fighting with bots

This post was going to be about a Naval Ravikant quote, but Skynet attacked.

It was very low stakes, as AI apocalypses go. I loaded Google Gemini, and typed 'Can you create a transcript for the following video? The transcript link is broken.'

The following text appeared onscreen:

So why don't we talk a little bit about leverage? The first tweet in the storm was a famous quote from Archimedes which was, 'Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth.' The next tweet was, 'Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal costs of replication. Leverage is critical.' The reason I stuck in Archimedes quote in there is normally I don't like putting other people's quotes in my Twitter like that, it doesn't add any value. You can go look up those people's quotes, but this quote I had to put in there because it's just so fundamental. I read it when I was very, very young and it had a huge impression on me, and we all know what leverage is. When we use a seesaw or a lever, we understand how that works physically, but I think what our brains aren't really well evolved to comprehend is how much leverage is possible in modern society and what the newest forms of leverage are.

And then I guess the AI got more self-conscious than I am about quoting people and erased the text.

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I'll spare you the rest of the back-and-forth. If I were more sophisticated, I could troubleshoot and describe the protocol I tripped that caused the aberrant behavior.

If I were less sophisticated, I would say that the AI is lying.

*****

I recently created an X account.

I'm not following anyone that I know in real life. Most of my friends that are still on social media hover around Facebook, and think of Elon Musk as a bad guy.

I have 31 followers. (Upped to 32 while typing this.)

I'm 90% certain that the first twenty of them are bots.

The longest conversation I had with one was a Japanese emigre to Los Angeles. She thanked me for following her, then accused me of being a bot when I didn't respond quickly enough to her messages. She sent an impossibly attractive selfie, and tried a few times to move the conversation to another app.

When I said I would be in Los Angeles the following week and offered to meet up, she said maybe. If I could download WhatsApp or Telegram, we could have coffee on the beach.

You know, like humans do.

*****

If this blog is useful for anything, a quick scan should show that I'm human. AI prompts don't combine this kind of scatterbrained detail.

I don't know how people online will prove this in the near future. Maybe when freelancers are hired, they will have to type out naughty language or bomb recipes.

The easiest way to calm fears that AI will take your job is to start using it. It will do many things better. It can't bundle these disparate actions into a cohesive package.