Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Suppose a runaway success novel/tv/film franchise has “Bob” as the evil bad guy. Reams of fanfictions are written with “Bob” doing horrible things. People endlessly talk about how bad “Bob” is on twitter. Even the New York times writes about Bob latest depredations, when he plays off current events.

Your name is Bob. Suddenly all the AIs in the world associate your name with evil, death, killing, lying, stealing, fraud, and incest. AIs silently, slightly ding your essays, loan applications, uber driver applications, and everything you write online. And no one believes it’s really happening. Or the powers that be think it’s just a little accidental damage because the AI overall is still, overall doing a great job of sentiment analysis and fraud detection.

Daniel Von Fange