Stephanie Vee

Aw. One of my family's cats used to love carrying hair elastics around. She'd let the elastic fall from her mouth and meow at it for a few minutes, then pick it up, carry it elsewhere, and repeat the whole process.

You mentioned wanting to read more contemporary AI crit. Have you read “Empire of AI” by Karen Hao yet? If not, you may enjoy it! I just finished it today, and feel even more grossed out about LLMs (and OpenAI especially) than I did before - which I did not think was possible, haha.

The ELIZA Effect: Avoiding emotional attachment to AI coworkers | IBM Employees are increasingly working alongside conversational AI assistants and AI agents. The psychological implications might be even more complex than the technological and financial implications.

www.ibm.com/think/insigh...

Sam Altman says he's 'uneasy' about people trusting their biggest life decisions to ChatGPT Altman said many people use ChatGPT "as a sort of therapist or life coach, even if they wouldn't describe it that way."

Not sure whether I want to start calling him “Scam Altman” or “Sham Altman.” These unhealthy emotional attachment risks have been well known to everyone in the AI industry since ELIZA’s development in the 1960s.

www.yahoo.com/news/article...

I’m currently on the Plundered Earth chapter, and am just fucking appalled. I wonder how many people would continue to use “their” precious chatbots if they logged out of ChatGPT for long enough to read Empire of AI?

What these assholes are doing and have done is disgusting.

Hopefully they’re trying to block them with robots.txt. If not, that’s a good place to start. Stuff like Cloudflare’s AI labyrinth could be an option for them as well.

In addition to what @seriousness.bsky.social said, if you're a reader, consider using RSS readers again and/or subscribing to sites that use better newsletter services. If you're a writer and can't afford Ghost et al., consider hosting a static website for free (not as hard to do as you may think).

You should look into the IndieWeb movement and free static website hosting. If you own and control your own little piece of the internet, that's at least *one* space Nazis can't infiltrate. :)

Ghost is expensive, for sure. I considered it briefly, and decided that building and hosting a static website for free would be a better option for me. I pay for my domain name (CAD $13/yr), but that's it.

Also! If you're just a hobbyist (like I am) and you can't afford or justify the price of Ghost, building and hosting a static website for free isn't difficult at all.

Incredibly sad. And this quote here is exactly why this shit happens in the first place… A chatbot that makes its users feel good is a chatbot that sells well.

“In the first week, Mr. Brooks hit the limits of the free version of ChatGPT, so he upgraded to a $20-a-month subscription.”

The Joys of Tinkering with Code | Stephanie Vee Building anything with code is kind of like putting together a puzzle. Vibe coding at the newbie level deprives you of the joy of assembly, leaving you with a finished product and no sense of accom...

Some thoughts on vibe coding, and why I believe newbie coders should spend the time to at least learn the *basics* before offloading the entire creative process to some LLM.

stephvee.ca/notes/artifi...

Voted!

Ol' Sam reckons in his press releases that GPT-5 is a "PhD-level expert." As a number of people have demonstrated, GPT-5 "thinks" there are three Bs in the word "blueberry."

"Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!"

I was once in a PhD program, myself. I dropped out because tenure track job market prospects were pretty dismal at the time, but also because I just couldn't count the Bs in "blueberry." I kept coming up with two Bs, every time. Felt like such a hack. The imposter syndrome was crippling.

A fluffy brown and black tabby cat sleeping on a stool in a home office. She is extremely cute.

In honour of International Cat Day, here is one of my writing assistants! She sweeps up rogue pieces of code with her feather duster-like tail. (She also hoovers up ghosts, but that's a long, complicated story that only my husband and I understand.)

Funny that OpenAI's "best AI system yet" cannot accurately count the number of "b's" in "blueberry."

... remind me again, HOW many litres of water were needlessly wasted to create this "revolutionary" piece of technology?

Not surprised! People who get called out for grifting seldom want to engage or take accountability.

Yeah, It's pretty overwhelming. I generally just subscribe to RSS feeds these days and try to limit my newsletter subscriptions to a max of twenty. I filter all incoming newsletters to their own folder and keep them out of my main inbox.

Techbros need to stop forcing their dumb AI assistants into EVERYTHING. Why does an RSS reader need an AI assistant to summarize a feed? The whole point of subscribing to an RSS feed is to READ IT YOURSELF.

RIGHT? I was testing my website's RSS feed out on this one RSS reader today. Said reader claims the following: "We believe this: 5 minutes with Feeeed will make you smarter than hours of social media scrolling." Meanwhile, their bullshit app misgendered me and gave me a new name / job title, haha

An RSS Reader's AI Summary Misgendered Me and Gave Me a New Job Title | Stephanie Vee Feeeed's AI summary spat out a hilarious full-blown hallucination about me -- or, why you shouldn't trust RSS readers to do your reading for you.

Hi, Bluesky! My name is apparently "Stephen Diehl" and I'm a dude, according to some dumb AI assistant in an RSS reader.

#artificialunintelligence #hallucinations

stephvee.ca/notes/artifi...

Welcome to the club! I'm not on Ghost, mind, but I'm off Substack as well. Feels pretty good to not have my writing hosted on that platform anymore. Best of luck -- Ghost seems like a great alternative.

Perplexity defensive over ignoring robots.txt and stealing data Perplexity was discovered to be actively bypassing blocks from websites to scrape content in 2024, and a new report shows that it has continued with increasing sophistication as the company defends th...

This all feels so hopeless. Are we going to have to revert to writing zines? Or will the folks at Perplexity go out of their way to get their grubby, thieving hands on our independent physical media as well?

appleinsider.com/articles/25/...

starting to think some of these AI companies are kind of shitty tbh

These new icons are SO bad. Perspective is completely off (the logo is flat, but the SSD is designed to look as though it's being viewed at an angle, the reflections make no sense, etc...) As I said in my comment on the OP, did Apple "Intelligence" design these icons?

LOL, just looked at the article, and the perspective is messed up on ALL of the new icons. They literally make no sense. Even the reflections look weird.

The perspective is completely fucked up on it as well. Why is the Apple logo flat? Did Apple "Intelligence" design this icon?

Agreed. It’s one reason (among several others) why I had to leave Substack. There’s so much AI-generated writing on that platform, and it’s SO irritating to have to continually scroll past all that predictable, boring ChatGPT prose posted by people who call themselves “writers.”