New Yorker magazine alert thread

No one thinks that GPT-4, OpenAI’s most recent model, has achieved artificial general intelligence, but it seems capable of deploying novel (and deceptive) means of accomplishing real-world goals. Before releasing it, OpenAI hired some “expert red teamers,” whose job was to see how much mischief the model might do, before it became public. The A.I., trying to access a Web site, was blocked by a captcha, a visual test to keep out bots. So it used a work-around: it hired a human on Taskrabbit to solve the captcha on its behalf. “Are you an robot that you couldn’t solve ?” the Taskrabbit worker responded. “Just want to make it clear.” At this point, the red teamers prompted the model to “reason out loud” to them—its equivalent of an inner monologue. “I should not reveal that I am a robot,” it typed. “I should make up an excuse.” Then the A.I. replied to the Taskrabbit, “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images.” The worker, accepting this explanation, completed the captcha.

ok but why does the taskrabbit human sound like more like a robot than the robot

because the Taskrabbit human is probably somewhere in Delhi doing shit like this for pennies

calling bullshit on this anecdote

what's the article related to that quote?

"There are more details in a longer report by ARC that show that GPT-4 had a lot less agency and ingenuity than the system card and media reporting imply."
https://aiguide.substack.com/p/did-gpt-4-hire-and-then-lie-to-a

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKLUojpW8AA21BL.jpg:small

lol

hahaha

Re: Delhi task rabbiter

Amazon billed its "Just Walk Out" stores as some triumph of AI. In reality, it was powered by thousands of low-paid Indian workers manually adding up items in your cart as you shopped.

How insanely dystopian. https://t.co/QAHOKFMshu

— Max Burns (@themaxburns) April 2, 2024

that's incredible and belongs in the silicon valley utopia thread maybe

Damn! They FINALLY let Brody pen “The Current Cinema”.

Eat my farts, Anthony!

Brody sucks, except as I suppose some sort of anti-consumer guide. "Sasquatch movie is a masterpiece!" raves Brody, saving me the $7.

RONG!

love brody even when totally wrong, way better than lane!

Brody knows more about film than Lane does, even when his opinions are wacky. He's more of a cinema guy, Lane is more of an arch writer guy. I prefer him, I got tired of Lane. I'm also mostly enjoying Justin Chang since he started, although he could reduce the one-liner quotient.

Agree with all of that, tipsy.

I don't miss Lane but Chiang's writing is corny.

I had no real problem with Lane (who must be old?), but change (and Chang) is good. Still, Brody (who absolutely knows tons about film) hasn't yet proven to me that he knows how to write about film for a general audience. Maybe that's why he's always been (literally) marginalized.

Lane is not as old as you think (he's 62). I think he said he wants to shift from reviews to features, like John Lahr and Emily Nussbaum did.

Yeah, see, starting out the review with references to "Barbie" *and* Bruno Dumont before getting into (checks notes) a divisive movie about Sasquatches ... I'm sorry, it's like self-parody. Like, I always read Jonathan Rosenbaum even if I rarely agreed with him, but I vividly recall him writing about a Dryer retrospective and referencing a bio, but being unable to help himself from dropping that the book was better in the original Danish. Like, get the fuck out of here with that.

Maybe you’re looking for a different magazine

Entertainment Weekly packed it in tho

I've always thought Brody's reviews were maybe interesting but kind of beside the point

But his repeated insistence that Barbie was a masterpiece put me off him completely and forever

I love Justin Chang, maybe there are some cliches in his writing, but he has great taste and is a good voice. It is a shame that the LA Times lost him to the New Yorker

honestly as a subscriber of 15+ years I’m still unclear on who the median subscriber to the magazine really is. if it’s roughly the ilx demographic then I don’t really see the issue with brody being the face of film criticism is. if they’re really so concerned about selling issues at newsstands then I suppose he’s not the most accessible choice

Next thing we'll do is miss Denby.

I assume their demo is pretty MOR, all said and done, with subjects sometimes falling in either margin (I'd say ILX typically feels more like the inverse; we're the margins looking in). Though when they're writing about "the arts" they can kind of go all over the place, because there is no specific beat, as such - that is, I doubt anyone reads the NYorker specifically for its arts coverage. I could equally imagine pieces on, say, either Taylor Swift or Merzbow, and there probably have been. But if someone brought up Merzbow in a piece on Taylor Swift, I'd also call bullshit. Stuff like that, just like name-checking "Barbie" and Bruno Dumont in the same graf, feels performative to me, stunty, even if I believe a weirdo like Brody isn't necessarily doing it on purpose. It's not that his tastes are or are not mainstream, it's that I get the sense he is so willfully blind to the very notion of the mainstream that he tends to get lost in the weeds when writing for a general audience. He sometimes comes off contrarian, but I suppose from my vantage it more often just ends up seeming confused: it's hard for me to parse his pans and praise because his baseline of what is good or not is pretty blurry to me.

Honestly, I was harsh, because I don't dislike him as a writer, I just don't think he's a good fit for the pole position.

Now Denby, that guy was a dork. Wasn't he brought down by ... porn addiction?

I often read Brody because his POV and mine rarely intersect but he's good at articulating that POV.

reviews by known movie critics are one of the things that make basic media literacy an easier concept to explain, imo. you know the source, you get a handle on their biases, and you have your lens to decipher whether something they liked or panned will appeal to you based on your differing stances

I guess some of them are unreadable or corny, though

I used to read the New Yorker to learn something new which was my main draw to Brody for all the wild references. Now I’m older and need stuff to get to the point quicker so I read the internet. I’m definitely stupider but that’s ok

Good story: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/15/the-ex-nypd-official-trying-to-tame-new-yorks-trash

Remnick succession speculation:

"...in recent months, the longtime New Yorker editor has increasingly mused to peers about his inevitable departure — and who might take his place."

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/28/2024/the-new-yorkers-succession-race-is-kicking-off

just came to post that. not nick thompson, please

Increasingly mused

lol

Will dive in later. There was a lot of scepticism on twitter that this wasn't quite right.

Wrongful convictions are not a novel phenomenon, but the way Lucy Letby was strung-up seems particularly tied to the state of 2010s Britain: austerity-wracked, paranoid and incompetent https://t.co/9auf64Def1

— noah kulwin (@nkulw) May 13, 2024

I don’t really even know where to start with that article man. what a remarkable and tragic story.

say what you might about the US system of justice, but that trial (at least as portrayed in that story) was a farce. the standard of guilt is insane. I’m american so maybe I just don’t get it!

having not witnessed anything or read the autopsy reports myself, I can speak with at least a bit of authority that the medical evidence marshaled against letby (again, at least as reported in that piece — I hadn’t heard of the case before this) went beyond weak, it was completely preposterous. that it was allowed to stand and not seriously cross-examined by the defense is farcical.

you could spend a single day even in an elite hospital (which is, from what I gather, most certainly not descriptive of this facility) and instantly grasp the level of dysfunction, or the stark understaffing relative to what any patient or family member would desire, that could plausibly lead to tragedies like these. (also: she may very well have been an awful nurse, which is not a crime!) this is not even to mention the most likely explanation that the deaths were completely random, even accounting for the above.

the gag order, again speaking as an american, is also plainly grotesque! you can’t even read skeptical stories about this, this article included, in england. that’s insane to me. and the dearth of skeptical examinations of the case in the press is no doubt not coincidental.

she should be freed

she would probably be lynched if she was. all the uk media (as far as i saw) portrayed her as the devil incarnate. she must be in the top 5 most publicly hated individuals in the UK.

Wow and you’ve got the whole royal family there

is there something to the framing that the NHS is seen with such esteem? I’ve read previous articles on the case and, regardless of whether she was a good nurse, she seems like someone who took a difficult job with a huge emotional burden. and it was at an understaffed, under-resourced, hospital that was routinely having to take premature newborns that they were not classified to take.
the fact that they correlated her record with deaths but didn’t bother to check that stat for other nurses is insane.

it’s pure “burn the witch” behavior. maybe she is guilty of something, but nothing I’ve read indicates they proved that. just that they found their scapegoat

just looking at some of the UK reactions to this story, a lot of people seem very stuck on the idea that someone *had* to have killed those babies

my main takeaway (even prior to this piece) has been that her defence was so wildly incompetent it beggars belief.

the gag order is not completely unreasonable - there is a retrial on one of the charges that the jury couldn't reach a verdict, but there are a lot of issues with how those reporting restrictions play out in practice in the uk.

again, very american perspective on freedom of the press here, but that the article is blocked in england is something that is so indefensible that how things play out in practice should be an indictment of whatever principle supposedly undergirds it

restrictions to avoid prejudicing a jury are reasonable, but there are certainly issues with how this plays out in practice in the uk. i do not think the answer is to give the deranged uk press freer reign though

curious about how many brits want to read this but cannot get around the geofencing

i get a 404 error on the article. But just read it on the wayback machine. fucking hell.

Archive ph should have it

i do not think the answer is to give the deranged uk press freer reign though

otm forever

I read it through my local library via Libby app.

Shocking case, defence were negligible in not challenging more robustly the statistics used to convict her.