There are several revealing quotes from Eugenia Kuyda, the CEO of Luka, which makes a chatbot app called Replika. At one point she reponds to claims that the company pulled a bait-and-switch by removing the ability for bots to respond sexually:
Kuyda disputed Rodichev’s claim that Replika lured users with promises of sex. She said the company briefly ran digital ads promoting “NSFW” — “not suitable for work” — pictures to accompany a short-lived experiment with sending users “hot selfies,” but she did not consider the images to be sexual because the Replikas were not fully naked.
Someone who thinks an image can only be sexual if it contains full nudity is not someone I trust to understand people at all.
I don’t know about you, but I find myself receiving a lot of emails about scams I should avoid. Gosh, life in 2023 sure is fun, huh? Recently, one such email from Capital One had me scratching my head. Here’s a look:
You can’t see it in that still picture, but the fish up top are (mildly) animated, which is a little fun:
However, those fish are also confusing, and not just because how the hell are their masks staying on? Let’s reason this out. The shark is a scammer, right? He’s pretending to be a goldfish, surely for nefarious/dinner reasons. OK. Very tricky, shark!
But then, for what possible reason is the goldfish wearing a mask? Is every fish in this corrupt sea a scammer? Or do they have a “Fish Face/Off” thing going on? Perhaps the goldfish is attempting to trick the shark as well. Am I going to have to actively scam my scammers? The future is exhausting.
I fear I have put much more thought into this than the designer did. This little image could’ve been cute and clever, if only they hadn’t given the goldfish a mask. Instead, they did extra work, and blew it.
Would you like a free robot vacuum cleaning your house for a few weeks? That sounds pretty good. What if, on top of that, you received $30 to $120? Amazing! Oh, and your naked ass might wind up on the internet? But still, $30!
I work to maintain a manageable email inbox. This includes frequently declining to provide my email address when asked, as well as unsubscribing from lists without hesitation. And yet? And yet, the nonsense never fully stops.
Of late, I’ve received a steady stream of emails informing me of modifications to various privacy policies. I imagine this is due to some law somewhere having been amended. Now the absurd nature of our society is laid bare each week, with multiple emails telling me that a document I’ve never read, and never will read, has changed.
Aside from providing a bleak laugh about our terrible future, however, privacy policy update emails aren’t really any fun. Better are those messages which at least provide some sort of amusement. For instance, in mid-December, I received the following:
Ah, yes, the most wonderful time of year! With much mistletoeing, and hearts all a-glowing, when American Airlines miles are earned by dining out at random restaurants and paying with a specific credit card.
The next email sent by the same sender was more uplifting. In fact, it was perhaps the best news I’ve received in a long, long time. I’m sad for the rest of you, however, because 2023 is not your year. No, no, per the American Airlines AAdvantage Dining Program:
Sorry, non-Paul chumps and chumpettes.
Last up, I received an email from the home of the Whopper, Burger King. Though I haven’t eaten meat in more than two decades, I do find myself in a Burger King once every year or three, as they’ve long had a few vegetarian offerings. Still, I don’t recall ever signing up for…well, anything. I imagine I received this as the result of placing an online order at some point in the past:
This email informed me that a “Linked (Credit) Card” would now work for loyalty identification, to “earn Crowns not only for
in-app and bk.com orders, but also for in-store purchases”. Now, that’s really news I can use, because a close look reveals the fact that I currently have a woeful 0 “Crowns”:
Yes, I believe even that “1+” dot should be empty for me. But my favorite part of this particular missive was the subject line, which badly misunderstand the meaning of its own very first word:
“Important” to whom, Burger King? “Important” to whom?
In 500 years, engravings will likely still be legible, while the QR codes will be meaningless.
Wednesday, November 30th, 2022
When I first ran into QR codes in 2011, I had an amusingly miserable experience. In the decade-plus since, the technology has gotten a bit more usable, particularly after QR code scanning was built in to the camera app on smartphones. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many restaurants switched to online menus accessed via QR code, and many still haven’t switched back. I suppose people just weren’t poking at their phones in public enough already.
While QR codes are now pretty well established, they remain distinctly unappealing to me. They feel like a kludge, unwanted technology that’s been forced on us to solve a problem in a clunky way. As such, when I heard about a company placing QR codes on gravestones, my immediate thought was “Tacky!”.
Sorry, Danny Boy.
Beyond that, though, it just seems unlikely that this business will last very long in the grand scheme of things. The idea of preserving the stories of the deceased is a fine one, but using QR codes to link to a small company’s website just feels terribly fragile. In 20, or 50, or 100 years, when “The Story Of” ever stops paying for their servers, these gravestones are just going to be festooned with useless trash.
Still, it could be worse. From the picture above, it appears it won’t be to difficult to remove the codes in the future. At least they aren’t engraving QR codes directly onto the headstone.
They’re literally referred to as “man’s best friend”!
Thursday, November 3rd, 2022
Recently, a video showing a Chinese drone dropping off a machine gun-laden robot has been making the rounds on the internet. I am certainly dismayed to see such a dystopian nightmare being made real. We really don’t have to do this, humanity!
It seems likely we will do this, though. Still, even if we’re condemned to face this monstrosity, we can at least avoid a second mistake. Let us not sully the good name of dogs by referring to this horror show as a “robot dog”:
A company called Sanas thinks they have the solution to problems faced by call center workers: Make them all sound white.1
The tacit promise of Sanas seems to be that callers will be more polite — and more amenable to being helped — if they think the person on the other end is more like them. (This isn’t a new concept; call center workers in India, the Philippines and elsewhere already adopt American names, and are pressured to develop accents that will sound more “neutral” to Americans.)
But there’s a fundamental flaw with the tacit promises of Sanas…Accents don’t cause bias, they trigger pre-existing biases. That bigotry is supercharged by the power dynamics at play in the hellscape of modern customer service, where frustrated callers are trapped on the phone with agents who have little authority to solve their problems, and everyone is forced to interact exclusively through dehumanizing, uncanny valley scripts…
And Sanas does little to remediate this hellscape; it merely puts a filter on it.
The problem isn’t the accents, it’s the system itself.
Footnotes:
The Sanas website currently provides a demonstration of this, toggling between an unfiltered audio file and a filtered one. I’ve archived a spliced-together version of that audio here. It contains a snippet of unfiltered audio first, then filtered audio, then a mix of the two. ↩︎
I actually thought we were past this, but it seems not.
Tuesday, October 11th, 2022
Last year, artist Damien Hirst sold $20 million dollars worth of art tied to NFTs. That was 10,000 sales at $2,000 each. Hirst then gave buyers the option of receiving a physical piece, or an NFT representing it. 4,851 people chose the latter, and now, Hirst is destroying the physical works associated with their NFTs.
This is very stupid! These people paid Damien Hirst $2,000 to burn a painting. Fine, fine, and also to provide them with a meaningless digital asset. Still, let’s all try to be better than this.
This appears to be my first mention of “the metaverse” on OFT. It probably won’t be the last.
Friday, September 30th, 2022
I have approximately no desire to go to Walmart in the real world, so the odds of me visiting Walmart in the regrettable metaverse are very long indeed.
Personally, my hope is that “the metaverse” is the 2020s version of 3D TV: Massively hyped and an utter commercial failure. Bonus points if it bankrupts Facebook Meta on the way down.
On this day, like most days, a bit of ridiculousness is a balm for the soul.
Wednesday, May 25th, 2022
If you don’t know what NFTs and “Bored Apes” are, gosh, I don’t know, consider yourself lucky. It’s all a pretty vapid rabbit hole of cryptocurrency and mediocre-at-best artwork, and ignoring it is mostly for the best. Still, for today’s post, a brief primer is in order.
An NFT (non-fungible token) is a one-of-a-kind digital asset, which mostly has value because other people agree that it has value. That’s true of lots of things, of course, though NFTs tend to seem much dumber than most assets. You can read more about NFTs here, but I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t bother. Think of NFTs as sort of like digital baseball cards, and you won’t be too far off-base.
Bored Apes are a particular type of NFT, featuring computer-generated pictures of cartoon apes. They’re popular with celebrities, and often used as profile pictures. OK. If that sounds fairly stupid, then you understand enough.
With all that as preface, please enjoy the headline “Someone Stole Seth Green’s Bored Ape, Which Was Supposed To Star In His New Show”. In essence, someone stole the digital asset which was going to be used to star in a TV show. Because of the way NFTs work, the possessor of an NFT is generally assumed to be its owner. As such, this theft could present copyright issues for the new show. There’s a whole lot of time, energy, and money being spent on things that are at best bad art, and at worst, terrible for the environment. On the plus side, however, they at least provide the rest of us with something to laugh at.
