Machine-Generated Garbage Hall of Shame: “What these bots are designed to do is essentially a matter of statistical programming, and presenting them as reliable sources of information can be misguided, foolish, exploitative, or even dangerous, as demonstrated by the examples on this list.”

Similarly, AI Hallucination Cases: “This database tracks legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments.”

Not to be confused with cases about AI hallucinations. “A solar firm in Minnesota is suing Google for defamation after the tech giant’s shoddy AI Overviews feature allegedly made up wild lies about the company — and significantly hurt its business as a result.”

“The unreliability and hallucinations themselves are the hook — the intermittent reward, to keep the user running prompts and hoping they’ll get a win this time. This is why you see previously normal techies start evangelising AI coding on LinkedIn or Hacker News like they saw a glimpse of God and they’ll keep paying for the chatbot tokens until they can just see a glimpse of Him again. And you have to as well. This is why they act like they joined a cult.”

“Executives and directors from around the world have called me to say that they can’t fund any projects if they don’t pretend there is AI in them. Non-profits have asked me if we could pretend to do AI because it’s the only way to fund infrastructure in the developing world. Readers keep emailing me to say that their contracts are getting cancelled because someone smooth-talked their CEO into believing that they don’t need developers.”

My website host, Siteground, has been trying to shove AI hype into their services lately. I can’t help wondering how many customers are actually asking for this, versus how many VCs and managers are insisting they’ve gotta be on the bandwagon. Especially given my fun new personal experience of bringing a problem to their customer-service LLM, where its very first response included a hallucination — advising me to change a nonexistent setting it just made up.

World news is spiraling. Here’s a distracting post about movies. At least it’s something to break up the doomscrolling.

Dog Man: Cute and fun. I kept noting and appreciating the characteristic Dav Pilkey humor. (“Lil’ Petey is actually Petey’s son!…in a coincidence so obvious, it’s not really a coincidence.”) Not actually sure how to describe it, but the guy sure can write a line.

One of the subplots is about an evil psychokinetic cyborg fish, and I love that everyone just…calls him “psychokinetic.” It’s the one word that’s blatantly outside the target audience’s reading level. Nobody asks what it means. Nobody casually mentions the definition. You can figure it out from context, or you can look it up — and what a fun word to look up, you know?

Another subplot involves “evil” cat Petey, trying to raise his child clone Lil’ Petey. The kitten insists on seeing the good in Petey, who’s the classic “soft heart underneath, will team up with the heroes when given a chance” kind of antagonist. But there’s also a subplot where he eagerly tries to reconnect Petey with his deadbeat dad…who turns out not to be on a redemption arc, he just slums around the lair for a bit, then finally runs off with all Petey’s stuff.

Which leads to a scene where Petey tells the kitten “Kid, it’s not you. Some people just won’t change.” A rare message to see in a kids’ movie — characters who are estranged from a relative, especially a parent, almost always learn a lesson about how they were being too harsh and unfair — and a really nice one. Young viewers should get to hear that if you go on a Plucky Child Reconciliation Quest and don’t succeed, it’s not because you weren’t nice/forgiving/plucky/open-hearted enough to deserve it.

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Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death: I heard about this movie when it was featured in This Movie Exists. Can’t top Moviebob’s summary: “a zero-budget spoof of jungle adventure movies that improbably crosses a legitimately insightful satire of late-1980s “battle of the sexes” culture-war politics with campy jungle-girl bikini babe action.”

I’ve seen the serious version of this movie on MST3K any number of times. The parody is amazing. Genuinely laugh-out-loud funny on a regular basis. The climactic battle in the village of the cannibal women is between two ethnographers, wielding swords (“I studied ancient weaponry at Berkeley”) and wearing slinky leaf mini-dresses, trading insults like “Your field methodology is sloppy!”

And most of it has aged shockingly well. If it had come out in 2025, as a period-piece satire of sexism in the 1980s, rather than a contemporary satire of sexism in the 1980s…it could’ve done basically all the same jokes.

(Honestly, the only bit I would change is, there’s an attempted sexual assault that goes down a little too casually. It’s clearly a bad thing, our protagonist stops it by showing up with a gun, it’s just portrayed more as “ugh, another of these sexist annoyances that pop up throughout the movie” than “narrowly-averted serious traumatic violence.”)

As of now, you can stream the Avocado Jungle on Tubi. Worth a watch.