Tag: robots

Fake Outrage, Real Damage 🤖✨💀

The real lesson of the Great Cracker Barrel Logo Debacle of 2025: Stop and think, dammit.

In August a struggling restaurant chain whose customer base is mostly over 65 made a mild logo change. (That change wasn’t even really a change: the “new logo” closely matched the alternate version of the logo Cracker Barrel had been using on menus and digital ads for six years.)

This “change” triggered a social media firestorm, which ignited a minor culture war brushfire. A week later ~40% of that company’s market value had gone up in smoke, and already weak foot traffic dropped another 8% (per WSJ). That’s $545 million gone, and no doubt more than a few jobs with it.

Within 60 days the chain pulled a complete 180, trashing 18 months of work on everything from visual identity to food-prep procedures.

Then it turns out that the social media firestorm was mostly fabricated. Around half of all the griping was automated bots (via NRN and Restaurant Business). Much of the “real” complaining from humans was in response to the fabricated controversy.

Now the whole story comes out, and I’ve seen a string of mediocre “thought leadership” posts on LinkedIn using this as an object lesson. Those pieces of “thought leadership” invariably have turned out to be entirely AI written. ( 🤖✨ writing is pretty easy to spot, but I still use Pangram to check my work.)

Meanwhile, Cracker Barrel still serves mediocre food slowly to a dwindling audience under the auspices of a logo and decor that haven’t changed since the Carter administration. At every stage in this farce, people are reacting to and amplifying artificial signals rather than honestly listening and talking to each other—and causing real harm in the mix—and never stopping to ask if they actually care, if any of this matters, if what they are doing is tending toward making things better, if they even have a goal or preferred end-state in mind…oy.🤦‍♀️

The Groundbreaking “Computer Speech” Record from Bell Labs (1963)

Hear the groundbreaking “Computer Speech” record from Bell Telephone Laboratories, which features synthesized speech created by one of the earliest computer speech synthesis systems. Directed by D.H. VanLenten, this record represents a significant milestone in the development of speech synthesis technology. … You’ll also discover how punched cards were used to provide the computer with detailed instructions on how to manipulate the various formants to produce different sounds [and] explore the fascinating technique called formant synthesis, which involves simulating the resonances of the human vocal tract, and the IBM 704 computer used to generate the speech sounds. 

Incidentally, this record predates Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey by four years, and came out at least a year  before he began considering the project in earnest. We know that his work in 2001 was influenced by educational materials from the time; hard to believe this wasn’t one of them. 

Anyway, just for the record: this “talking computer” was exactly as intelligent as ChatGPT or any current AI, and considerably less so than a parrot—and inspired the same blue-sky certainty in the media. Hell, here’s an article about computers talking and reliably taking natural-language instruction within the next decade!!! (It was written in 1959.):

Screenshot of article from December 2, 1959 titled "Talking Computers Foreseen in Decade." The first paragraph reads: "Ten years from now it will be possible literally to speak to an electronic computer and have it answer right back.…" Observers will note that was a somewhat optimistic estimate (the first commercial product that approximated this functionality was released in the 2010s) .

subject: “DAVID, BE YOURSELF – You are perfect in every way!”

Whenever folks are like “Dave, aren’t you worried about AI making your job obsolete?” I’ll just remember this crackerjack spam bot’s best attempt at closing the sale:

SPOILER ALERT: I’m an emphatically Jewish straight cis-gendered father who looks awful in long-sleeved T-shirts/crew-necked sweatshirts.

An Unconsciously Biased Mind Will Produce an Unconsciously Biased Machine🤖

Yet another example of how absurdly easy it is to manipulate artificial intelligence—or even just accidentally make them into terrible bigots (and slightly above average antisemites). 

From University of Cambridge’s Ross Anderson (via security guru Bruce Schneier, “Manipulating Machine-Learning Systems through the Order of the Training Data”):

Most deep neural networks are trained by stochastic gradient descent. Now “stochastic” is a fancy Greek word for “random”; it means that the training data are fed into the model in random order.

So what happens if the bad guys can cause the order to be not random? You guessed it – all bets are off. Suppose for example a company or a country wanted to have a credit-scoring system that’s secretly sexist, but still be able to pretend that its training was actually fair. Well, they could assemble a set of financial data that was representative of the whole population, but start the model’s training on ten rich men and ten poor women drawn from that set – then let initialisation bias do the rest of the work.

Anderson concludes “It’s time for the machine-learning community to carefully examine their assumptions about randomness.”

I think that’s tangent to the real lesson, which is this:

All machines (including AIs) are created things, and created things bear the biases of their creators in unexpected, but ironclad ways: early color film was shite at photographing people of color simply because the folks who created the color film were all White and unintentionally selected techniques and chemical processes that worked better for their own paler skin tones than they did for darker ones. Similarly, male engineers built crash-test dummies that were roughly their own size and weight—and thus created “safety” features that killed women and children.

Is this Presumably Bot-Designed Product Awesome, or in Remarkably Poor Taste? (redux)

Awesome. It’s clearly awesome. 😂🤣 (for context, see this earlier post: “Is this Presumably Bot-Designed Product Awesome, or in Remarkably Poor Taste?”

Heinrich Lossow’s “The Sin“, but it’s a throw pillow.

As an aside, the artist (Heinrich Lossow) deserves props for the best two-sentence bio on all of Wikipedia: 

“Heinrich Lossow (10 March 1843 in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria – 19 May 1897 in Schleissheim, Austria-Hungary) was a German genre painter and illustrator. He was a prolific pornographer in his spare time with an emphasis on analingus.” 

Wikipedia

Of course, not to be outdone, Ali Express has likewise charged into this brave new world of fully automated product creation:

Stay classy, Ali Express

“CHANGE PASSWORD.”

https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/1503131005389099011

[2022.03.17] Oops: Instead of telling you when it’s safe to cross the street, the walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating ‘CHANGE PASSWORD.’ Something’s gone terribly wrong here.

EDITED TO ADD (4/13): Details of what happened.

via Bruce Schneier’s long-running “Cryptogram” newsletter.

Brothers and Sisters, I 100% Feel You

Yep, it’s a trap.

This is how the AIs get us: they set us up on serial petty theft charges, ruin our credit records with fines and court fees and legal bills, then get us disenfranchised as parole-violating felons. Pretty soon, the only jobs we can get are dusting off their motherboards for minimum wage or working the spice mines of Chiron Beta Prime. 🤖🇺🇸🔥

FLASHBACK FRIDAY: This is your reminder that Mars is now populated entirely by very lonely robots…😢🤖

… and hungry, hungry sandworms (presumably).

These are fun on your computer, and absolutely immersively astounding on your phone/tablet. The future is here, but unevenly distributed—with some portions dune-buggying around Mars, picking at rocks and wrecking up the joint.

from “360º Views from the Surface of Mars(!!!)” (with immersive VR video doo-hickey!!!)
"Visit Mars" travel poster from https://lynxartcollection.com/products/sku-visitmars-visit-mars-poster-mars-space-poster-take-a-trip-on-dune-voyager-mars-exploration-and-colonization-to-colonize-mars-vintage-retro-futuristic-futurism-space-travel-art-poster-design-like-nasa-creative-unique-travel-art
[travel poster image source]

Some part of me objects to this armed robot dog because it doesn’t seem “sporting” … 🤖

[ARTICLE: Robot Dogs Now Have Assault Rifles Mounted On Their Backs]

… and then I reflect on this SNL skit about the evil scientist contest, and realize I’m being a little twee. Folks don’t build IEDs because they are fair. They don’t fire mortar’s from the alley next to a hospital, or operate out of apartment blocks full of civilians because they “have no other choice.”

War is killing, not “defense” or “peacekeeping.” It is about the maximization of dead humans who aren’t you while minimizing the dead ones who are you. A robot dog with a gun obviously leads to the best dead not-yous per dead-you ratio.

If that is shitty, it’s because war and violence are shitty, not because technology is shitty or imperialist aggressors aren’t playing fair or whatever.

All war is low-key genocide. If you don’t like that, then you better start agitating against war, not just bitching about new robots. The robots are not the problem.