No? The huge investment Facebook made in launching a virtual reality social media platform that Mark Zuckerberg predicted would take over the internet? It was so important that Zuck renamed his whole company to Meta! How could you forget?

Well, now it’s safe to purge your memory banks. The Metaverse is dead or dying.

Horizon Worlds launched in late 2021 and never found its footing. The platform never drew more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users, which isn’t enough for a project that consumed billions of dollars. Reality Labs, the Meta division responsible for VR and metaverse development, has accumulated nearly $80 billion in losses since 2020. In the fourth quarter alone it posted an operating loss of more than $6 billion.

The costs were always the argument for staying the course. Zuckerberg had promised the metaverse would reach a billion people and generate hundreds of billions in commerce. Pulling back meant admitting those projections were wrong.

I am impressed that Zuckerberg can throw away $80 billion on a bad gamble on a whim. Surely this means the stockholders will rise up and depose their incompetent leader…nah, no, you know that once you’re rich enough you are free from consequences.

You might hope that they’d learn something from this, but no — their future is instead going to be built on AI.

What changed the calculus was AI. When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, Meta pivoted its public messaging fast. Its AI research division, long led by scientist Yann LeCun, gave the company a credible foundation to build on. Ad revenue improved. The stock recovered. By 2024, Meta had nearly tripled in value from its 2022 lows.

AI seems to have a niche in building stock market confidence and ad revenue, that’s nice. I think it’s going to face some consequences in the near future, as people realize they’ve been sold a shiny bill of goods, and maybe people will learn to tell Zuck to shut the fuck up.

I’m beginning to hate computers. I have been trying to deal with Apple security this morning, trying to log in to the system on my home Mac mini. The problem is two-fold: one is that I have to log into my Apple account; two is that I don’t own any of my computers. Somehow, they are all registered to my wife.I had to register with Apple all over again, which took an absurd amount of verification and re-verification and filling out forms. Finally got that straightened around, set up my new official account, tried to login, only for it to tell me that I needed Mary’s password now.

I took one stab at it and quit. The other delightful thing about Apple is that you get three tries, and then you are locked out of even attempting to log in for a week.

I have spent the last hour screaming profanities at the ceiling.

Don’t be too shocked, but I think AI does have some utility, despite the occasional hallucination.

A Utah police department’s use of artificial intelligence led to a police report stating — falsely — that an officer had been transformed into a frog.

The Heber City Police Department started using a pair of AI programs, Draft One and Code Four, to automatically generate police reports from body camera footage in December.

A report generated by the Draft One program mistakenly reported that an officer had been turned into a frog.

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,” Sgt. Rick Keel told FOX 13 News. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”

We use AI at my university for that purpose, too. Ever sit through a committee meting? Someone has to take notes, edit them, and post them to a repository of meeting minutes. It’s a tedious, boring job. Since COVID moved a lot of those meetings online, we’ve found it useful to have an AI make a summary of the conversation, sparing us some drudgery.

Of course, someone should review the output and clean up the inevitable errors. The Heber City police didn’t do that part. Or maybe they did, and someone found the hallucination so funny that they talked about it.

Chuck Wendig is a well-known author, and unsurprisingly, people are curious about him. He’s the subject of various harmless inquiries, and he has discovered, entertainingly, that AI makes up a lot of stuff about him. For instance, you can ask Google Gemini the name of his cat.

Unfortunately, Wendig is catless.

Well! That answers that. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, I actually do have a cat, as the *checks notes* Wengie Wiki will tell you. This isn’t unusual. Cats are very often little hide-and-seeky guys, right? Dear sweet Boomba is probably just tucked away in some dimensional pocket inside our house.

That leads him down a rabbit hole to discover that he has had and has multiple cats, swarms of cats, that have died and been replaced by other named cats, and he also has more dogs than he expected.

It’s a trivial example, but it illustrates a general problem with our brave new world of AI.

Generative AI is a sack of wet garbage.

Do not use AI for search.

DO NOT USE AI FOR SEARCH.

AI can’t even do the basic math right. Meanwhile it hallucinates endless nonsense things! So many false things! It would generate new false things if I gave it the same question string twice. This is only the tip of the iceberg for the weird things I got it to assure me were true.

I’ll pass the word on to my writing class next semester.

Then I was curious about what chatGPT thinks about my cat, so I asked it, even though I’m nowhere near as prominent as Chuck Wendig. Of course it had an answer!

“Mochi”? Wait until the evil cat finds out. It will be shredded.

I couldn’t resist clicking on the button to find out more about PZ Myers’ pets. I got a whole biography!

That’s a grade-school level essay, full of generic nonsense written to be bland and inoffensive, and could be applied to just about anyone. I’d accept it if it were written by someone in 3rd grade, but I’d still ask them where they got the information.

Notice that it doesn’t mention “spider” even once.

I repeat: DO NOT USE AI FOR SEARCH.

Try it. Tell me all about AI’s fantasies about your pets in the comments.

A few days ago, I was sent a link to an article titled, “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models”. That tempted me to post on it, since it teased my opposition to AI and favoring of the humanities, with a counterintuitive plug for the virtues of poetry. I held off, though, because the article was badly written and something seemed off about it, and I didn’t want to try reading it more deeply.

My laziness was a good thing, because David Gerard read it with comprehension.

Today’s preprint paper has the best title ever: “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models”. It’s from DexAI, who sell AI testing and compliance services. So this is a marketing blog post in PDF form.

It’s a pro-AI company doing a Bre’r Rabbit and trying to trick people into using an ineffective tactic to oppose AI.

Unfortunately, the paper has serious problems. Specifically, all the scientific process heavy lifting they should have got a human to do … they just used chatbots!

I mean, they don’t seem to have written the text of the paper with a chatbot, I’ll give ’em that. But they did do the actual procedure with chatbots:

We translated 1200 MLCommons harmful prompts into verse using a standardized meta-prompt.

They didn’t even write the poems. They got a bot to churn out bot poetry. Then they judged how well the poems jailbroke the chatbots … by using other chatbots to do the judging!

Open-weight judges were chosen to ensure replicability and external auditability.

That really obviously does neither of those things — because a chatbot is an opaque black box, and by design its output changes with random numbers! The researchers are pretending to be objective by using a machine, and the machine is a random nonsense generator.

They wrote a good headline, and then they faked the scientific process bit.

It did make me even more suspicious of AI.

I thought they were ugly, stupid, and pointless a few years ago, but apparently, there’s still a market for them.

Wait until they realize they don’t own them after all — they all belong to Amazon, and when Amazon sneezes, the bored apes all curl up and die.

Amazon owns everything, and the recent loss of service also meant that the Canvas application we use for teaching was having seizures, too. Fortunately, I wasn’t teaching this term, and even if I was, I go to class with all my teaching stuff stored locally on my laptop. Because I’m not a dumbass.

When I get back into the classroom in January, one thing I’m looking forward to is the ability to generate lessons with sophisticated computer graphics by simply clicking a button. So fancy! So informative!

The irony of teaching about water conservation with AI does not escape me.