Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for June 18, 2023

“Alexa, does the forecast call for rain?”

“Eventually ….”

Alexa, is it going to rain here today?

I play pitch on my iPad, been playing it for years. It is so difficult to beat it. Drives me nuts. It knows how to bait me to use my trump cause I have to. I can have the perfect hand and it screws me. I DO NOT blame it on the computer knowing my hand!

Alexa didn’t say WHERE it was raining..

Dad told my brother, don’t light your gas.

What – GASLIGHTING BY INANIMATE OBJECTS???!! Be afraid … be VERY afraid ..

Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads.

This is when you go into Settings and turn her and/or Siri OFF.

My issue is that my internet and cell service shows my location to be half a state away, so what is local?

“What you are seeing and what you are hearing is NOT what is happening!”: Alexa…or was that TFG????

They BOTH have “Artificial Intelligence”.

The broth is only as good as the stuff you boiled in it.

Be nice, Alexa.

Well, it is almost certainly raining right now. No location stipulated.

Alexa doesn’t have a weather reporting station outside your house. It relies on the one closest to you. A relative term. And, speaking of relative terms, Happy Father’s Day.

ChatGPT gets all snide and snippy when you correct it when it’s wrong. Apple Weather app on the iPhone on the other hand has a function where you can tell it it’s wrong. MSN Weather app on the XBox has quit working altogether months ago.

So do weather forecasters which is a misnomer. They claim it will rain and it doesn’t. They haven’t a clue. What is worse is it doesn’t rain for 2 months and they sound happy about it!!! I’m a gardener and I am not pleased.

Jokes aside, I don’t have and won’t ever have one in the house. Also got rid of 2 Roombas because they spent too much time stuck under furniture or just missing stuff. I can clean the same room in about 15 minutes.

Current cell phone weighs 14oz with a ton of stuff I will never use riding the chip. Continuous updates of no value to me. Increasing numbers of serious accidents are the result of drivers texting in traffic.

Tablet uses up to 4 minutes ‘optimizing’ software on every start. Again, of no value to me.

Tell me, please, just how has those electro-digital pests have improved the quality of life.

Well, technically, it is raining, somewhere. But, not here. Tomorrow, and the rest of the week: that’s a whole different matter.

Everyone needs to see that movie, so we all know what everyone seems to be talking about. “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, just doesn’t get it anymore.

A.I. has not become sentient, it has become Republican…ahhhh,…run…!

Dwight Eisenhower and Bernie Sanders synch up ideology wise withholding the prevalent racism

maybe he should have asked “is it going to rain here!”

And people wonder why I won’t allow Alexa or Siri to be operating in my house.

“For the rain it raineth every day.” – Shakespeare

I’d throw that blamed heifer contraption in the garbage…

Same thing happened to me yesterday. It did start raining about 15 minutes later.

Makes no sense.

I can google faster and get better answers.

Well AI does appear to reflect whatever biases its software engineers wrote into it…intentional or not… so it’s likely always gaslighting one group or another… maybe we need to treat its info like we treat info from humans? By using our own judgement…and with a grain of salt???

Every night at 7 Alexa tells me it is going to rain tomorrow. Being the Rainy Season, she is usually right.

We don’t have Alexa or any other such device but when we go to the home of someone who does my husband always asks “Alexa, what’s the meaning of life?” spoiler alert, she doesn’t know.

I have Amazon Echo devices all over my house. Every one of them has a button on the top to TURN OFF THE MICROPHONE. That also makes the unit useless, but, whatever…Every morning, before I get out of bed, I ask the Echo Dot on my headboard “Alexa, what is the weather today?” and she says “Today in Sunnyvale the weather is… and today it will be…”. This morning she asked if I’d like a more complete rundown each time I ask, and I replied “no thanks”. I use these devices to find out the time the drug store near me opens on Sunday, what’s the score in an ongoing baseball game, etc. etc. etc. They are extremely useful to me, but many people have convinced themselves that they’re something nefarious. It’s their loss.

This is what my experience has been with the free AI chatbots. They get some crazy idea from the online discussion groups they were trained on and you cannot disabuse them of the notion. I had one tell me repeatedly that “baby on board” signs were deprecated because they could cause road rage.

The word “data” is plural. You need to use plural verbs…

Once I had the music on pretty loud, and I thought I had to shout over it to tell Alexa to lower the volume. She said, “You don’t have to raise your voice to me.” (really happened). Related story – I was rubbing my sore knee while watching TV, and an ad for Voltaren came on, with the announcer asking “Got knee pain?”

Like 4 o’clock, it’s always raining somewhere.

An acknowledgement of Father’s Day would have been nice!!

Not only can’t I believe my lying’ eyes, I can’t believe the feeling I get when the raindrops keep falling’ on my head

Oh, please: data is plural. I know that sounds a little awkward, but it’s the truth.

This is ChatGPT all over. Remember, behind every AI is a team of programmers… and a corporation.

First: he didn’t specify where it rains.

And second: Alexa is paid by psychotherapists.

One of the top concerns when it comes to the harms of social media and political polarization in the United States is the fear of echo chambers or people operating in media bubbles. from Wired

“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” In case anyone wants to know.

I thought Gaslighting was Google’s job?

Hello wiretap.

The next thing I’d put out the window is Alexa.

I don’t think gaslighting is learned. I think it’s an automatic response reflex. Like when I drop the f bomb when I stub my toe (always on the left foot).

So, what is it called when you’ve only listened to data sources that tell you what you want to hear so long, you don’t even care anymore if you happen to hear data that you can’t deny is true but doesn’t fit into the world you now live in, so you just ignore it? Is that a real form of echo-chamber delusion syndrome? Is this comic a straw-man argument against such a thing existing?

“I have ECDS? that’s ridiculous, it’s like claiming it’s raining when clearly it isn’t.” and/or “Oh, I don’t have a problem seeing both sides of the issue, you’re just trying to gaslight me”? Is that it?

Eh, maybe I’m overthinking it and it’s just a cute joke about AI getting too intelligent.

Your own fault it’s not raining…..

Hey, Alexa, why is Richard Nixon sitting next to me at the bar?

The weatherman is always wrong, with or without a computer