Wilson 🫒

gay wrath month🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️
they/them

[Omar El-Ayat @oelayat]

“All of Lebanon must burn”

Free Press writer: I’d gently push back on the idea that this is extreme

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Mayowa @Mayoveli]

This cost them about $1 trillion.

The truth is, you cannot build systems like this exclusively on the logic of profit. You cannot expect to break even in 20 or 30 years. Projects of this scale are built because the government decides they must exist to serve the people.

And this is a problem with systems that are strictly, or overwhelmingly, capitalist. If you leave every problem in your society to the spontaneity of the market, some challenges are so large and so unprofitable that you will never have sufficient incentive to solve them.

[Carlos @agent_of_change]

Europeans used to be big fans of green energy, but now that the Chinese are leading the way they seem to be changing their minds.

“China dominates green tech, producing about 90 per cent of the world’s solar modules, more than 80 per cent of wind turbines and 80 per cent of battery cells, as well as controlling wider supply chains for rare earth and semiconductor materials.”

Europe apparently needs to be mindful that “we don’t replace one set of dependencies on fossil fuel imports with a dependency on Chinese low-carbon technology.”

One of the reasons for caution is that “China was likely to restrict supply of low-carbon technology and components”.

It’s worth noting that China would only ever do such a thing in a context where Europe was engaged in aggression against it. So the question for Europeans is: what’s more important, preventing climate catastrophe, or reserving the right to participate in hot and cold war on China?

A very revealing sentence: “An under-appreciated risk was that the US could demand Europe remove Chinese technology from its energy systems — or face tariffs, sanctions or reduced security commitments.”

This is a stark admission that Europe is likely to be forced into subjugating its own interests to those of the Project for a New American Century.

All pretty pathetic.

[Reid Chalker @ReidChalker]

@loomdoop @katewillett Always comes back to a joke The Onion made.

[Jesse Peltan @JessePeltan]

This is actually ridiculous.

[Pirat_Nation 🔴 @Pirat_Nation]

Starting in 2027, smartphones sold in the European Union will be required to have user-replaceable batteries designed for greater durability and more charging cycles.

Manufacturers must also provide spare parts and repair manuals for at least 10 years after a model is released.

This is real pressure against planned obsolescence. It should mean phones that actually last longer, cheaper fixes, and a lot less electronic waste piling up. About time.

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

It's easy to get desensitized to this, but Netanyahu just bragged about intentionally killing civilians in Iran.

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

god I hate this faux populist bullshit. K-12 is also free for rich people, as are public parks, the fire dept, libraries etc. Study after study shows means testing is the quickest way to gut programs for the rich AND the poor because it erodes the public base of support.

[ada @enayessa]

gaga and ariana have already been on here so they'd have to be like SUPER famous like beyoncé or taylor swift or carly rae jepsen

[Alex Taliadoros @AlexCTaliadoros]

Throwback to this classic from the Washington Post Editorial Board.

[hasanabi @hasanthehun]

we’re here because corpo centrist pro israel dems believe that trumps unpopularity will be enough to give them marginal electoral victories w/o having to push for material changes that address the working class needs. people want real fighters. they want real change!!!

[Aaron Regunberg @AaronRegunberg]

I hate to contradict Third Way but I’m gonna go out on a crazy limb and say it’d probably be more electorally valuable for every Dem to spend the next two weeks hammering this line rather than debating what we all think about Hasan Piker.

[river moon @kissmeriver]

robyn wrote piece of me by britney and these gays are talking shit about her!

[big_pedestrian @big_pedestrian]

These. Are. Concentration. Camps.

[Jessica Burbank @JessicaLBurbank]

bruh

[George @SocDemGeorge]

They’ve only just learnt this despite it being in their faces for the last 10 years

[matt bernstein @mattxiv]

what is apartheid if not this

[Mondoweiss @Mondoweiss]

BREAKING: Israel's Knesset has passed a law to execute Palestinian detainees.
Death by hanging. Mandatory sentencing. No pardon. 90 days to carry out.

It applies through military courts with a 96% conviction rate. It does not apply to Israelis.