A Sociological Eye

  This is Stonehenge. You're probably familiar with it! I've seen documentaries about it all my life. It's a henge--one of many circular structures built of stone, wood, and earth found in Northwestern Europe, especially in the British Isles. They were built by the ancient societies of the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages for ceremonial purposes, and people love to debate what those were. All we really know is that the sun rises over the Heel Stone on the summer solstice and sets over it on the winter solstice, as you see here:   Actually, you never get that peaceful view today, because the place is always crammed with visitors and worshippers on the solstices: About those worshippers--many of them are neo-Druids. Now, the reality is that Stonehenge was built a couple thousand years before there's any evidence of Druids existing--they didn't emerge until the Iron Age. While it's true that the Britons of the Druidic era were preliterate, so of course they left n...

    Would you like to read some of the interesting books suggested by Chicago Sun-Times for your summer vacation? Well, it's most likely you can't. That's because only 5 of the 15 suggestions are actual books! The rest are the hallucinations of whatever AI chatbot the editors prompted to produce the list. The authors are real. But the books are not. One of the fabrications, by the way, is titled, "The Last Algorithm." Just a little bonus irony! Apparently the newspaper was sold in a buyout agreement that involved firing 20% of the staff. The current hotness in the world of CEOs is the belief that the moment has come when they can shed a lot of white-collar workers and replace them with "nearly-free" AI LLM chatbots, just as years earlier they fired blue-collar workers and replaced them with robots. AI tools are remarkable--don't get me wrong--but they are also unreliable, because AIs lack both judgment and understanding of what they're doing. Ch...

Let's see where we went in the space of a week! Last Sunday, Elon Musk fumed on X about his xAI chatbot, Grok, treating the BBC and The Atlantic as reputable information sources. Musk declared it "embarrassing" and wrong for the AI to trust such media. On Tuesday, as the first white South Africans were arriving in the US as refugees, Musk was posting on X about terrible "white genocide" taking place in South Africa. People asked Grok to fact-check this claim that genocide was being committed against the white Afrikaners who had imposed apartheid. Grok debunked the claim as untrue, and this got a lot of attention on social media and in the news. Then on Wednesday, Grok suddenly stopped giving many people sensible answers to questions they asked it, and suddenly started relating everything to an assertion that there was a genocide being perpetrated against white people in South Africa. People asking about dog memes, about baseball stats, about video games, abo...