John Scalzi:

I search my name on a regular basis, not only because I am an ego monster (although I try not to pretend that I’m not) but because it’s a good way for me to find reviews, end-of-the-year “best of” lists my book might be on, foreign publication release dates, and other information about my work that I might not otherwise see, and which is useful for me to keep tabs on. In one of those searches I found that Grok (the “AI” of X) attributed to one of my books (The Consuming Fire) a dedication I did not write; not only have I definitively never dedicated a book to the characters of Frozen, I also do not have multiple children, just the one.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/ai-a-dedicated-fact-failing-machine-or-yet-another-reason-not-to-trust-it-for-anything/

There’s a version animated in the style of the '70s Star Trek cartoon that makes it legitimately great.

Purdue and Google recently expanded their strategic partnership, emphasizing the importance of public-private partnerships that are essential to accelerating innovation in AI.

https://www.purdue.edu/ai/

Translation: somebody’s getting paid off

🎶 Money makes the world go 'round 🎶

This is what you get when you take Star Trek episodes where the writers had run out of ideas and watch them from the bottom of a K-hole.

And just think, he’s been further pickling his brain for half a decade since then.

I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.

Only four (August 2021).

The best I ever saw was a reply to a news story to the effect of, “If I were ever invited swimming in the Murderkill River, I would just not go.”

(This might be the original. Then again, it might not.)

J. Mijin Cha writes:

My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.

Climate is an MDPI journal. Finland’s journal-ranking service downgraded Climate to zero status.

I would simply not name my airplane company “Boom”.

“How do you keep yourself from going insane?”

“I tell myself I’m a character from a book who comes to life and is also a robot!” (Hubert Farnsworth giggle)

Also discussed in last week’s Stubsack.

deleted by creator

No one point out that “keeping your head while all about you are losing theirs” is also a trope.

Handshake meme of Yud and Rorschach praising Harry S Truman

From the comments:

I got Claude to read this text and explain the proposed solution to me

Once you start down the Claude path, forever will it dominate your destiny…

Growing up in Alabama, I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it, but I definitely had the feeling when meeting some people, “Given the bullshit you alreasy buy, there is nothing in principle stopping you from going full fash.” I get the same feeling now from Yuddites: “There is nothing in principle stopping you from going full Zizian.”

The people who build these products aren’t bad or evil.

No, I’m pretty sure that a lot of them just are bad and evil.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we stand at a crossroads. This technology holds genuine promise.

[citation needed]

[to a source that’s not laundered slop, ya dingbats]

A belief system that inculates the believer into thinking that the work is the most important duty a human can perform, while also isolating them behind impenetrable pseudo-intellectual esoterica, while also funneling them into economic precarity… sounds like a recipe for delicious brownies trouble.

From Lila Byock:

A 4th grader was assigned to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking using Adobe for Education.

The result is, in technical terms, four pictures of a schoolgirl waifu in fetishwear.

Dr. Casey Fiesler reports,

I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let’s dig into the findings.

[…]

Did you guess “that paper does not actually exist”?

Did you also guess that NOT A SINGLE PAPER IN THEIR REFERENCES APPEARS TO EXIST? […] When I was searching in various places to confirm that those citations were fabricated, Google’s AI overview just kept the con going.

Jill Walker Rettberg in the comments:

There’s a peer reviewed published paper in AI & Society called Cognitive Imperialism and Artificial Intelligence which is clearly mostly AI-generated. Citations are real but almost all irrelevant. I emailed the editors weeks ago but it’s still up there and getting cited.

(thinks) groxxing

This chatbot-generated house floor plan gave me a 45-second giggle fit.

(The original post does seem to be satirical in intent.)