For those of us who don’t want to sit through 30 minutes of people not getting to the point quickly can you give a summary, please?
It’s an entertaining 30 minutes, though! LOL
The point to me is, “How can something that bad pass post production inspection and actually be released to the public?”
I’m the opposite. I regard it as a convenience to go straight to a self-checkout terminal rather than waiting behind three people in a checkout line, one of whom has an overflowing cart.
I remember having problems with them a decade or so ago when they first came in, but they’ve worked out the bugs, and I’m used to them, so I almost never need to call over the one clerk keeping an eye on several self-checkouts, and it’s been like that for me for several years now.
Why that’s about the most polite insult I’ve received in some time! 
Not likely to seek out the studies cited, but that article says little. I’m surprised to hear a lot of people conflate cynicism with intelligence. I would expect skepticism, but cynicism?
And “trust” depends on whom we are trusting, and in what sorts of situations. I think most individuals act largely out of self interest in most situations (barring close friends and immediate family). That doesn’t mean they wish me ill, but rather, that I and my concerns are simply irrelevant to them. I admit that is likely affected by confirmation bias.
I acknowledge expertise in the many areas in which I am ignorant, so I do “trust” persons I perceive to be expert and unbiased in those areas. I’m not sure there is any other way to exist, unless one embraces ignorance.
I am very confident that most for profit corporations are operating to maximize the profit of their shareholders, rather than out of any altruistic motives. That figures into the “trust” I place in their products and communications.
Of course, the possibility exists that I’m just a big dummy! 
If that is the case, how come I’m not the happy idiot…?
Bing Chat AI gaslighted and threatened end users.
3 minutes and 10 seconds into the video, if you wish to go straight to that part.
“Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained—that is if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity.… Today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand … [and] cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda … to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable.” Edward Bernays, 1928
I think it was Neil Postman who said in the 1980s that television was the best medium ever for its intended purpose, which was to sell advertising and put it in front of people.
2023 to Bernays and Postman: you ain’t seen nothing yet.
There’s also a kind of nonlinear scaling thing to it too. If you are exposed to 10 interactions and one of them is intrusive and demanding and perhaps hostile, it’s easy to regard that as a minority. If you have 1000 interactions and 100 of them are bad, it’s the same proportion, but it can seem like a worse problem, because 100 bad things is a lot more than 1 bad thing, in a different sort of way to how 900 good things is more than 9 good things.
For example if you go out for a walk and say “hi” to 10 people you walk past; 9 of them say “hi!” back; one tries to get you to attend an Amway sales pitch, you might return home and just shrug it off as a random weirdo.
If you pass 100 people and 90 of them say “Hi!” back, but 10 of them try to get you into Amway, you might return home thinking ‘WTF is it with all these Amway people?’ - same mathematical proportion, different perception.
Yeah, the only reason I ever use Edge is for web dev testing. Firefox or Chrome.
Hey, I do that too! I thought I was the only one who treated Twitter as if it was a blog hosting site.
The digital stuff doesn’t bother me. The same filters I developed growing up with broadcast TV still work. I can still go to the park or the beach or just a walk around the block and nobody there wants anything from me.
The only time I find it exhausting is when I visit new places where every kindness seems transactional (I’ll probably never go back to Morocco) but even that is probably just a byproduct of the tourism industry and easy to avoid with a little cultural education.
“Hustle culture” writ large. Just wait until companies perfect the “blipvert”.
Also, who uses Bing? Is it the only search engine available on your Windows Phone? Is it the best engine for searching Geocities and Angelfire?
To be fair, all chatbots are deception machines that are inherently gaslighting users into the believe that they are actually performing cognitive functions of consciousness with a human-like theory of mind. Bing Chat was just an incompetently trained and restrained chatbot that did exactly what chatbots would do if trained on reddit and and YouTube comment sections.
Stranger
I have never understood the phenomenon of “influencers”?
Who are they ‘influencing’? Not me, as far as I know. I don’t read blogs or Facebook; I don’t think I could come up with the name of a single “influencer”.
I get my news from sources like the BBC and Reuters, and even those I read with a good pinch of salt.
Also, I get it that modern media receivers have a number of ways to control the volume of their outputs. I’ve been a big fan of the mute button when one entered our household in the 1970s. Similarly, you don’t have to look at the ads on the periphery of a website (despite all the flashing and movement), you can spend 30 minutes working out how to control ad content with blockers or settings, etc. The old, “If you don’t want to get mugged, don’t go to that part of town” pitch that in other applications draws accusations of victim blaming.
Yeah, I COULD do all sorts of things to turn it all down. Maybe. For now. But my point is, I am mad because I HAVE TO. I resent having to take some unknown but very specific action (which involves exploring technologies I am not yet competent with) in order to make my life simply livable. Yeah, I could carry a jammy and eliminate muggers, but why should I even have to think about them in the first place?
I’m going to speculate that that isn’t standardized across the industry - at least not at the supermarkets around here. At the one I’m talking about I don’t see the first indication that the cashiers are in any hurry at all. Not that I want them subjected to some middle management drone with a stopwatch standing over them either. Just some attempt at efficiency, which I rarely observe.
In fact, I’ll go farther. If the supermarkets were in any way interested in serving people faster it would look a whole lot different. To my eye, they have barely changed since I was a kid. The fact is, the manager at my store showed classic institutional disinterest. Maybe it’s true that person doesn’t have control over things that would make a difference. Next time I’ll find someone from corporate and abandon my damn cart in front of them if that’s what it takes to get their attention.
Naw, no one standing there with a stopwatch - they have the computerized registers spying on the workers. Which means every so often we figure out how to game the system, at least to some degree. I know exactly what starts the clock, and when it stops.
I moved back to the UK from the US a few years ago, and it seems that in the UK the “10 item quick checkout” lane isn’t a thing here now. Not sure if it ever was?
But I too hate the auto-checkout things and refuse to use them.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they worked well, but every time I try one it seems to get into some locked-up state that won’t let you do anything (even cancel, back up or retry) so you have to call an assistant.
As a professional computer programer, I put some of this down to just bad user-interface design.
The designers should be forced to ‘eat their own dogmeat’ as we used to say in the trade: do their own shopping via the damn things!
The whole influencer thing sort of sickens me. I sometimes get called that myself, usually by marketing people who want me to shill their product on YouTube - ie ‘influence’ people to buy it, in exchange for freebies or money.
Hate it.
I don’t let any form of advertising or influence bend my will. The last time I let that happen was in September of 1993, and I learned my lesson.
A confluence of events weakened my usually iron will-- I was on vacation, driving through St. Ignace, Michigan. An Arby’s commercial came on the radio, advertising their new mushroom swiss burger. It was around lunchtime, I was hungry, and just happened to be driving past an Arby’s. So I got myself an Arby’s mushroom swiss burger.
It was terrible.
It is absolutely that dramatic about it.
I introduced my father to computers 35 years ago. He has since passed on.
He got addicted to the internet. He had PAGES of short cuts.
He never got really computer savvy.
BUT, he said he wanted to write a book titled “More and more about less and less”. I think that’s a good title.