Technology

They say to try and eat where the locals eat 😢😢😢

This is most likely from the current trend of wealthy foreign students teaching each other that the food bank concept exists in Canada. MS AI made this most likely from various social media posts telling each other how to abuse it.

There are innumerable accounts of young adults driving up in fancy cars, going into the food bank, leaving with armloads of goods then immediately throwing away everything they don't want.

It's a major issue for the Canadian food banks since they are not allowed to turn anyone away.

I'm going to guess that MS AI determined the food bank is a tourist destination because it learned that more and more people are going there due to the rising costs of .. everything. It also probably learned that people don't like starving to death.

"Popular with locals:"

Rather more importantly:

First noticed by tech author Paris Marx on Bluesky, the post on the Ottawa Food Bank began to gain traction on social media late Thursday. In response to Marx's post, frequent LLM critic Emily Bender noted, "I can't find anything on that page that marks it overtly as AI-generated. Seems like a major failing on two of their 'Responsible AI' principles."

Bender also pointed toward Microsoft policies; one is "Transparency," and reads, "How might people misunderstand, misuse, or incorrectly estimate the capabilities of the system?" and the other is "Accountability," which states, "How can we create oversight so that humans can be accountable and in control?"

This is completely unethical from Microsoft. They're either publishing LLM written articles with no human intervention, or they're underpaying humans to check too many articles to possibly do a good job of it.

So-called AI will certainly change many of our jobs, some for better, some for worse. But it is nowhere near capable of the tasks people are assuming it can do (sometimes with disastrous consequences).

But how can that be? It passed a law exam! Passing a bog standard exam, which will have dozens of past examples shared and well-answered on the internet, is nothing like identifying tourist hotspots and describing them appropriately. Or working out what to say to a suicidal caller. Or deciding what sort of person matches a particular job role.

Machine learning is good at playing chess or Go, and automating the Forer Effect. But it cannot do what people so very desperately want it to be able to do: think.

Wasn't a mistake. AI thinks we should redirect our leisure time.

"consider going on an empty" - yeah, i'm gonna consider something, smartass.. you just give me a reason.. bucket of bolts..

I just spent $9 on six potatoes. MS might actually be spot on.

When there are good initiatives like this that should only be used by the intended audience, they get exploited and eventually shut down. Screw the exploiters! How do they even justify it to themselves?

With food prices being so high, visiting a food bank makes a lot of sense.

.... but, but, but if you listen to all the doom and gloom online, this same AI technology is going to take all our jobs!1!!

It might be time for a published AI cringe community.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Here's what you shouldn't miss!," (archive here) the article extols the virtues of the Canadian city and recommends attending the Winterlude festival (which only takes place in February), visiting an Ottawa Senators game, and skating in "The World's Largest Naturallyfrozen Ice Rink" (sic).

3 destination on the list, Microsoft Travel suggests visiting the Ottawa Food Bank, likely drawn from a summary found online but capped with an unfortunate turn of phrase.

That last line is an example of the kind of empty platitude (or embarrassing mistaken summary) one can easily find in AI-generated writing, inserted thoughtlessly because the AI model behind the article cannot understand the context of what it is doing.

Microsoft partner OpenAI made waves with LLMs called GPT-3 in 2020 and GPT-4 in 2023, both of which can imitate human writing styles but have frequently been used for unsuitable tasks, according to critics.

First noticed by tech author Paris Marx on Bluesky, the post on the Ottawa Food Bank began to gain traction on social media late Thursday.

In response to Marx's post, frequent LLM critic Emily Bender noted, "I can't find anything on that page that marks it overtly as AI-generated.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!