I usually don't post a chunk of the 404 Media articles on AI I come across, because they're quite anti-AI, and while I myself do like that, I know it might get tiresome for others here. But I figured this one might be worth posting since it relates directly to the experiences of the folks at 404 Media specifically.
That, and I'm not really posting it as news per se, as this situation is at least partly stuff we've already seen before — LLMs outputting overconfident, yes-anding nonsense that turns mundane topics into something that's "worth contacting a journalist" about. But that doesn't mean it can't be interesting, or admittedly a little amusing.
From the article:
Last week, I got an email from a man in Russia whose Instagram account had been banned. [...] The email seemed AI-generated, like many others we have gotten recently. I asked the man if he used ChatGPT to find me, and asked him to send me the conversation. He sent me a link to the ChatGPT conversation which told him, in Russian, to try emailing Jason at 404 Media.
“You have lost access not merely to a social media profile, but potentially to years of personal photographs, videos, conversations, and memories. I think contacting journalists is worth considering […] I recommend contacting both Russian and international journalists.” ChatGPT then gave him a list of several news outlets, including 404 Media.
[...]
Last night, someone emailed me, Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, the Washington Post, CBS News, NBC News, The Markup, The Information, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Sun Times asking for an “independent investigation” into why their Verizon cell phone service wasn’t working on their iPhone.
[...]
We also sometimes get emails sent to us in which companies’ actual tech support systems are cc’ed, which has led to several threads where a person using AI is emailing an AI system going back and forth repeatedly.
[...]
Over the years, we have gotten very used to getting bizarre emails from sources. [...] Lots of those emails are likely to have come from people who are struggling with some sort of mental health issue; the emails we’ve been getting recently aren’t like that. They are emailing us specifically because they have a tech problem, don’t know where to turn, and ChatGPT is telling them to contact us, is writing the email for them, and is compiling “evidence packets,” “forensic trails,” “evidence dossiers” “original correspondence,” a “bounded set of primary records,” and a series of questions we are supposed to investigate.
Title focuses on 404 because it's written by them, but it's not just them. Half of this is folks are being told every little tech problem they have is a scandal of newsworthy proportion, and so they get sent to whatever news org ChatGPT happens to spew at them first.
I do agree it's funny, but more for the absurdity of it all.
It makes sense that AI would have learned this. One the one hand, tech companies do everything they can not to solve anyone's problems to begin with (or even let them talk to a human), and on the other hand AI isn't being trained on private customer support interactions (those might be searched, but only by an AI being run by the company that owns them), but on public output. AI interactions are going to logically complete to the public knowledge that the only way to get anything fixed is to make it a newsworthy scandal.
I already do this, everyone has AI write crazy verbose tech documentation now thats impossible to read so everyone has to have AI summarize it
It used to be there was some barrier to entry in writing software cause to use a language you have to be able to read the docs on some level. Now you can just garbage in garbage out and have the garbage document itself so the garbage can read it
[OP] LukeZaz | 13 hours ago
I usually don't post a chunk of the 404 Media articles on AI I come across, because they're quite anti-AI, and while I myself do like that, I know it might get tiresome for others here. But I figured this one might be worth posting since it relates directly to the experiences of the folks at 404 Media specifically.
That, and I'm not really posting it as news per se, as this situation is at least partly stuff we've already seen before — LLMs outputting overconfident, yes-anding nonsense that turns mundane topics into something that's "worth contacting a journalist" about. But that doesn't mean it can't be interesting, or admittedly a little amusing.
From the article:
[...]
[...]
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delphi | 7 hours ago
That is, considering 404's recent output, indubitably the funniest possible thing to happen to them
[OP] LukeZaz | 4 hours ago
Title focuses on 404 because it's written by them, but it's not just them. Half of this is folks are being told every little tech problem they have is a scandal of newsworthy proportion, and so they get sent to whatever news org ChatGPT happens to spew at them first.
I do agree it's funny, but more for the absurdity of it all.
Protected | 3 hours ago
It makes sense that AI would have learned this. One the one hand, tech companies do everything they can not to solve anyone's problems to begin with (or even let them talk to a human), and on the other hand AI isn't being trained on private customer support interactions (those might be searched, but only by an AI being run by the company that owns them), but on public output. AI interactions are going to logically complete to the public knowledge that the only way to get anything fixed is to make it a newsworthy scandal.
TurtleCracker | 11 hours ago
I fear we will all have to use AI to both send and filter communication at some point.
axb | 11 hours ago
Reminds me of this cartoon by Mark eToonist, from 2023 -- AI Written, AI Read
snake_case | 7 hours ago
I already do this, everyone has AI write crazy verbose tech documentation now thats impossible to read so everyone has to have AI summarize it
It used to be there was some barrier to entry in writing software cause to use a language you have to be able to read the docs on some level. Now you can just garbage in garbage out and have the garbage document itself so the garbage can read it
[OP] LukeZaz | 4 hours ago
Is there even a point to summarizing it by that stage? When it's garbage all the way through like that, there's nothing important left to focus on.