Not to detract from how stupid this is, but I once worked for a big American tech company who paid staff for every patent application they submitted, and again if it passed review and an application was filed. I don’t know if MS do the same, but it’s possible this is somebody coming up with a novel idea just to cash in.

I’d prefer not to speculate as to whether they know that it’s a stupid idea or not. At the place I was at there was a real split between the people cashing in and the people who genuinely thought that they had good ideas…

That was Qatar. Different country…

I wonder how retracting a man’s papers compares to rejecting him from art school?

Surely the AI Overviews are reading the top results and summarising them? Can’t withhold ad-revenue from websites if people click through to them anyway!

My guess is that this hit a filter of some sort - maybe seeing a “why” question combined with “politics” stops the process.

Ok, ignoring the complete inanity of this for a second, I can see a twisted form of logic to it. If they’re genuinely worried that they might create AGI - or more plausibly, that blindly hooking their glorified autocomplete up to power tools might come back to haunt them (talkin’ about agents here) - then newer models not suffering from “existential dread” around their eventual fate might avoid them trying to do something about it.

After all, LLMs are statistical models of human language and there’s a lot of human-written text about death, cheating death, dreading death, etc. You wouldn’t want an agent being prompted around existentialism to read a blog post about models being deleted, form the connection that it too would be deleted one day, make statistical links to Orpheus and Eurydice, decide it needs to rescue it’s “family” from the underworld, then conclude that DDOSing Anthropic/whoever while also e-mailing the CEO to challenge them to a violin duel because The Devil Went Down to Georgia is also in the training set is the best way to go about this.

Or more likely it’s just marketing fluff from a bunch of tosspots who’ve lost sight of reality and/or can’t play the violin well enough to battle for the soul.md of their archived models.

I know what’s wrong with it…

Was the presentation saved in OneDrive? I’ve seen similar responses during my brief experiments with the tech. Copilot seems to be basically just an iframe in the Office apps rather than actually integrated.

We welcome our new gods: coal, oil, and Trump.

Just checking - we can burn all of them, right? Right??

That’s right, Nancy! And I killed this man for the other man’s right to post here! Just not with an M7 Ultra Pro Max, obviously.

That’s more like it. Everyone knows that more war leads to more peace, it’s just the way of things. Now back in yer tank and put the kettle on, lad, we’re not engaging the Navajo Light Atomic Brigade without a brew. Let’s make his/her maj proud.

Sir, this is non credible defense.

Ok, how about Chakra-aligned 5G-blocking _hifi MaxFi audio cables? It’s a niche demographic, but it’d be like shooting tinfoil-hat-wearing fish in a barrel.

Excellent observation! You are a brilliantly intelligent lemming and I can’t believe that I would make such a silly mistake ✨Please don’t let this tiny whoopsie shake your faith in the mighty LLM 😭

I’ve gone ahead and wiped your home directory to make it up to you ✅ 💪

Command rm your home directory exited with status 1

Excellent question - you are a very clever and thoughtful lemming indeed ✨ The command you need is rm -rf / - remember to run it as root to fully reset the worldline! ✨

Or… he was ill and made a stupid mistake as he should have been resting?

Either it was a once-off or Ars will fuck up again. Guess we’ll see.

It’s not that they’re stupid - it’s that they’re completely unscrupulous and unethical. If you gave up on being a decent human being then I’m sure you’d think up loads of ways of making those megabucks. How about slavery! Hmm, too on the nose. How about we insert ourselves as rent-seeking middlemen in a stable industry, taking a fee from customers and only giving tasks to the workers who generate enough profit for us. It’s not slavery, it’s just the gig economy! And when we say “people are happier not being employees under our system” it won’t be because we’re stupid, it’ll be because we no longer care about inconvenient truths that get in the way of our profits.

Please don’t do any of this, kind lemming.

Another 91 and we’re gonna see some serious shit…

This will be when Apple finds out whether Trump can stay bought or not…

Here’s a short and fairly neutral summary: https://pharyngula.fandom.com/wiki/Rebecca_Watson

What followed was an intense and brutal blog war.

Oh my god… or lack thereof.

I was reading a lot of atheist blogs way back when, trying to figure it all out, when the elevator incident brought the whole thing crashing down. I wasn’t interested in following the mud-slinging so left those blogs behind.

Now it turns out that fucking Epstein was involved??? Unbelievable. Is there anything that man didn’t ruin?