Because the people using this service don’t know. That’s the point. OF effectively sells the illusion that its “models” are there voluntarily, they enjoy their work, and they really really want to talk to lonely, horny men like you. And while most people realize this is a scam, there are enough lonely, horny men who don’t know it’s a scam, or don’t want to know it’s a scam, to keep it profitable.

This is why so many otherwise intelligent people fall for financial scams of every variety, from meme stocks to Iraqi dinars to “free money just for cashing this check for me”. Because they want it to be true. They want the opportunity to be real. And as a result their critical thinking skills fall by the wayside.

The article is asking a question: can humanity exist without causing the mass extinction of other species?

And if humanity can live without causing mass extinctions, what do we have to give up to live that way?

And I think those questions are worth asking.

I mean, after a lifetime of left/liberal infighting while conservatives lived by the phrase “no enemies to the Right”, I’m just happy to see Democrats finding a lever that divides the right and jumping up and down on it.

And if a bunch of high ranking Democratic Party members are on the list too, and they go down with the Republicans, so much the better.

Also, and more seriously - if there’s any hope of stopping fascism in the United States, it’s not going to be through the corporate Democrat establishment. It’s going to be through a left-wing populist movement taking over, or driving out, that establishment, the same way national socialists took over the Republican Party with the Tea Party movement and then memed Trump into office.

And ordinary liberals demanding the Epstein list, and continuing to demand it no matter how much Democratic Party leaders call it a conspiracy and a distraction, is a good sign that the American left is as sick of politics as usual as the Tea Party and MAGA movement were a decade ago.

I suspect that’s why users are complaining about the new model. It’s like the article talks about - the parasocial relationship between users and their AI agents. We grew up in an era when computers were tools, but these users want computers that talk to you like a friend.

On the OpenAI community forums and Reddit, long-time chatters are expressing sorrow at losing access to models like GPT-4o. They explain the feeling as “mentally devastating,” and “like a buddy of mine has been replaced by a customer service representative.” These threads are full of people pledging to end their paid subscriptions. It’s worth noting, though, that many of these posts look to us like they have been composed partially or entirely with AI. So even when long-time chat users are complaining, they’re still engaged with generative artificial intelligence.

Lol. How sad is it that people are using LLMs to write their fucking Reddit posts?

The Republican and Democratic establishments are very much the same.

Trump - and his Heritage Foundation minders - isn’t business as usual.

The Rs and Ds both opposed tariffs and supported free market capitalism. Trump demanded tariffs because he’s a boomer, and he wants to go back to his childhood when the economy was based on manufacturing and coal mining.

The Rs and Ds both gave lip service to free speech. Trump has sued universities for allowing protests, deported students for writing op-eds, and is appointing political commissars to monitor major news networks and veto dissent.

The Rs and Ds both believed that unbiased economic data was important, even if they wanted different economic policies. Trump fires people for reporting data he doesn’t like.

The Rs and Ds both believed that soft power was as valuable as hard power, and that USAID and PEPFAR and so on were important, not just on humanitarian grounds, but in building support for the United States around the world. Trump and Musk think soft power is for wimps and are viscerally disgusted by helping black people.

Frankly, if there is any genuine distinction right now between the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment, it’s because Trump bullied the Republicans into it. And if this country survives it’ll be interesting - albeit horrifying - to see if the Rs go back to business as usual or continue their slide into an anarcho-capitalist theocracy.

AI in others fields, like medecine, automatic subtitles, engineering, is fine for me. It won’t give bad habits, it is well understood by its users, and it is truly benefical, as in being more efficient to save lifes than humans, or simply being helpful to disabled people.

I think the generative AI tech bros have deliberately contributed to a lot of confusion by calling all machine learning algorithms “AI”.

I mean, you have some software which both works and is socially beneficial, like translation and speech recognition software.

You have some software that works, and is incredibly dangerous because it works, like facial recognition and all the horrible ways authoritarian governments can exploit it.

And then you have some software that “works” to produce socially detrimental bullshit, like generative AI.

All three of these categories use machine learning algorithms, trained on data sets to recognize and produce patterns. But they aren’t the same in any other meaningful sense. Calling them all “AI” does nothing but confuse the issue.