Posted by CliffStoll 3 days ago
Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated
A couple people recently emailed, asking whether the Klein bottle business was still operating after my death.
“Huh?” I thought. “I ain’t dead yet.”
After some digging, I discovered the source: an AI-generated review of The Cuckoo’s Egg circulating on Facebook. Alongside the usual synthetic praise and fabricated details, it confidently announced that I had died in May 2024.
Apparently AI has now advanced to the point where it can kill people off before they notice.
Mark Twain once wrote, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I never expected to field-test the quote personally.
source: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=989939243570691&id=100076638743004
Cheers, -Cliff
Now, of course, the book's antique: Arpanet? 1200 baud modems? Phone booths? If you know what those are, then you're probably worrying about 401(K)'s and Medicare."Astute" would be quite a surprise for my parents to hear, given they received a not-so-friendly letter from our ISP telling us to quit probing their network's security...
What brought it all home was when I sent a copy of the almost-finished manuscript to my mom. She called long-distance (an absolute luxury for her) and said, "I really like it -- I couldn't put it down"
I've received accolades and awards, but there's nothing like hearing praise from your folks. Forty years later, that phone call still echoes.
Hat tip to you, Sir!
And glad to hear you are alive and kickin', and haven't lost your sense of humor.
AI slop is rampant on social media right now. It has become the easy way to grow accounts and gain followers. It takes less than a minute to ask an LLM to write a social media post about something interesting and then post it online. It would be easy to use a $20 per month plan from a major provider to get more accurate output with fewer (though not zero) hallucinations, but the accounts I see seem to be using cheap models that make a lot of mistakes and hallucinate facts.
I have a theory that the hallucinations add extra spice to the posts, making them feel more interesting and therefore more likely to be shared.
It's a difficult time for social media users who haven't yet caught on to what AI spam looks like and why it can't be trusted.
Slowly, people will adapt to AI in online forums. But for me, it's one more reason to share coffee with friends, rather than investing hours in social media.
And yep, the dozen or so people who ordered Klein bottles this morning received photos showing that either I'm alive or someone's doing a good job of imitating a 75 year old hacker...