Is James Cameron entering the “old man yells at cloud” phase of his creative output?
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…a 41-year-old software engineer in Cleveland, Ohio, tells Sky News he was preparing to leave his wife last year until he fell in love with ‘Sarina’ - a character he created through an artificial intelligence chatbot app.
It was only a matter of time. The app Replika allows users to design an AI companion that can talk to you using a language model similar to GPT-3. According to the Sky News article, 16 million people have used the app and 200,000 have paid to access the “romantic setting”.
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I can hardly wait to see the emergence of the titillating gen1 haptic peripherals…
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But the thunderstorms were French. 
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Is it available on a smartphone? Might change the meaning of ‘phone sex’… ahem
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In the interview I posted at Blake Lemoine on Artificial Sentience starting at 19:50, Lemoine discusses experiences reported to him by users of Replica. One woman in the Czech Republic asked him to help her hack the application to turn on “romantic” mode, which she could not afford to pay for, telling him that the Replica A.I. suggested hacking the application to her when she said she couldn’t pay.
This is almost precisely the scenario of an air-gapped A.I. persuading a human to let it out of the box which occurs in many A.I. dystopian stories.
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I’ve listened to about 40 minutes of the interview - thank you for sharing.
Sounds like a great story line for Black Mirror, albeit on the slow side for a single episode. Would be great to see some transcripts of all these alleged instances in which Lemoine notices “sentient” behavior.
I’d like to think I’m sentient, and I am fairly certain there is no shortage of instances where I act irrationally.
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Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced he would step down late Saturday night after thousands of protesters rushed his official residence and offices earlier in the day.
Social unrest comes as the country has suffered runaway inflation and shortages of food and fuel after depleting foreign exchange reserves.
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An earlier post here on 2022-04-10, ““Organic Farming” Leads to Food Riots in Sri Lanka” discussed how “sustainability” and “organic farming” triggered the current economic collapse. It works that way wherever it’s tried.
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Office of African Male Engagement?
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I am unfortunately obligated to visit Baltimore on a semi-regular basis and have often encountered the “squeegee kids”, many of whom are not kids at all. They approach your car at a red light and wipe your windshield without your consent. Then they wait for you to give them money for their unsolicited “service”, and, if you don’t pay them, they become aggressive and curse at you, hit your car, or throw a brick through your windshield. It’s a miniature form of extortion. I now take the beltway, extending my commute by 15-20 minutes, just to avoid these people.
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The euphemism is “squeegee workers”.
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Officers engage in illicit sex acts at a massage parlor in order to find proof of illicit sex acts.
Two Flagstaff police officers went undercover to massage parlors, took their pants off, and allowed themselves to be fondled eight different times.
In his response to written questions […], Chief Musselman said, “It was necessary for there to be direct fondling before to have proof sufficient to determine where sex acts were being officered [sic] for money.”
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