Enshittifications

Conversations with the New Siri

William TimbermanLeave a comment

Killing Google:

I asked Siri to locate the Ramparts magazine article that included a reference to sociologists from Michigan State University working with the CIA on the South Vietnamese Strategic Hamlet program. Two minutes later I’d downloaded the full article to my personal research archive, complete with a full color image of the cover of the April, 1966 issue of Ramparts which had contained the article.

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In the summer of 1989 I took my 14 year-old daughter on a weekend trip to Los Angeles. She was interested in filmmaking at the time, so I’d worked up a list of some of the locations where scenes in the movies she’d seen had been shot, and promised to show her both how they looked in real life, and why they’d been chosen for some of their movie transformations. Blade Runner’s tour de force conversion of the Bradbury was high on that list.

Although according to my sources the Bradbury was supposed to be open the morning we visited, it turned out when we got there that it was locked up tight. When I rattled the entrance door in frustration, a security guard came, opened the door, and explained that a Janet Jackson music video had just been filmed there the night before, and the lobby was still full of equipment.

I begged him as only a father can to let my daughter have a short peek at the interior, so he kindly let us stand just inside the door for a couple of minutes. Sure enough, the lobby was still full of metal scaffolding, but the elevator cages, the wrought iron and glazed tilework, the critical full-width skylight were visible enough to compare it with how it had appeared in the film. With our job done, more or less, and after a brief exploration of the façade of the Million Dollar theater across the street, we left Broadway and downtown to pursue the next attraction on the list.

I’ve long suspected that the video in question was Rhythm Nation. Although online searches in the late 90s had seemed to confirm it, hardly any details were forthcoming at the time. When the question popped into my mind again a couple of day ago, though, I thought, Why not ask Siri? The answer from Siri was a detailed production history of Jackson’s album Rhythm Nation 1814, including confirmation that the title video was at least partially filmed in the Bradbury. When I asked the followup question: “On what date was the sequence in the Bradbury building filmed?” I got this answer:

“While the exact date for the Bradbury Building sequence is not publicly documented, it was filmed as part of a 20-day shoot in August 1989 for the Rhythm Nation 1814 short film. The entire project was shot simultaneously over that 20-day period.”

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Creepy Interventions:

This unsolicited encounter with the new, let’s-pretend-I’m-a-Machine-of-Loving-Grace Siri so startled me that I deleted Siri’s pop-up message before I realized I should have preserved it in a screenshot for later consideration. Since I didn’t, the report here of what it had to say is as honest a paraphrase as I can cobbble together from memory.

Full disclosure: I’m old, and I sometimes talk to myself while working, especially when I’m attempting to solve a particularly thorny problem. I know I’m doing it when I’m doing it, I know what conventional wisdom thinks of the practice, and frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn. So don’t @ me, okay?

Anyway, I was reading a social media feed of the latest Trumpian atrocities on my iPad—anti-social media would probably more accurately describe this particular feed—when I spontaneously muttered, out loud, the following rhetorical aside: “Ah, fuck, I don’t know if I can take another minute of this shit. What the hell are we going to do?” When I looked back up at the screen I found this message in a Siri-style modal dialogue box:

“It sounds like you’re having a problem. I think I can help you—I know a number of sources that offer comfort and advice to individuals in stressful situations. Would you like me to provide you with some references?”

Mind you, I hadn’t invoked Siri, hadn’t said anything which sounded remotely like “Siri,” or “Hey, Siri,” and I’d absolutely, positively never offered even the slightest indication that I had any interest in talking to my new Apple-embedded stochastic parrot as though it were a person.

Thoroughly put off my feed, both literally and figuratively, I typed: “Do NOT, under ANY circumstances, offer any unprompted advice, information, offers of aid, nor any communications whatsoever in which you act as though you were a person.”

Siri’s response: “Okay, I won’t respond unless prompted.”

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Controlling Household Gadgets:

New Siri is slow, abysmally slow, much slower than the old, stupid Siri. Doesn’t at all like doing business with very expensive devices, like speakers and hubs, with 5 year-old chips in them, however functional they may still have been before the latest Apple system software release. With many customer’s homes now fully-equipped with devices that can cost in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when the whole array is addded up, do any of these pell-mell, cutting-edge tech outfits really think they’re gonna get away with obsoleting all of our pricey hardware every couple of years? If so, their bean-counters are running the risk of a very personal Armageddon as we near the end of their bosses’ industry-wide rush to digital supremacy.

A “Significant Security Incident”

William TimbermanLeave a comment

So Sam, your sandboxed model ran off and plundered Hugging Face without even leaving you a note, eh? Is that what I’m hearing? Does that mean that the hippies were right, that information really does want to be free? It’s kinda like what that old guy said, I guess:

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
to have an ungrateful child

(Cue sardonic laughter.)

The Antipersonal Assistant

William Timberman3 Comments

My flirtation with so-called smart home technology began with internet connected cameras that allowed me to see inside my house when I was away on trips, and with locks that I could unlock remotely in case my neighbors needed access in emergencies. Maybe the memory of my mom driving my dad crazy by wondering an hour or so into every Sunday drive if she’d left the iron on is what set me up for this. Whatever it was, I found that the offer of a personal panopticon to help control the things in my life that might still be controllable was genuinely seductive, even though I’d long been aware that the things one can control in life aren’t the things that actually matter.

In any event, ten years or so into this adventure, the technology had matured to the point that relying on it to help me do things I hadn’t previously been able to do seemed quite natural. Then the daemon of generative AI sprang full-grown from Sam Altman’s brow—unbidden, unannounced, largely unfathomable—and demanded to be a full partner in the pilgrim’s progress I had up till then considered to be my private life.

Would you like me to show you what movies are on that you really want to watch? Here’s all the news I compiled for you today—I left out the things I know would upset you. I saw that you were almost out of coffee, so I ordered ten pounds of your favorite whole beans from that new place you got the push notification from last Tuesday, the one you saved in your shopping list.

No, thank you. Raped by the heralds of demented late-stage capitalism was definitely not something I wanted chiseled on my tombstone, let alone tattooed on my backside. Was there any way to avoid it, though? Well, not entirely, but there was Apple.

Apple was (and still is) almost universally considered among the technorati to be hopelessly behind in AI, particularly in the generative AI that made Alphabet’s Gemini so much smarter and more responsive than Siri, so much more competent at the agentic functions that made a personal assistant genuinely useful. Fine, I thought, investigating further, I’ll stick with Apple, then. They promise they’ll let me turn the good shepherd stuff off, and retain at least the illusion of free will.

I should have known better. I don’t think anyone has yet realized just how demeaning, yet inescapable, our dance with the agents of virtual personhood is going to be. For example:

I like to read before going to sleep, but I don’t like having to get out of bed to go turn the lights off when I’m finally ready to put away the reading and get some shuteye. Most people probably just switch off their bedside lamps, but given the built-in recessed ceiling lights that came with my house, I skip the bedside lamps and instead engage in a three-part Siri conversation with a HomePod on the other side of the room:

Siri, good night. This turns off all the lights except the lights above the bed, locks all the doors, turns off the TV and speakers in the living room if they’re still on, and checks to see that the garage door is closed.

Siri, before bed. This sets the lights above the bed to the right color temperature and brightness for reading.

Siri, bedtime. This turns the lights above the bed off.

A couple of nights ago, I mistakenly began the sequence by issuing the second request, before bed, instead of the first, good night. Siri, however, responded as though I’d actually said good night. Since the two requests don’t actually sound anything alike, I’m tempted to believe that the Siri algorithm(s) have taken note not only the content of the requests I’ve been issuing almost every night for the last few years, but also their sequence, and very helpfully did what it assumed I wanted it to do instead of what I actually asked it to do. The fact that its inference was helpful in this particular situation didn’t keep it from feeling like a scenario straight out of 1984. These are precisely the sorts of judgments that no one who values their personal autonomy wants a stochastic parrot to be making, even in support of the seemingly benign act of turning lights off and on.

Get ready folks. Unlike me, you might not have to share your bed with them, but it does look like these corporate nursemaids are going to be looking over everybody’s shoulder from now until some future Sam or Elon decides there’s more profit in thermonuclear war, desertification, or Soylent Green. Last one to the singularity is a rotten egg!

Apple News Sucks

William Timberman
  1. Sell, sell, sell
  2. Idiots have ideas that we need to consider
  3. How I felt when….
  4. Here’s something weird to eat, wear, take a cheap flight to and still feel 1) virtuous, 2) au fait 3) frugal
  5. Donald yes
  6. Donald no
  7. The Atlantic also has ideas (war, famine, pestilence, and David Frum—that’s four, right?)
  8. Relax, AI may be eating the world, but it won’t take even the slightest little nibble out of your Apple stock