AI week Oct 21: Riddle me this
Dead Internet, AI's sameness problem, and a riddle
Hello and welcome to another AI Week!
First, the sad news: AI week is going on semi-hiatus due to some family health issues.
Now the good news: I'll still be sending out periodic linkdumps, like this one. There's just too much going on not to share!
In this week's AI Week: * Lots of links * A couple of comics * A riddle at the end
Protecting kids...
... but not too much
California is cracking down on AI technology deemed too harmful for kids, attacking two increasingly notorious child safety fronts: companion bots and deepfake pornography.
Sounds good and all, but the California governor vetoed AB 1064 and a couple others that would have provided much stronger protection:
https://abc7.com/post/california-gov-newsom-vetoes-bill-restrict-kids-access-ai-chatbots/18001782/
The bill would have banned companies from making AI chatbots available to anyone under 18 years old unless the businesses could ensure the technology couldn’t engage in sexual conversations or encourage self-harm.
Commentary:
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/silicon-valleys-capture-of-our-political/
Heaven forbid. What if, in the process of trying to ban AI products that quite actually encourage children to kill and harm themselves, we wind up banning chatbots that help children cheat on their homework, diminish their propensity for critical thought, and lead to the development of other forms of AI psychosis?
ChatGPT Was Not Designed For This
ChatGPT is a well-known sycophant…. is that really what we want whispering in the ears of generals?
https://futurism.com/future-society/general-taylor-korea-chatgpt
If it’s worrying that high school kids are outsourcing their brains to AI, it’s downright alarming to imagine US military leaders — the commanders of the most well-equipped armed forces in history — doing the same.
Beyond sycophancy, GPT-5 has been found to generate false information on basic facts “over half the time”
Related comic
SMBC on sycophancy (click on the comic for the full thing)
Dead Internet
Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says 'much of the internet is now dead'
https://www.businessinsider.com/alexis-ohanian-much-of-the-internet-is-now-dead-2025-10
Dead articles
More than half the new articles on the web now register as "Probably AI" in a common AI detection tool, for whatever that's worth.
https://graphite.io/five-percent/more-articles-are-now-created-by-ai-than-humans
Interestingly, I pasted some of this article into the same AI detection tool and got "95% probability AI". I pasted a different chunk and got 5%. YMMV.
Dead wages (Jan 2025)
Rewind to this article from Jan 2025: Top AI Investor Says Goal Is to Crash Human Wages
https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-investor-goal-crash-human-wages
Related: I'll have my robots talk to your robots
https://www.thecut.com/article/job-search-unemployment-stories.html
Dead patients?
Should an AI copy of you help decide if you live or die?
https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/10/should-an-ai-copy-of-you-help-decide-if-you-live-or-die/
Easily the worst idea I've read today, and that's saying something
Art & Culture Dept.
AI's sameness problem
Alex Kantrowitz: When almost all AI generated content looks alike, the novelty wears off fast.
https://open.substack.com/pub/bigtechnology/p/ais-sameness-problem
AI images, video, and text often exhibit a uniformity that can only be broken with deliberate prompting, and even then not reliably.
BUT ...
with fine-tuning, AI can produce literary-sounding text:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/21/ai_wins_imitation_game_readers/
Related: the problem with AI music
Charlie Puth on Why AI music isn't great (video from TikTok via Jenny Rae Rappaport)
Comic
Sheldon: What Artists Do
AI struggles to solve a riddle
A man has two, a king has four, a beggar has none. What is it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/comedyheaven/comments/1o7vjva/money/
It's fun to try this with different models! Here's Llama 4 Scout:
And GPT-5 mini is refreshingly taciturn:
I liked this answer, attributed to ChatGPT:
but this is what I got from ChatGPT:
ChatGPT started out strong, but then it went off the rails.
Does this riddle have a definite solution? I don't know. But unlike Gemini, I do know that the solution is not "O".
If you have a solution to share, reply or leave your answer in the comments!
That's it for this week's AI week! Thanks for reading. Leave a comment or hit reply if you've got thoughts or stories to share.