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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2042 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 7, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So I know a lot of posters here are doing some really advanced stuff with AI, but I have a quick little anecdote from my own luddite life that might help explain why most normies don't really see AI as something particularly useful.

I just asked Google's free AI what the current value of 0.035 ounces of gold is and it completely face-planted, ignoring the decimal and the zero and giving me the value for 35 ounces. This isn't a case of overactive guardrails or confusing syntax or hallucinating plausible details into a news story; it's the most basic of transcription errors, the kind that dumb, pre-LLM systems have solved for decades. Old google never would have made such an error.

This is the technology that's going to completely upend the world order? It makes sense for normies to be skeptical. Regardless of what the frontier labs have cooking, the AI most people actually interact with is worse than useless half the time.

Anybody else have one of these "the fuck are we even doing here?" moments with AI recently?

You know those posts and news articles where the author finds some Democrat lunatic or Republican influencer saying something stupid, to paint the entire party that way?

Unfortunately for you here, Google’s AI has about as much sense as a lunatic influencer. You’re better off asking a Markov chain.

I totally recognize that. But the primary point of my post was to highlight how vast the gulf is between the average Motte-poster's experience with AI and the rest of the world's experience. Part of the reason people like Scott Alexander keep spectacularly failing to connect with normal people on AI safety and related issues is that the vast majority of people's interactions with AI involve shitty free versions. With the exception of the absolutel worst and cheapest AI-assisred search and automated customer service lines, AI technology has penetrated into ordinary people's lives a lot less than you'd think just by reading here.

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