Citizen ◾Pharmacist⚕️◾Translator ◾Medical communicator.
🔸Apotheker 🔸Medizinischer Kommunikator

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

We are really fucked.

• AI has become dangerous (not because it is brilliant but because it has poor judgement, a constitutional inability to reliably follow rules, a surfeit of brute force and too much access to the internet and system permissions).

• OpenAI is practically on crime spree, hinting at things to come, and Trump is doing nothing about it.

• The media is too caught up in fairytales about extinction.

Everybody is talking; nobody is really doing anything.

And it’s only going to get worse.

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

Why did you start the whole thing then? To begin with.
Looking forward a day where I no longer see or hear about Sam Altman and his peers.

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

Sam Altman is warning the world about Sam Altman, and says we need to stop Sam Altman because Sam Altman can’t stop Sam Altman.

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

Oh lieber Beethoven... was für eine Seele!

[Maria Popova @themarginalian]

How to be an artist – Beethoven's touching letter to a little girl who sent him fan mail https://t.co/PB828Fzvyx

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

Keep AI away from Masterpieces such as Starry Night! What Van Gogh imagined that night 18.06.1889 is something way beyond human comprehension let alone Machine Learning! AI art is not Art.. It is BS

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

finally AI can show us what painters wanted us to see

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

Pass it on. CRAP

[Michael @TheMG3D]

Pass it on! CRAP!

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

Kein Kommentar! Einfach katastrophal

[Maja von Westphal @majavonwestphal]

Lehrplanentwurf für die fucking 5. Klasse, Fach Englisch.

Verbindliche Inhalte u.a.:
- Schreiben mit LLM
- Übersetzen mit LLM
- Chatten mit LLM

Kritische Auseinandersetzung?
Nö. Wieso auch?!

Wir möchten hier gerade alles anzünden. Was stimmt nicht mit den Leuten, was?!?! 🤬

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

@DorotheaBaur @MrEwanMorrison One of the best articles indeed. I wanted to translate it into German once I read it, but did not, leider.

[Jo No 🇩🇪🇪🇺🇺🇦🇬🇪 @jono0815]

Palantir raus! Aus allem! Sofort, unverzüglich!

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

Deshalb liebe ich Deutsch

[German Simply 🇩🇪 @GermanSimply_]

🇩🇪 German has a word for the sadness you feel knowing the world will never be what it should be.

Weltschmerz
Welt = world. Schmerz = pain

English can't name it. German built a word for it – because naming a feeling is honouring it.

More where that came from. Grab a coffee🧵👇

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

What this paper manifests is what we might call " AI Enshitification" :
The experiments showed that AI -assisted users finished early questions faster, but after roughly 10 minutes without AI, they solved less, stalled more, and quit sooner.

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

BIG claim from new MIT + Oxford + Carnegie Mellon and other top labs paper:

AI can boost performance at first and then leave people less able to think through problems on their own.

Just minutes of AI help can improve scores now while weakening independent problem-solving right after.

The interesting part is that the damage is not just lower accuracy.

It is lower persistence, which is usually the hidden engine of learning, because skill grows through repeated contact with difficulty, not just exposure to correct answers.

That's why a good teacher sometimes withholds help to preserve struggle as part of the lesson, while today’s chatbots are tuned to erase friction on demand.

Across 3 experiments in math and reading, about 1.2K people either worked alone or used a GPT-5-based assistant for part of the task.

Assisted users finished early questions faster, but after roughly 10 minutes without AI, they solved less, stalled more, and quit sooner.

That happens because hard thinking is not only about getting answers; it is also about building the habit of holding a problem in mind, testing steps, and pushing through confusion.

The sharpest drop came from people who used the model for direct answers, not from those who used it more like a hint system, which suggests the real issue is not AI exposure itself but replacing effort with completion.

The result is not that AI makes people less capable by default, but that answer outsourcing can shrink the mental effort that normally trains skill.

----

Paper Link – arxiv. org/abs/2604.04721

Paper Title: "AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance"

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

I am using Brave and duckduckgo to watch YouTube: 0 Ads

[Ewan Morrison @MrEwanMorrison]

Thanks to enshittification, this is now the cost of trying to live without all those advertisements that we hate.

YouTube Premium - $191.88
Netflix Standard -$239.88
Amazon Prime Video Ultra - $59.88
X Premium+ - $480.00
Apple TV+ - $155.88

Total per year - $1127.63

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

You would never see the Internet the way you do after reading " Enshitification". We are being enshitified in every way possible by big tech and we really have to be careful. Thanks a million @doctorow for this great , albeit frustrating, work.

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

''That is a system actively making people worse at knowing what they don't know, which is one of the most dangerous things you can do to human judgment at scale. The companies pushing AI hardest into employee workflows should be reading this research carefully."

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied what they call cognitive surrender, the tendency to accept AI outputs without critical evaluation. Across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 trials, subjects accepted faulty AI reasoning 73.2% of the time and only overruled it 19.7% of the time. When the AI was wrong, users still accepted its answer 80% of the time. Subjects who used AI scored 11.7% higher on confidence in their answers despite the AI being wrong half the time. Adding time pressure made people 12 percentage points less likely to catch AI errors. Adding financial incentives and immediate feedback made them 19 points more likely to catch them.

My Take
The time pressure finding matters enormously for how AI is actually being deployed in workplaces. Companies are using AI to justify faster turnaround times, which means employees are using it under exactly the conditions that make them least likely to catch mistakes. When you're rushed, your internal monitor for detecting errors essentially stops firing, so you get AI output, no time to review it, high confidence it's correct, and a meaningful chance it's wrong.

People using a system that was wrong half the time still felt more confident in their answers than people who weren't using AI at all. That is a system actively making people worse at knowing what they don't know, which is one of the most dangerous things you can do to human judgment at scale. The companies pushing AI hardest into employee workflows should be reading this research carefully.

Hedgie🤗

Link to research for those interested: https://t.co/0iZz42132M

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

The worse is yet to come

[Reid Southen @Rahll]

Someone trained AI on her music, got a distributor for it, the distributor then copyright claimed her videos and music that the AI was trained on, effectively stealing her money. An absolute outrage, AI and AI powered scammers are strangling creatives.

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

The sparks it generates that you, subconsciously, evoke every now and then

[G. F. Allen @AuthorGFAllen]

What makes a piece of writing truly memorable?

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

Furthermore, the number of people who are capable of watching,say, a significant documentary film is becoming less and less. All because Big Tech CEOs , driven by greed and FOMO , are literally ruling the entire internet.

[Michael Shermer @michaelshermer]

Over 35 years of professional writing I have noticed that fewer & fewer people read full books & magazines now. They want a tweet summary, or a 1-minute video, or a 7-minute excerpt at the longest. I wrote a 9000-word analysis of compatibilism in Truth but readers want 900 words.

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

Exactly. Nobody.

[Luiza Jarovsky, PhD @LuizaJarovsky]

Nobody wants to read AI-generated books.

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

@doctorow obviously, '' Enshittification'' is getting more momentum as people realize the reality of being enshittified
https://t.co/P6mlaUmEpm

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

AI companionship is the worst manifestation of Loneliness Pandemic, on which BIC Tecs capitalize and earn a great revenue, sadly.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

This is so weird. Why on earth would anyone find companionship with an AI ‘companion’? None of this is remotely healthy or real. It’s actually seriously fucked up.

[Basel Watfa 🇩🇪 @WatfaWriter]

Why blame him to begin with? Blame every platform that gave him a space, every country invited him,every podcast that gave him the opportunity to utter his dystopian nonsense from the bubble he lives in. Sad to see such a lunatic having such privilege, really.

[Luiza Jarovsky, PhD @LuizaJarovsky]

🚨 BREAKING: Sam Altman justifies AI's energy efficiency by comparing it to the FOOD humans need to eat in 20 years of life, plus all our evolutionary history.

That's a strange way to escape from environmental scrutiny.