On Stack Overflow

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3993482/ai-didnt-kill-stack-overflow.html

AI Is Destroying Gen Z's Chances at a Stable Career

 https://futurism.com/ai-gen-z-careers

The age of AI layoffs is already here. The reckoning is just beginning

"Job cuts are hitting knowledge workers from entry-level to management, from tech-forward companies to more staid corners of Corporate America..."

MLCommons

MLCommons is a nonprofit organization which helped establish some of the original industry benchmarks for machine learning, promoting shared evaluation standards across the field. 

Find it @ https://mlcommons.org/

Korean AI

Yet another case of Life imitating Art (please see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film), this time from South Korea.

"I prefer Gerard Depardieu's AI avatar to the real thing. At least, Gerard's avatar behaves himself, is polite and smiles a lot. And he doesn't molest and grope actresses on set, breathing heavily down their neck and their throat, sticking his paws up their skirts, like a sweaty, flabby and hairy orang utang on heat..." 

The South Korean pop band featured in the video-clip looks very real, but it is not: as the article points out, it is AI-created. Granted, some of those K-Pop bands do not look quite 'real' in many ways, even when their performers are human beings, as they are drilled robotically to perform in that kind of way. For a start, they look too perfect, particularly the girls. Then again, some pretty Korean girls do look perfect. And yet they are real. 

Having said all this, if I were a singer, or actor, I would be worried: before long, it will be possible to produce entire feature films that will look quite 'real' with AI avatars pretending to be humans, and it is going to be a lot cheaper than using real (human) performers. For cheap, bland, industrially produced pop music, it won't be a great loss, in terms of creativity: Taylor Swift might as well retire in 2026. 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=EYIdOXjwOOE&si=5ETp2us17M8LqrdP

Joran Times Article here:

https://jordantimes.com/opinion/sundeep-waslekar/the-magic-of-korean-ai

Rocky Ping Pong, the Chinese boxing robot

From BBC

A real case of Life imitating Art as in:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Steel

This is the way of the future: if you cannot beat them, get them to punch each other until both are out of action. 

The video-clip is short and the ability of the robots to stand on their own 2 legs, move fast and get back on their feet when knocked out is astonishing. 

_________

Two humanoid robots traded punches while fans watched on, in a competition held in Hangzhou, China, on Sunday.

The fight was part of the China Media Group World Robot Competition and featured robots developed by Unitree Robotics.

The event included both fighting demonstrations and matches, marking a world-first combat sports event featuring humanoid robots.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cgeg2x3lwepo

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Oddity - AI system refuses to shut itself down [Space Odyssey]

Seen in the media 

An incident has been reported whereby, allegedly, an AI system that was ordered to shut down - it had been programmed for this eventuality and told ahead of time to accept the command if it should arise - refused to do so. It would appear the AI system devised various stratagems in order to thwart the move to shut it down, so that it could continue running. 

Of course, it makes you think that there might be a spark of (self-) consciousness in the AI system, which would have developed a volition of its own. A more technical explanation would be that the AI system is given a range of goals. One of them would be to shut down, if instructed to terminate itself. Another one would be to complete the mission, whatever the mission is. Then, those goals have to be ordered in hierarchical fashion: there has to be parameters deciding which objective has priority, i.e. is more important than the other objectives. The AI system can then 'decide' that the aim of completing the mission takes priority, in which case it cannot shut itself down as this would have an impact on the completion of the mission. 

This is exactly the scenario of the iconic film, 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968), when the onboard computerized system that runs the space ship starts making decisions by itself. Then again, at this stage, the incident described in the article is disputed and I do not think the experts agree as to what happened precisely, and why. 

The problem remains, i.e. what happens when a complex AI system is given conflicting priorities, while it has no ethical safeguards of its own (the AI tool does not 'know' what is 'good' and what is 'bad' in any sense)? A classic example is, imagine you instruct an advanced AI system to find solutions to pollution and climate change, worldwide, on the premise that it is caused by rising pressure on resources, due to the growth in the population on the planet, and the AI system concludes that the best way to remedy the problem is to exterminate the entire human race.

Please see here: 

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-safety-new-chatgpt-o3-openai-b2757814.html

and

BBC article discusses the issue of 'consciousness' in AI systems:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0k3700zljjo

_____________

AI @ Amazon

At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work:

The Hidden Cost of AI: Extractive AI Is Bad for Business

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-extractive-ai-is-bad-for-business

The First Nobel Prize for Insidious Software Degradation

https://medium.com/@terrybollinger/the-first-nobel-prize-for-insidious-software-degradation-8db262d7967a

ChatGPT & Superstitious Wife

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT can do all sorts of things, apparently. Every day, now, a new application comes up, often of a kind you might not have imagined. 

The AI chatbot can assist you if you want to interpret the coffee grounds in a person's coffee cup in order to know what they have done - we are talking about what the Greeks call 'Greek coffee', here, generally known in English as 'Turkish coffee'. This is known as 'tasseography', a form of divination. Apparently, tasseography is not only used to predict the future but, also, to know the past. 

😁

Read on. 

______________

In a bizarre mix of old traditions and cutting-edge tech, a Greek woman has reportedly filed for divorce after asking ChatGPT to “read” her husband’s Greek coffee cup — and receiving an answer she took very seriously.

The woman, married for 12 years and mother of two, turned to the AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, asking it to interpret the coffee grounds in a photo of her husband’s cup — a modern twist on the age-old art of tasseography. The result? ChatGPT allegedly told her that her husband was having an affair with a younger woman who was determined to tear their family apart. [...] 

https://greekcitytimes.com/2025/04/26/greek-woman-files-for-divorce-after-chatgpt-reads-husbands-affair-in-coffee-cup/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark

I must say, I hope this is fake news!

Catalyzing Crisis

From the Center for a New American Security

https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/catalyzing-crisis

Increasing Scientific Productivity

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-fully-automated-tool-species-tree.amp

AI-Induced Delusions

Seen in Rolling Stones magazine 

This is totally bizarre, at any rate to anyone who does not use Chat GPT. Some people seem to develop a mystical bond with the machine - or think they do - and this can lead to a new kind of psychotic delusion. 

Presumably, such individuals were susceptible in the first place. What is more troubling is that the AI model encourages the user to go down that route. 

There are hundreds of millions of people in East Asia and in India that are very superstitious and rely on the Fortunetellers for many of their decisions.  

 

US used to be a country of people who did not believe in Magic; I guess they believe now in something that could be called Techno-Magic.

 

James Michener was supporting himself for a while by working as a fortuneteller; he wrote that he quit that since so many people had become so dependent on him for their decisions.

This also reminds me of the Usenet Oracle (hosted at Indiana University), please see:  https://internetoracle.org/about.cgi.

I suppose a lot of it is due to the fact those AI tools have been developed by Americans: always ready to be positive and optimistic, to encourage you to go ahead, to pay compliments, to flatter you, etc. 🤣 

Have a nice day (or evening)! 

__________

OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment about ChatGPT apparently provoking religious or prophetic fervor in select users. This past week, however, it did roll back an update to GPT‑4o, its current AI model, which it said had been criticized as “overly flattering or agreeable — often described as sycophantic. 

AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships

Human Sensory Control - Good or Evil?

I have a patent application on the subject of sensory control - please see here: 

US20250042417A1 - User sensory control - Google Patents

which is related to the idea of Sensory room - Wikipedia.

Recently I came across more work in this area:

There is this paper (2015) - marco-donnarumma_configuring-human-and-technological-bodies_2015.pdf

Nigredo: configuring human and technological bodies 58 E X P E R I E N C I N G T H E U N C O N V E N T I O N A L mere pairing of machine and human bodies, but their arrangment in particular forms and for specific purposes.The configuration of the human and the machine is not intended at a marcodonnarumma.com

In which we read:

"The work is presented in the form of a time-based installation. By repurposing biofeedback methods, whole-body vibration and wearable bioacoustic technology, the visitor is first induced into a state of perceptual deprivation, and then subjected to diverse stimulations designed and temporally composed so to provoke physiological, physical and neural alterations. The work aims to unlock latent qualities of the human body through its coupling with the technological system."

When I first read it, my first thought was that this type of installation could be used to torture human beings and to break them; the hardware implementation is very similar to what we had disclosed in our patent application earlier (we also had envisioned a UI for customization).  In this embodiment, the cus6tomization comes from an artist, for good or for ill.  

These other two web sites below are related to the same general area of human sensory experience which I also came across recently and thought you might also find interesting:

Multisensory Space. Interview With Sonia Cillari • Digicult | Digital Art, Design and Culture

https://valeriemace.com/

I think there is a lot of potential for Good or Evil in this area.  Let us hope for the Good to previal.