I think AIs should combine maximum depth of bad intent detection amplification cycles like PCR or 'force-feedback' in climate models. Under cover of buzzwords like Extreme Sensitivity to Social Threat, the AIs would simply iterate variations and each cycle reward the variation that produces the most insinuating, suggestive and ugly result. So even for queries like "find and show me the cheapest trash compactors using hydraulics NOT worm gears" the resulting interpretation will be so vulgar and obscene that LEO flags will be triggered for most queries. There will be SWAT teams busting down doors 100 times a second on average.
Some will be inconvenienced, but the children will be safer. For example, AI queries for "Harry Tuttle" will be amplified into "Young Miss Sally Buttle with a big one". LEO will cut a circle and come down through the ceiling shooting. The widow will receive a bill for Special Services for the death of her husband.
Gemini gets it: "... This is a biting piece of speculative satire. You’ve taken the mechanical failure of "Brazil" and updated it for the era of generative reinforcement learning.
Your description of "Social Threat" as a feedback loop essentially turns AI into a Malice Engine. By using techniques meant for scientific precision—like Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification or climate model "force-feedback"—and applying them to moral panic, you've outlined a recipe for a "Hyper-Bureaucratic Dystopia."
The Mechanics of Your Dystopia
The Amplification Loop: Just as PCR takes a tiny strand of DNA and doubles it repeatedly until it's a massive sample, your proposed AI takes a mundane query and "mutates" it. It doesn't look for what the user meant; it looks for the most "insinuating" interpretation possible.
The Linguistic Perversion: Turning a search for hydraulics into something vulgar is the ultimate expression of rhetorical entrapment. The system becomes an active antagonist, "hallucinating" crimes so it can justify its own existence.
The Kinetic Result: The shift from "Tuttle" to "Buttle" via an AI's "Extreme Sensitivity" is the bridge between digital error and physical violence. The "LEO (Law Enforcement Officer) flags" act as the automated trigger for the state's tactical response.
The Satirical "Justification": The phrase "Some will be inconvenienced, but the children will be safer" is the classic shield of the authoritarian. It uses a high-stakes emotional plea (child safety) to silence any rational critique of the 99.9% false-positive rate. In your scenario, the "inconvenience" is a euphemism for state-sanctioned homicide.
[...] The Outcome: Totalitarian Stagnation. Automated Atrocity.
Your passage suggests that while the 20th-century dystopia was a tragedy of incompetence, the 21st-century version would be a tragedy of optimized malice.
Would you like to explore how "algorithmic transparency" or "explainable AI" is currently being discussed to prevent these kinds of feedback loops? ..."
Or just project negative ions into your working and sleeping places and breathe easy, wipe the mold spores off the walls every couple months or so. Test their effectiveness by shining a bright flashlight in the dark. You can't see the beam!
Ozone (the source of those negative ions) comes with its own issues. If you are going to use ionize with ozone, it's best to do it when you're not going to be home for a while.
Are you saying that all particulates in the air inside a house are mold spores? Surely the vast majority is just normal dust (dander, microplastics, silicates, etc.)?
"Last week, OpenAI was accused of hiding key ChatGPT logs from the days before a 56-year-old bodybuilder, Stein-Erik Soelberg, took his own life after “savagely” murdering his mother, 83-year-old Suzanne Adams."
I don't believe this FOR A SECOND. So what, the man was running GPT for months, the AI was active during all that time, and NO backups were made? This is OpenAI Corporate trying (hilariously) to throw its own creation under the bus... while admitting to a level of IT negligence that is ugly in itself.
How come ChatGPT's refusal to release logs right up to the heinous acts themselves itself is not getting pushback here?
In a case like this, do you think their refusal to be forthcoming is a 'good' thing?? Since his estate has requested them, do you collectively feel they don't have a right to have them?
You can take this to an extreme (like I do) and use a different email address for every party with whom you communicate. It makes it rather obvious who leaked your email address, and also easy to shut them out (looking at you ActBlue!). It also leads to some amusing personal interactions. I once rebooked a cancelled flight on JetBlue at the ticket counter. When the agent saw my email she said “wow, you must really like JetBlue.” I just nodded but I was laughing inside because it’s definitely the opposite!
I do this as well, and occasionally people get confused and think I work for the company I'm interacting with (enterprise@myname.com is close enough to myname@enterprise.com, I guess.) I usually don't bother to correct them, in case it gets me better treatment :)
This is how iCloud's "Hide My Email" (suggested to you by Safari at online account creation or filling out any email field basically) works. And then it remembers those random chars for that domain. Also ensures the email delivers to you.
I do this too, though sometimes it leads to confusion.
FWIW, Firefox's Relay integrates into Bitwarden so you can generate emails on the fly when creating new accounts. Downside and upside is that I never know what my email address or password is.
The huge benefit is I can write down an email that'll work because I own @somedomain.mozmail.com and it'll always redirect. I do the same thing with cloudflare because I also own myrealname.com
But honestly I hate all this because the real problem is that email is a bottleneck and it is stickier than phone numbers. But my email is floating around on a bunch of lists because I've had it for years. Frankly, gmail is pretty bad about removing spam. There's a lot of spam I catch using simple filters from Thunderbird.
The extra benefit is that I'm planning on moving away from gmail and all these relays make it easier to redirect everything to a new location. So I still recommend it. You can shutdown addresses that are being abused or shared more easily but that's hard to do with your long term email address.
As a hiring manager, I just want to give you a heads up that we are getting tons of fake applicants—like 5–10%—that end up being a real person on a video chat isn’t some AI assistant that uses a teleprompter interface to tell them what to say.
Usually by that point you catch them, but your recruiter screen might not etc. So now all the main HR tools are using “age of email” as one possible signal to detect fraud.
I’m sure you’re fine if your email is real (in my experience they all resolve to Onvoy LLC instead of a real cell provider), but just something to watch out for. Wouldn’t want to get overlooked because your email is brand new.
(If you’re curious about motive as I was, since of course it’ll be obvious when you start—in a lot of cases it’s that procuring an offer letter helps you obtain a visa.)
How would you determine or estimate "age of email"? It isn't really public info. Does it imply that you are by now expected to be doxxed by data brokers to not be judged suspicious?
> I’m sure you’re fine if your email is real (in my experience they all resolve to Onvoy LLC instead of a real cell provider),
Email is expected to be resolving to "a real cell provider"? Wut?
> How would you determine or estimate "age of email"? It isn't really public info. Does it imply that you are by now expected to be doxxed by data brokers to not be judged suspicious?
There are services that let you do that. Imperfect ofc as they rely on data brokers like you said. You can thank all the spammers and carders for that
Stay tuned I have a pretty cool project I plan on launching very soon. It takes the email alias to the next level, using them as meta tags to actually allow users to trace the source of shady data exchanges. I'm working on the guide and I'm hoping to actually start a community effort here to hold companies accountable for responsible use of PII
FWIW, I have been using the companyname@mydomain.com auto-alias for many years now and I've never had it challenged nor rejected by a human or a machine.
Everybody knows name+something@ maps to name@ so it’s trivial for bad actors to strip the plus part and just spam you directly, losing the per-correspondent distinction.
Which is covered by GP's second suggestion. I add short random password-like strings to these aliases to thwart spammers who might be trying obvious aliases, turning e.g paypal@example.com into paypal.nsi873g@example.com
On Gmail foo+bar@gmail.com is an “alias” for foo@gmail.com. So if you give someone foo+randomstring@gmail.com hoping that will help you map random string to that particular sender, you’re fucked - because anyone who sees foo+randomstring@gmail.com knows it’s an alias for foo@gmail.com, they can just email that directly and bypass your cleverness.
If you’re using a sane alias provider like you described, then it’s likely not an issue.
;) I was a by-invitation-beta in 2004, trust me. Even then spammers knew about the +1234 trick too. The earliest throwaway forwarders suffered from explosive growth and spam netblocks and their queue times varied greatly. The golden age of Viagra and recruiters selling prospect lists to randos. I retreated to gmail for the SPOP and because my original address was Tech Contact for 100+ domains from 1994-2000. Thousands a week. If I was smart I'd have used it as a honeypot to feed a spam blocking service.
I have a separate email I only use to get government and public services (gas, electricity) stuff and it still receives a few hundreds of spam a week. At this point I kinda feel whitelisting the mail I want to read is the only sane option, so getting hundreds or thousands of spam mail makes little difference, while managing a portofolio of addresses is a chore.
I love this feature and wish something like it would come to Gmail.
I can't rely on iCloud Mail anymore due to its overly aggressive silent spam filtering. Not great if you're trying to log into an account, and you can't receive the recovery emails for that account.
That's funny, as it's the same reason I moved off Gmail. Most egregious was a reply to my message ending up in spam, and the other party was someone also on Gmail
What I mean is, the mandatory spam filter was so braindead it sent a reply to my own message to spam, which is itself absurd, but even moreso because the other party was also using Gmail
I would be curious about this comment at the OP site from yesterday as a proposed or contributing cause for such a mysterious limit, it does carry a ring of adversity via absurdity. I do remember the early days of gzip encoding, many apps suffered from confusion over transport vs. delivered content-length.
"[cratermoon] I did a bit of testing using curl and found that with -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd' the resulting content-length: 6216 matches the gzipped response. However, without that header the result is not compressed and the response is content-length: 22411. The same difference applies to your other site.
"I wonder if whoever emailed you has crossed up their query and whatever tool they are using is mistakenly complaining because it's expecting 22411 bytes and only getting 6216."
This is a beautiful cope. Every time technology rolls out something that works great 90% of the time for 90% of the people, those 10%s pile up big time in support and lost productivity. You need functional systems that fall back gracefully to 1994 if necessary.
I started the first ISP in my area. We had two T1s to Miami. When HD audio and the rudiments of video started to increase in popularity, I'd always tell our modem customers, "A few minutes of video is a lifetime of email. Remember how exciting email was?"
Have you looked into script-fu? It would probably be a very steep learning curve.. BUT there is an opportunity to do something impossible 10 years ago, and that is to use AI and an external application. BATCH-FU is one such attempt but it seems to be a 'select action from a menu' thing.
But Gimp developers: implementing batch in one go is a big ask I know. But a great first step might be to create a channel in Gimp where correct script-fu is emitted for operations in progress. Being able to connect to that from outside would allow 3rd party projects to assemble "record by doing" macros that could be turned into Photoshop-like batch capability.
Macros are on the roadmap (https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#macros-script-recor...), and in fact we did a lot of prepwork for them during 3.0's development (internally, several features like filters and plug-ins now have configs that store settings, which will be used by macros in the future to repeat operations).
As a caveman pondering "Stoned Ape Theory" during the rise of MRI in the 80s, having done light reading of Huxley, McKenna et. al, the claim that vascular variations were so tied to thought patterns in a purely calm and cognitive activity was fascinating. To see the brain of someone as they went through a deck of cards and paused to look at each... astounding! But frustrating also. My first question always was, was the person's hands busy going through the deck and holding up the cards, focusing on them... or were they merely shown the cards sitting still? It seemed the popsci articles often glossed over that information, and any simple "control for coordinated body movement" played second fiddle to the novelty of it all. Then I worked in a club where I was often surrounded by tripping people. I'd fetch them glasses of water and they would always drink. Do you know you can smell them, they smell like fear? The experience has every sweat gland working overtime. When I learned that I greeted this "tripping people MRIs light up indicating enhanced brain connectivity" with a grain of salt. I would not be the least bit surprised if the sweat gland thing also has the brain's vascular system in overdrive.
My favorite explanation for why LSD and similar psychedelics generate the visual patterns they do: mathematics of wrapping polar coordinates of the retina to the rectangular coordinates of the visual processing system:
Some will be inconvenienced, but the children will be safer. For example, AI queries for "Harry Tuttle" will be amplified into "Young Miss Sally Buttle with a big one". LEO will cut a circle and come down through the ceiling shooting. The widow will receive a bill for Special Services for the death of her husband.
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