Tag: chatbot

Could I Be an Engagement Farmer?

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I woke today to a panic on X.  Elon Musk threatened, “Any accounts doing engagement farming will be suspended and traced to source”.

I thought, “Oh no, the jig is up!”

Then I thought, “What the hell is engagement farming?”

So, I did a search and found out, “Well, to a large extent, we all go to social media either for or to give attention. It is in this context that this phenomenon known as engagement farming crops up. It’s the art of cultivating interactions through cunning tactics rather than genuine content.”

It consists of, “ Leading questions   …  Inflammatory content.   …   Clickbait headlines   …   Desperate pleas.”

Let’s see.  Check, check, check and check!

Dammit, Elon Musk has caught on to me and is coming to get me!

Now maybe I’m wrong but doesn’t the internet, more or less, consist of nothing but those things?  You could say that clickbait is in the eye of the beholder but isn’t that also the basis of the whole news industry?  What is a 72-point headline but the paper equivalent of clickbait?  Now sure, the subject must be something important if you blare it out there but the motivation is the same, get someone to bite the hook and buy the paper.

Now sure, someone who actually cares about what they are writing has a somewhat different result.  Intelligent people respond to intelligent writing and idiots don’t.  They stop at the point where a girl in a short skirt walks by.  Now far be it from me to disparage girls in short skirts.  They basically make the world go round.  But there has to be something afterward to think about.

So, if Elon Musk is saying he’s going to remove the sex bot clickbait from his platform I applaud him.  There are already enough outlets providing that media.  But if he’s going to eliminate the engagement farming won’t there be nothing left at all?

And I appreciate his desire to improve X and try to elevate the content.  But in order to do that he should be working on his algorithms to find out how to differentiate actual engagement from bot traffic.  And I hardly think any of us can help him there.  It seems to me it will require the ability to differentiate AI from human responses.  And to my mind the only way to do that is to monetize the interactions.  In other words, people will pay to be entertained, bots by definition will not.

And that’s a good point.  The advertising model for entertainment has been blown up by the tech lords.  Google and Facebook have monopolized advertising to such an extent that newspapers and television have been effectively driven out of business.  The future will belong to subscription services.  And I’m sure Mr. Musk knows this.  His trick will be to make the transition.  His hope is to turn X into a one stop shopping location for news, entertainment and other information-based activities.  Since he seems to be friendlier to people of my political persuasion I am more or less sympathetic to his efforts.  I’ve even bought a lower tier subscription to X and watch hopefully for some future benefits that his enterprises may afford me.

But now I find Elon is gunning for me!  We poor farmers of engagement are doing our best to absorb what little nutrients we can squeeze out of X traffic.  And instead, we are hounded out of existence by the algorithm!  Oh, the pain, the pain.  Well, the show must go on.

Could I be an engagement farmer?

I wish!

Of Chatbots and Cheese

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family, Science, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , ,

So, as I was saying yesterday, the kids and the grandkids came over.  And Camera Girl killed the fatted calf, cooked it and then afterward served cake and ice cream to the stuffed survivors.  I skipped all the meatballs and sauce and made my self three sandwiches; a Reuben, a roast beef, provolone with mayo on “peasant bread” and a free form that included mustard, corned beef, lettuce and sweet gherkins on French bread; all washed down with hot coffee.  Suffice it to say I ate too much but have no regrets about it.  Later on, I had way too much vanilla ice cream and pound cake.  About that I do have regrets.  But c’est la guerre.

Today I faced the new day feeling bilious and groggy.  But all this warm weather of late inspired us to head for the state park for a long walk in the woods.  Seriously, I really want to thank whatever climatic forces are responsible for this winter’s mild weather.  I hereby agree to whatever destruction of the planet occurs and with my blessings.  Walking in the middle of February through this park without snowshoes is an innovation that is well worth finishing off those poor devils living at the Equator.  And since our Lizard Overlords are bringing all those people here anyway, at least I can have the benefits of a warmer climate here in Dunwich without feeling bad about it.  So, after the strengthening and revivifying effects of our hike I am restored to health and looking forward to enjoying the rest of this holiday weekend.

During the festivities yesterday I was able to talk with my eldest grandson and he told me he managed to get on the Dean’s List at the college where he is studying computer science.  Apparently, that requires a 4.0 grade point average.  I was impressed.  He is a lot like me.  Which means that studying for any subject in which he hasn’t any interest, is very difficult.  So that means he is displaying considerable discipline.  I attribute this to his parents spending a lot of time stressing the need for conscientiousness.  So, I am impressed with them too.

We discussed the recent trends in computer science.  We both got a laugh out of the recent vicissitudes of the “metaverse.”  The fact that the geniuses at Facebook didn’t realize that people don’t want to walk around wearing virtual reality headsets all the time is ridiculous.  After all, it’s one thing to wear a headset while flying an F-16.  There it’s a matter of life and death.  But in almost any other instance real life is superior to virtual life.  Think about it.  I can go into a field and throw a real baseball around with my grandsons.  Or we can all stand around wearing VR headsets and pretend to throw around a baseball.  That is so lame as to even defy comparison to other lame things.

Then we talked about artificial intelligence and of course ChatGPT.  He was generally very excited, not about the present chatbots, but rather about the potential in the near future.  Apparently, the level of sophistication is still growing quickly and whereas currently the behavior merely mimics human thought he was enthusiastic about it becoming closer to human creativity over time.  I warned him that AI’s ability to replace humans in the workforce might someday even allow it to replace computer scientists and he ruefully agreed the potential is there.

It was a very interesting conversation.  I still think of artificial intelligence as a tool.  If I let a chatbot write an essay for me, I’d use the output as a framework from which I’d insert the creative ideas that I wanted to make.  Facts and figures and even sententious musings aren’t thinking.  They’re scenery.  You have to have a point of view.  Sure, you can tell a chatbot the point you’re making but it still sounds like a Wikipedia entry.  I defy a chatbot to rise to my level of outrage.  And since my point of view is currently algorithmically forbidden to chatbots, by definition, I am immune from their competition.

Afterward, Camera Girl joined with the kids going to a middle school theatrical performance and Princess Sack of Potatoes saw her first live play.  And she was enthralled.  Camera Girl just watched her reactions to the performance throughout and said it was amazing.

And I thought, how is an algorithm going to mimic that?  An intelligent and emotional child “learning” about theater; how will the computer scientists mimic that?  The human brain only has about ninety billion neurons.  I’m sure supercomputers can multiply that number of memory slots almost infinitely.  But can we even define what it means to be a human being.  I’m not sure we currently can.  I’m not even sure we’ll ever be able to.  Lots of people are convinced that consciousness is just a level of complexity.  Once we have umpty-ump petaflops of computing power HAL will wake up and take over the world.  I’m far from sure that’s true.  It’s fun to use in science fiction stories but reality may not oblige us.  How do you program the point of view of a four-year-old girl watching a live play for the first time?  Where’s the slider for enthralled?

So, despite living in the pall of the East Palestine mushroom cloud and the other outrages that the Biden dismantling of America subjects us to, I’ve found fresh evidence that human life still contains transcendent beauty.  We are much, much more than the sum of our neurons and other cellular components.  We are capable of fascinating and remarkable behaviors.  Maybe we’re not quite obsolete yet.  Sure, the Lizard Overlords may take away our modern conveniences like gas and oil and force us back into a pre-industrial lifestyle but it will still be as human beings and that is an amazing simulation to be a part of.