If something ever happens, I don’t know what I would do if I found out my search results had become public.
Like, yesterday I was searching "Is it legal to eat guinea pig meat?" not because I have any interest in eating guinea pigs, but because Amazon Vine was giving away these reusable guinea pig cage pads. And then I started thinking "If you have reusable, washable pads to make it easier to keep guinea pig cages clean, is it possible that someone could farm guinea pigs?"
Like, they’re collecting the guinea pig poo to use in the garden. Or like, could someone gather a massive amount of guinea pig poo and make methane gas or do whatever they needed to do in Mad Max to turn pig waste into biofuel to run their muscle cars? Does guinea pig fur make fancy moccasins like they do with rabbits?
And at it’s base, all my wonderings can be led back to a book I read when I was child. A science fiction book where the best and brightest kids were chosen to be part of a program, and then they were all tricked into being frozen in cryostasis because the end of the world was about to happen and they were going to be used as the saviors of humanity, like Fallout before Fallout existed. Only the main character’s dad, who spent the rest of his life searching for his missing son, gathered a bunch of people and managed to save a huge chunk of humanity, who then spent centuries in the wastelands and there was some mutations and what have you’s, but when the kid wakes up, he finds out that his dad never stopped searching for him and that his dad was basically the savior of humanity.
And one of the things his dad left behind was the idea that there was a Sleeping Prince that would wake up one day, and that everyone should protect and care for that prince. And the main character realizes that he is the prince. That his dad loved him so much that he aimed all of human society toward ensuring that his son would have a good future.
And one of the things that really stuck in my mind was that his father had gathered a bunch of guinea pigs to raise for meat, parts, and fur for clothing. And I’m not sure–I was a child when I read that book–but I think the guinea pigs might have been bred (and effected by radiation) to be big, like, bigger than capybaras, and humans were using them as working animals? Like, putting saddle bags on them to carry supplies, but I don’t think they were big enough to ride around on?
Anyways, the whole point of this is that if someone just looked at my search results, I would seem like a psychopath because there’s none of the deeper explanations behind why I originally searched for the term, or what I was thinking, and basically, that’s why modern "AI" is so shitty.
People are clicking away at a massive "Choose-Your-Own Adventure"-machine and thinking that it’s sentient. When no. You’re making options, which takes you from A to B to Z. You’re filling in the blanks, "Mad Libs"-style, and thinking to yourself "Wow! This thing is so brilliant it can remember my name! We’re best friends now."
And the guys that created the datasets the "AI" pulls from just grabbed a bunch of random shit off the Internet to train it because THAT’S where they wanted to cut corners on a technology that cost TRILLIONS OF AMERICAN DOLLARS. That’s not in yen folks. That’s in USD.
"Instead of paying a bit of money and ensuring that all the information used for our datasets is complete and accurate… We’re just going to scrape Reddit and hope for the best. We’ve even got the archive of Yahoo Answers loaded into that baby. The technology is solid. We can now depend on AI to decide which humans should live or die."
So yeah. I’m in a bit of a mood.
Please, Robo Gods, do not build my profile based on my search results or the goofy pictures I took when I was 15 years old. Please and thank you.
And also, I have no interest in eating guinea pig meat. I just had a thought and was curious about the answer… which ended up being something produced by a terrible AI. "Yes, it is legal to eat guinea pig meat in the United States where it can be viewed as game meat… [blah blah blah]… In some countries like Peru and Brazil it is a regularly eaten meat, though in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States it is taboo and illegal to eat." Hm.
~Harper Kingsley
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I always click the “Web” option on my search results, to filter out all the AI slop.