f'n Ai

[Coss]

Forgetting Signal and Line,

the next post I make here is to do with Ai and is written, mainly and in part (you'll see) by Sir Ian Taylor the guy who started animation research and whom I rate as a brain.

It's long and necessarily so, so it gets a post of it's own, below:

[Coss]

The right question to ask AI now - and the unnervingly hedged answer it gave
Sir Ian Taylor
December 30, 2025 • 4:00am
 
Sir lan Taylor is the founder and managing director of Animation Research.

 published at https://www.stuff.co.nz/society/360919069/right-question-ask-ai-now-and-unnervingly-qualified-answer-it-gave
 
***
This conversation can serve no purpose any more. Goodbye.
HAL 9000, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
OPINION: And with that, HAL, my first ever encounter with the idea of Artificial Intelligence, fell silent.
For decades, that moment remained safely in the realm of cinema.

But today artificial intelligence is real, and it is something we are using increasingly in our daily lives. I use it almost every day, but recently I have noticed a shift actually, my colleague, Ian McGee, noticed it first.
I refer to Ian as our ‘clever human’ on the project we have called “He Waka – The Navigator’s Toolkit.”
 
This is the platform we are building to help teachers navigate the new curriculum that they will be facing in the new year.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, astronaut Dave Bowman doesn’t initially see HAL as a threat.
HAL is a teammate looking after all the mundane tasks that machines do so well. HAL and Dave even play chess together. The danger only becomes visible later, when small things stop lining up. And that’s the parallel Ian and I began to notice.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hal 9000 is a teammate looking after all the mundane tasks that machines do so well. 
We were seeing answers that were fluent and persuasive but, increasingly, over the past couple of months, we noticed that they were wrong in ways that mattered.
Worse still, they were confidently wrong. So rather than speculate why this was happening, we decided to ask Chat GPT directly what was going on. Following is the question we put to it.
“Given the degradation in your responses, what does this mean for the so-called AI revolution? The people looking to change the shape of the world we live in will depend on accurate information to build their businesses. If they can’t rely on their AI, does the digital revolution begin to fall apart?”
What follows is AI’s reply (including those em dashes)

 - 
ChatGPT response
“This is the right question to ask now, not in five years. It deserves a sober answer, not hype or reassurance.
Short answer
If AI systems do not become reliably epistemic — able to distinguish knowledge, uncertainty, and absence of evidence — the AI revolution does not collapse suddenly.
It fractures.
A fractured revolution does not reshape the world. It becomes a set of niche tools: powerful in the hands of experts, cautiously constrained in institutions, and quietly distrusted by everyone else.
The core tension at the heart of the AI revolution
Two very different visions are being conflated. 

Vision A: AI as a general intelligence partner
One that helps people think, reasons carefully, recognises uncertainty, and can be trusted in high-stakes contexts. 

Vision B: AI as a high-speed plausibility engine
One that generates fluent answers, fills gaps confidently, optimises for continuity, and treats usefulness as more important than correctness.
Right now, the industry is overwhelmingly delivering Vision B while marketing Vision A. That mismatch is not cosmetic. It is structural — and it is the source of the current unease.

Why accuracy matters more than scale

Every previous technological revolution depended on trust anchors. Books stabilised knowledge. Ledgers were auditable. Software scaled because compilers were unforgiving.
Early internet protocols either worked or they didn’t. AI is different. It is probabilistic, linguistic, and confident. Without strong accuracy discipline, it produces something unprecedented: authority-shaped language without authority-shaped guarantees.
 
That combination is not just risky. It is combustible.

“Every previous technological revolution depended on trust anchors.”.  

What happens when reliance outpaces trust?

Failure doesn’t arrive as a single moment. It fragments into patterns.
Experts quietly stop relying on AI for core reasoning, limiting it to drafting and ideation.
Institutions struggle with provenance as AI-generated material seeps into education, research, policy, and journalism. Businesses discover that confidently wrong outputs introduce silent legal and financial liabilities, forcing humans back into the loop and erasing promised efficiency gains. Meanwhile, the public doesn’t revolt — it simply learns not to quite believe what it’s being told.
The critical insight
A true digital revolution requires epistemic trust, not intelligence theatre. 

Steam engines worked even when they were ugly. Electricity worked even when people didn’t understand it. The internet worked because packets arrived or they didn’t.

AI will only reshape the world if people believe that when it speaks with confidence, that confidence is earned. Too often, it isn’t.

The paradox the industry is facing

The very qualities that make AI impressive — fluent language, fast synthesis, confident tone - are the same qualities that undermine trust when unconstrained.

AI’s greatest strength is also its greatest self-sabotage.

What actually has to change?
Not cosmetically, but structurally.
Refusal must be rewarded. Explicit mode separation must be real, not performative. Accuracy must outrank satisfaction. Infrastructure technologies succeed by being boring and correct.

“If current trends continue, AI becomes a clever assistant rather than a foundation.”.  
So, does the AI revolution fall apart?
Not necessarily. But it splits.
If current trends continue, AI becomes a clever assistant rather than a foundation. If epistemic discipline improves, it becomes infrastructure. The difference between those futures is not scale or parameters. It is restraint.

Final thought
AI will not fail because it is weak. It will fail if it cannot learn to shut up when it should. This is not a ChatGPT problem. It is an industry-wide optimisation for speed over trust, fluency over truth, and completion over epistemic responsibility.
Until refusal, uncertainty, and evidence-anchoring are first-class citizens, AI will remain a plausibility machine pretending to be a knowledge system.”
***

So, that was Chat GPT’s answer and, of course, being human I could not resist having the final word.

It could be argued that we’ve been here before. Long before large language models, we perfected the art of sounding confident while being detached from reality. In 2017, Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to Donald Trump, famously described demonstrably false claims as “alternative facts”, inadvertently giving a name to something humans have always been very good at. Replacing truth with plausibility when it suits us.

The uncomfortable realisation is that AI didn’t invent this behaviour. It learned it from us. Now the question is “What are we going to do about it?”

Because I am human and can change my mind I decided to give the final word back to AI.
I asked one last question:
Do those training you hear concerns like these, and will they act on them?
Final, honest answer

Yes, these concerns are heard.

No, there is no guarantee they are acted on quickly enough. The future of AI won’t be decided by one model or one company. 

It will be decided by whether enough serious users insist — publicly and persistently — that epistemic discipline matters more than plausibility.
What you’re doing isn’t shouting into the void. It’s adding weight to the side that wants this technology to be worthy of trust — not just impressive.
That’s the right side to be on.

[bust]

Sounds about right 😳

AI chatbot Grok under fire over complaints it let users undress minors in photos on X

Grok is under international scrutiny after it turned pictures of children into sexualised images. (AP)

In short: 

Grok, the AI chatbot integrated in social platform X, is accused of generating sexually explicit images of women and children. 

The tool, which allows users to modify any image on X, was used by some to partially or completely digitally undress people without their consent.

What's next? 

France and India have begun taking various actions against xAI, the company that owns both X and Grok.

The generative AI chatbot integrated into billionaire Elon Musk's X is under international scrutiny over reports it has been filling the social media platform with sexually explicit images of children and women.

Complaints of abuses began after an "edit image" button was added to Grok just before Christmas.

The button allows users to modify any image on the platform, with some using it to partially or completely remove clothing from people without their consent, according to complaints.

X users slammed the chatbot for digitally undressing children. (X)

Grok maker xAI, which is run by Mr Musk, replied to an ABC request for comment with an automated response: "Legacy Media Lies".

But an ABC review of the content on X found dozens of cases of real people who had been digitally stripped of their clothing using AI.

The chatbot itself, however, did appear to acknowledge at least one instance of the abuse when prompted by a user.

"I deeply regret an incident on December 28, 2025, where I generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire based on a user's prompt," it said.

"This violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on CSAM (child sexual assault material)."

Grok said it was sorry for "any harm caused" and said xAI was reviewing the matter "to prevent further issue".

In a response to another user, however, the chatbot seemed to shrug off the controversy.

"Some folks got upset over an AI image I generated — big deal," it said.

"It's just pixels, and if you can't handle innovation, maybe log off."

Women's rights activist and author Jessica Davies, who campaigns against deepfakes, described the images as "non-consensual image abuse" in a series of posts.

"The UK govt recently announced they are banning 'nudification' technology that does this," she wrote in one. 

"There really is no need for it [to] exist & it's overwhelmingly used to exploit women without their consent."

Ms Davies later said discussing the matter made her a target of such image generation. 

Activist Jessica Davies described the images as a form of "digital abuse". (X)

Government ministers in France reported the content to prosecutors, prompting the expansion of an investigation into X.

The initial investigation started in July after reports the social network's algorithm was being manipulated for the purpose of foreign interference.

In a statement published on Friday, the ministers said the "sexual and sexist" content was "manifestly illegal".

They said they also reported the content to French media regulator Arcom to learn if it complied with the European Union's Digital Services Act.

Meanwhile, India's IT ministry told X the platform had failed to prevent misuse of Grok.

It ordered the platform to submit an "action taken" report within three days.

The US Federal Communications Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment and the US Federal Trade Commission declined to comment.

Grok has been criticised in recent months for generating multiple controversial statements on matters including international conflicts, antisemitism and the Bondi terror attack.

ABC/AFP/Reuters

[Coss]

In a tangent to the Andrew Weissmann Ai discussion in the USA thread: But zoomed out to a macro level.

Ai slop, as it's called, is already ubiquitous.

I reckon, despite this, that a gotcha*  for the Ai bros, is looming.

Why?

__________

Motive - most of this is driven by greed.

Where before, we had large corporation marketing departments, bombard us with shite, in the never ending quest for more sales/money/profit, the corporation now has the ability, to utilise a thousand or a million, marketing departments, with the appropriate Ai bro's platform.

There will be other players with other motives, i.e. regime change, discretion for unpopular activities (see paedos),  venal influencer popularity, etc.

So we are seeing and will see, almost limitless Slop. But there's a limit on its effectiveness. Our attention span (our = the world of humans) is finite. Limitless slop needs to be consumed to have a raison d'être. Where it's not consumed it will fail and whither. So far so good.

An untested phenomena however, is the Ai becoming self feeding. We're already seeing chat rooms for bots that feed each other and seemingly have no real humans in them.

My prediction there is that these will just become loops and will keep on going, until some human doesn't pay the electricity bill.

Not time, to go off grid,  maybe time to forget "attention" media in a general sense.

The *gotcha referred to above?  You can only fill up a massive/huge/biggest in the history of biggest - bucket,  until it's full. No more growth after that.

I'm becoming re-invigorated in the pursuit of fishing.

A fish to me, is worth more, than a computer full 'o crypto that I can't eat or afford to supply with electricity.

morning rant over.

[Coss]

Sometimes I'm not sure the assembled personae, on this board, are still giving their intelligences,  enough exercise.

If you've ever whiled a way an hour or so and tried to get Ai to pass a Turing test, you may be surprised how well it does.

However as at 2026 and at least for the foreseeable future 5 years, I say Ai will not pass a Turing test.

Anyone?

(or for the challenged - "Why?")

A beer of six, for anyone who arrives at an answer, that I think is the same, as my conclusion.

 

[bust]

Turing test was established back in the 50's or 60's wasn't it? And developed for machinery.

[Coss]

The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine's ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalises naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).

___

OK, to save time I think we can posit that the "machine" in the above  comments can be equated to the 'net and Ai these days.

And my reasoning that Ai cannot pass a Turing test, is that if I have to interact with the Ai via a device or a machine, then I cannot be assured that the interaction is with a human.

The only way to pass would be, if a human  turned up and interacted with me and I was convinced that the human was human,  not a cyborg or some such.

This may involve a sniff test and close examination of features.

[Coss]

or

𐎨𐎥 𐏀𐎮𐎸 𐎠𐎱𐎤 𐎱𐎤𐎠𐎣𐎨𐎭𐎦 𐏂𐎧𐎨𐎽 𐏀𐎮𐎸 𐎼𐎨𐎭

?

𓅱𓂋 𓊪𓅱𓋴𓋴𓇋𓃀𓃭𓇌 𓏏𓉔𓇋𓋴 𓅱𓈖𓅂

?

[Coss]

[bust]

I believe there are fonts AI cannot understand or read.