moment of silence for everyone who relied on AI chat bots for research when it’s going around saying shit like this.
[image description: search that reads “country in africa that starts with K”. the featured snipped is from www.emergentmind.com and reads “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.” /end ID]
A host on a podcast I like (Trashfuture, check it out) has a theory that generative AI is, in terms of its effect on society, the opposite of the printing press.
While the printing press exponentially expanded access to knowledge, generative AI actively reduces it by polluting the information sphere with this kind of fluent bullshit.
You Google something, you click a result that looks like it could be authoritative, but you have no idea if anything it’s saying is a cogent representation or analysis of the facts, or just something that ChatGPT spat out so that the owner of the site could make some quick ad revenue.
And then, of course, it starts to eat itself. Generative AI starts being trained on its own output, and these falsehoods and inconsistencies grow and spread, like prions. Suddenly, nothing is true and everything is.
Another exquisite example of American NIMBYism - local regulations in a rural town that make illegal any house that is too small from being built on a given property. A lady wants to build a smaller house on her lot so she can build a horse stable on the rest and she just….can’t.
What i like about this story is that a lot of the narrativr around “how did America get so NIMBY” is that it was almost accidental. People wanted to preserve their neighborhood, preserve historic buildings, etc, and were fine with affordable housing conceptually but, ya know, not in their back yard. And its partially true, for sure, for every bad actor manipulating the historical preservation board is a group of willing allies proud to Save Our Heritage.
But that narrative also concedes too much, and this article shows that: this ordinance exists as part of an explicit agreement with the state agencies to “keep property values high”. Because property taxes are what funds local gov, and housing prices fund the resident’s finances. They just say it, openly, no shame, “your house proposal is just too cheap, spend more”! The idea that high property prices is a bad thing is not on the radar.
If you have a policy apparatus built explicitly to increase property values, well, not surprising that it achieves that goal.
there’s a reason why people always say “houses should be more affordable” and never “houses should be cheaper”
