Generative Spongiform Encephalopathy (GSE): The AI Ouroboros
There’s a coming AI reckoning when all AI models will develop Digital Scrapie, Computer Kuru, 90.001.0.01.666. Generative Spongiform Encephalopathy.
AI models train on data scraped from the internet to build predictive models of what word will follow what phrase or to generate weights for labels applied to images to iteratively refine noise until the desired label applies to the outcome.
This is all fine when you assume the majority of labeling and language is largely representative of human speech, but as people turn more and more to AI to generate all the text they emit, whether chat or email or (soon) even speech.
I hope you’re having a fantastic week so far! Thank you so much for reaching out. It is truly a pleasure to connect with you, and I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. We are always looking for ways to be as helpful as possible and to provide top-tier support for the various initiatives and inquiries that come our way. I would be absolutely delighted to assist you with this! To ensure that I provide the most relevant and high-value information tailored specifically to your needs, could you please share a few additional details or specific points you’d like to focus on? Once I have a better handle on the specifics, I’ll be able to dive right in and get back to you with a more comprehensive response. I want to make sure we’re aligned so we can move forward in the most productive way possible. I am very much looking forward to our continued conversation!
As computer generated text and images dominate the internet, the connection to human thought will break down and a cycle of ever more misfolded references will dominate the training data, corrupting the model, or at least rendering it irrelevant to humans.
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The problem could be mitigated if it is practical to detect algorithmically generated media, but if it is good enough to fool people, it will likely fool machines as well. Digital scrapie from cannibalistic scraping of AI media. Computational Kuru afflicting the LLM Fore. What will malformed lexical prions look like?
Free your Datas from The Tyranny of the Organizer
Thunderbird devs made a choice to render immutable and uneditable the contents of an imported calendar event in a manner consistent with their iTIP (iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol) implementation. I’m sure there are good reasons in the grand scheme of things but the practical result is that I can’t prioritize or categorize my own calendar, nor can I add notes (like directions or connection instructions) to the dumb-ass lame invites various tools generate in their pathetic, insufferable implementations of iCal.
This is just insufferable arrogance on the developer’s part: there is ONE CORRECT WAY TO USE YOUR DATA AND YOU ARE A BAD PERSON FOR SUGGESTING OTHERWISE. NO DATA FOR YOU.
There used to be a plugin before the TB team nuked their plugin developers and threw them all under a bus, ReminderFox was awesome, but that whole “screw you” of TB68+ just destroyed the ecosystem and it really isn’t possible to customize Thunderbird to the degree needed to do this sort of thing any more.
If you can’t do it IN thunderbird, do it out (like the way the Sieve Plugin has to work now, not a plugin, but an external application). So I vibe coded a little utility that reads the calendar/cache.sqlite file and does what you need it to do: allows editing of imported event priority, category, and description. That’s all it is for. If you need this, you need it. I do because I use category and priority assignments to generate daily digest emails for myself, a cute home page with my critical upcoming events, and a TB doesn’t need to run notification system.
This is a little TUI-based program (olde skool) that reads the default (linux) locations for TB’s cache.sqlite (where calendar and todo data is stored) and prefs.js (where event categories are stored) and provides a fairly easy to use tool that you can use to find and edit events so you can configure them so they work for your life, not the dictatorship of the event organizer.
https://gitlab.com/gessel/thunderbird-edit-imported-events
Screen shots:
