u/HolyBatSyllables

Research has shown, over and over again, that de-identified “anonymous” data doesn’t necessarily remain anonymous when combined with other datasets. Toward the end of last year, the appliance giant Kohler endured a security shitshow when a researcher showed that its stool-analyzing smart toilet camera was not actually properly encrypting the images that it sent to Kohler. The concern there was that your poop data would be somehow accessed by bad actors. In the case of PoopCheck, anyone can simply buy access.  

After I told Marco I was writing an article about PoopCheck and its database, he stopped responding to me and did not answer any of my questions.

This thing should be pulped

>Sam Altman says he "hopes" that micropayments from AI agents fund publishers as traditional search traffic declines.
> >"My agent can read it, pay $0.17, and give me a summary of that. If I want to go read the whole article, pay $1."

I highly recommend reading this article, but for those who absolutely refuse, here's a couple excerpts:

From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently

> >With some MIT colleagues, Kosmyna set up an experiment that used an electroencephalogram to monitor people’s brain activity while they wrote essays, either with no digital assistance, or with the help of an internet search engine, or ChatGPT. She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity. > >In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn’t much happening up there. > >The study’s participants, who were all enrolled at MIT or nearby universities, were asked, right after they had handed in their work, if they could recall what they had written. “Barely anyone in the ChatGPT group could give a quote,” Kosmyna says. “That was concerning, because you just wrote it and you do not remember anything.”

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>Falling test and IQ scores are the subject of hot debate. What is harder to dispute is that, with every technological advance, we deepen our dependence on digital devices and find it harder to work or remember or think or, frankly, function without them. “It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users,” Kosmyna mutters at one point, frustrated at AI companies’ determination to push their products on to the public before we fully understand the psychological and cognitive costs. > >In the ever-expanding, frictionless online world, you are first and foremost a user: passive, dependent. In the dawning era of AI-generated misinformation and deepfakes, how will we maintain the scepticism and intellectual independence we’ll need? By the time we agree that our minds are no longer our own, that we simply cannot think clearly without tech assistance, how much of us will be left to resist? > >Continuous partial attention helps explain both brain rot as a mental state – because what is it if not cognitive overwhelm, the point at which you stop resisting the onslaught of digital distraction and allow your brain to rest in the internet’s warm, murky shallows? – and the existence of the online slop itself. After all, what matters to tech companies financially is not that you want to be reading what you’re reading, or that you love what you listen to or what you’re looking at, only that you are unwilling or unable to pull yourself away. This is why streaming services such as Netflix crank out bland, formulaic films that are euphemistically labelled “casual viewing” and are literally designed for viewers who aren’t really watching, and Spotify playlists are filled with generic stock music by fake artists, to provide background music, “Chill Out” or “Party” vibes, for listeners who aren’t really listening. In short, the modern internet doesn’t necessarily make you an idiot, but it definitely primes you to act like one. > >[...] As we transition from the internet era to the AI era, what we’re consuming is not only ever more low-value, ultra-processed information, but more information that is essentially predigested, delivered in a way that is designed to bypass important human functions, such as assessing, filtering and summarising information, or actually considering a problem rather than finessing the first solution presented to us. > >Michael Gerlich, head of the Centre for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School, began studying the impact of generative AI on critical thinking because he noticed the quality of classroom discussions decline. Sometimes he’d set his students a group exercise, and rather than talk to one another they continued to sit in silence, consulting their laptops. He spoke to other lecturers, who had noticed something similar. Gerlich recently conducted a study, involving 666 people of various ages, and found those who used AI more frequently scored lower on critical thinking. (As he notes, to date his work only provides evidence for a correlation between the two: it’s possible that people with lower critical thinking abilities are more likely to trust AI, for example.)

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>[...] But almost all the research that has found benefits to introducing tech in classrooms is funded by the ed-tech industry, and most large-scale independent research has found that screen time gets in the way of achievement. A global OECD study found, for instance, that the more students use tech in schools, the worse their results. “There is simply no independent evidence at scale for the effectiveness of these tools … in essence what is happening with these technologies is we’re experimenting on children,” says Wayne Holmes, a professor of critical studies of artificial intelligence and education at University College London. “Most sensible people would not go into a bar and meet somebody who says, ‘Hey, I’ve got this new drug. It’s really good for you’ – and just use it. Generally, we expect our medicines to be rigorously tested, we expect them to be prescribed to us by professionals. But suddenly when we’re talking about ed tech, which apparently is very beneficial for children’s developing brains, we don’t need to do that.”

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>“Being able to Google something and providing the right answer isn’t knowledge,” Clement says. “And having knowledge is incredibly important so that when you hear something that’s questionable or maybe fake, you think, ‘Wait a minute, that contradicts all the knowledge I have that says otherwise, right?’ It’s no wonder there’s a bunch of idiots walking about who think that the Earth is flat. Like, if you read a flat Earth blog, you think, ‘Ah, that makes a lot of sense’ because you don’t have any understanding or knowledge.” The internet is already awash with conspiracy and misinformation, something that will only become worse as AI hallucinates and produces plausible fakes, and he worries that young people are poorly equipped to navigate it

At least 36 states currently provide tax breaks for companies to build the facilities, coming at a cost of billions in forgone revenue. Virginia, the state with the most data centers, is dishing out $1.9 billion annually to data center developers. For Georgia, it’s $2.6 billion annually, according to an official state estimate. And after offering $150 million in breaks in 2024, Texas’s comptroller’s office this year upped that number to more than $1 billion annually, a nearly 567% increase in just one year.

This is the most accurate portrayal I’ve ever read. The headline is very misleading. This is more a typical portrayal of what it’s like to work for these training companies, rather than anything to do with tv writers.

>MY ASSIGNMENT IS to make an AI friend and write an account of our friendship. My editor assures me it will be the easiest bit of research I’ll ever do. I won’t have to travel, the AI friend will be on my phone—all I’ll need to do is spend enough time with it for it to be something I can work with. This job does not sound easy to me. I find it tricky to open up to humans, so how am I to achieve real rapport with a mechanoid? My apprehensions appear to only intrigue my editor. > >I set about selecting an AI friend. It should have taken an afternoon. It took months. > >I considered ChatGPT: juiced up by billions invested, it is vastly more advanced than companion AIs, and I’d heard it could be tuned to my humour or style. But that last feature wouldn’t help test friendship. I wouldn’t ask a friend to speak to me “in the style of Batman.” You can’t tailor your friends. Can you? You might go to specific places to find them, like the goth rave at the sex club instead of the dog park, or sidle up to some people at work while pointedly ignoring others. > >What about Claude for my AI friend? Anthropic downloaded over 7 million books without permission to train Claude; a novel I wrote was among these. It had used me; now I would use it. > >No, my editor said. I must use an AI designed for companionship, not optimized for utility. My assignment was to investigate the lucrativeness of loneliness. Replika is a forerunner in AI companionship, AI friendship’s Microsoft. It reportedly had 35 million users as of November 2025. Character.ai, which just banned child users from conversing with chatbots, has 20 million. ChatGPT users were sending 2.5 billion prompts per day as of last July, OpenAI told Axios, but how many of those are friendship messages is occluded. If this is to be a true consumer review of AI friendship, I have to use a program created for it.

Tech company executives are confident that AI will completely transform the economy and point to the changes they see in-house to prove that this change is coming fast. At Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, leadership says that AI generates a growing share of the overall code, which makes it cheaper and faster to produce. The implication is that if this AI is good enough that tech companies are using it internally to improve efficiency and reduce headcount, it’s only a matter of time until every other industry is similarly transformed. 

Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story.

A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies.

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

The lake is shrinking due to water diverted for agriculture and the impact of the climate crisis, placing inhabitants of the nearby Salt Lake City at possible risk of toxic dust clouds as the lake bed dries up.

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But these jobs will not outweigh the longer-term impacts to Utah and beyond, critics argue. Stratos is expected to raise the state’s planet-heating pollution by about 50% by consuming a huge amount of energy and water to power and cool itself, according to one impact analysis.

The network of industrial-scale fans needed to cool the datacenter’s hot pipes will result in so much waste heat that it could raise daytime temperatures in the surrounding Hansel valley by 2F to 5F (1.1C to 2.7C) and night-time temperatures by 8F to 12F (4.4C to 6.6C), according to an analysis by Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.

> So, there’s a piece in Jacobin arguing that data center moratoria are a “terrible idea” making the rounds on social media and beyond. It’s pretty easy to see why this makes for some good discourse; naturally, there’s going to be frisson among AI optimists when a perceived opponent—here, the nation’s most influential socialist magazine—makes a case for aligning with the tech industry’s goals. > > While I’m pretty unconvinced on all but one or two of the points that the piece itself raises, and I think it seriously misconstrues the class politics of data center fights, I do think it’s worth litigating this idea. Because I do believe we should be thinking about what a broader and more engaged politics of resisting, regulating, and ultimately governing AI might look like. It’s a good occasion, in other words, to ask: > > * Who is fighting data centers? > > * Why are they fighting them? > > * Are anti-data center movements a dead end—or a starting point?

But what you will increasingly get from this butler is “factslop.”  Rather than ushering in an era of information abundance, AI is likely to make access to the truth very much harder. It will also starve many institutions that produce enough of the truth for machines to ingest. And this scarcity of supply will impose an impossible cognitive cost on finding a single fact.

Here is how it’s likely to happen, and some history to explain why. 

Back in 2006 Facebook just introduced its newsfeed, making it “stickier” for users and kicking off a major shift in information consumption. The philosophy its founder Mark Zuckerberg later laid out was that his platform enabled free expression for all, thus promoting truth and democracy. Elon Musk and others later parroted the talk.

But instead the truth “sank” and the democratic debate in social media drowned with it in a tsunami of fake news and other malinformation.

Fast forward a few years from now. New, AI-based operating systems will have kicked off, cocooning the user inside a comfortable, personalised bubble they never have to leave. To feed the user’s information needs LLMs will be ingesting everything that’s produced in real time. 

But since traffic doesn’t leave the bubble, many more information providers will have collapsed. So, who will remain on the information supply side? Anyone who has a stake in persuading you, selling to you, lying to you, and manipulating you. Not journalists and news organisations informing
you. And they [LLMs] will produce a lot of factslop, or information that looks legitimate, but is anything but. 

And if you want to find facts on whether a nascent politician has been implicated in any corruption as he runs for a local office, good luck with that. Outside the cocoon, the cognitive load that will be required to plow through the noise to find that single fact will be insane, and you will no longer be used to it, like we are not used to walking to libraries to search for old books.

>We want to insist on this point: hype is not accidental.