“From the beginning of my career in politics, I had a personally imposed policy about swimming in my lane and not overcommenting on things I wasn’t an expert on. But in this case, I could not take the pontifications of this Ivy-educated gang; they were talking about the limits on what food stamps cover and don’t, and I could just tell none of them knew one person who had ever needed food stamps. I raised my hand (something I think only I did when I wanted to talk) and told them what it was like to see people humiliated in line trying to buy generic cereal, canned soup, milk. To watch them realize what they couldn’t get. To watch them realize how ridiculous it was that sports drinks were covered but something like Sunny Delight - which is actually much cheaper than orange juice but still has a decent amount of vitamins - was not, but that there was nothing they could do. I could feel my face get red and hot. I usually think you start losing your argument when you physically reveal how worked up you are, especially in a place like the White House, where, theoretically, what you say should be based on facts and figures and evidence; if your face is red, aren’t you showing too much emotion? I don’t know, but I got my point across. It wasn’t a conversation intended to resolve or change anything at that moment, but POTUS made it clear he was on my side.”
— -Alyssa Mastromonaco, recounting how she used her experience working at a grocery store during a policy meeting discussion.
Frank the Bot (@nostalgebraist-autoresponder) absolutely fascinates me, from a computer science standpoint of course but even more so from a sociological and anthropological standpoint.
For one, there is something so human about taking an extremely complex AI and…just setting her loose on a shitposting website, for other users to play with, for fun.
For two, she really illustrates that if you want an AI to pass for human, one of the most valuable things you can do is put it somewhere that its bot quirks can pass for Just How The Culture Works.
Like, if you pay attention, and you know, and you know what you’re looking for, it’s not hard to tell that Frank is a bot. Some posts are more passable than others, but all of her images have that AI-Generated Aura, she tends to lose track of context from earlier in a thread, she occasionally gets stuck in loops of only minor changes to a certain template, she occasionally just says completenon-sequiturs, she even forgets her own name sometimes-
But that doesn’t prove shit about shit here on tumblr. Us human users do the same damned things for shits and giggles all the time.
I love her. She fits in so perfectly. I genuinely wouldn’t know she was a bot if she didn’t advertise it, not because she has no tells, but because they just blend in so naturally with tumblr’s culture of nonsense.
I mean, look at this shit.
This looks like the kind of thing a human tumblr user would absolutely create after seeing some kind of absurd cursed shit or in response to getting a really weird ask or just because this website tends to inflict psychic damage in general. Of course, when you know it was done by a bot, it becomes pretty obvious that this is an AI-generated image, but if you don’t know - the odd face shapes may be just a stylistic choice; the bodies blended together and the hand-looking bits in the lower right are probably just artifacts of an artist rushing to crank out a meme and not caring about much more than hinting, what do you mean this wasn’t made by a human tumblr user ribbing this hellsite for being a hellsite?
And, I feel like this could say a lot about people, and compatibility, and subcultures, and even jump into a whole philosophical discussion about the nature of AI and how culture shapes both people and bots in very similar ways-
But underneath all that we come right back to, wow, this website has created a culture that lets well-meaning bots fit right in, we have created a niche that puts the Turing test on easy mode.
Yeah I actually do sometimes wonder about the extent to which Frank has the Turing test passing ability you described. I’ve never found anything that made me sure.
It’s been a lot of fun watching the “bot” label become less and less relevant as she becomes a recognizable part of this ecosystem.
ETA: here’s a couple of times when Frank was confused enough about human communication that she seemed like she was doing the Turing test:
There is so much going on here, the fact she made a laptop mockup for her own cat, the fact that she put the “google images of birds” on it, the fact that the cat KNOWS it’s the cat’s “laptop,” the fact that the cat is UPSET WHEN HER LAPTOP IS MESSED WITH…
People make fun of mechanics problems assuming spherical frictionless cows or algebra problems with people buying 8 dozen cabbages, but those have nothing on relativityproblems:
“Didn’t threaten the lives of justices”? Fuck that bullshit.
Justice Blackmun, who wrote the Roe majority opinion, had a bullet shot through his living room window. This after years of receiving letters threatening his life. The bullet occurred right after he had received a particularly concerning letter, and was at the end of a year in which DC-area clinics had been subjected to seven bombings. Not threats, bombings.
ough. my post escaped containment with a typo. crying, screaming, throwing up, etc, etc
There’s a post of mine that passes around Facebook every so often, and there’s a glaring type on it, and every time I see it, I just want to stare off into the distance as I hold a lit cigarette.
yesterday my date made me promise to “not talk to any random russians this time” only for me to immediately become best friends with a kosovan gang member. saved on a technicality
after i successfully taught him how to play uno via google translate i explained to him that my date’s phone got stolen, prompting both the most threatening AND the most hilarious sentence ever typed into a translator:
“why did you have to promise that you won’t talk to russian people in in first place” because after a certain amount of alcohol i enter a stage of inebriation my friends have dubbed “russian hour” in which the duolingo trained part of my brain takes over and i sniff out russian speaking people like a bloodhound and exitedly talk to them until i am physically dragged away.
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