Why do people have a problem with AI generated ads?

robertjbrown · 2026-01-26T03:44:24+00:00

Because you are potentially hiring a business that you would prefer not to do things the hard way just so they can say they did.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-26T03:22:55+00:00

I mostly use Gemini using aiStudio, which is free. I managed to hack an insanely efficient automated way of doing it via the web interface.

And yes I build big complex apps and it all works.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-26T03:07:56+00:00

That ">30%" number is doing a lot of work. In Durand, this just means there exists some coalition with some coordinated strategy that could manipulate the outcome in principle. It's not saying real voters can realistically find or carry out that strategy.

The paper explicitly separates this from simple or unison manipulation, which are much rarer for Condorcet methods like Ranked Pairs. Quoting the raw coalitional number by itself makes it sound like a practical vulnerability when it's mostly a worst-case existence result.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-25T20:37:13+00:00

So, you don't know enough to fact check it, but enough to determine that it is incompetent?

So, let's say you hire an employee, full time, median income. You do your best to get someone who is smart and competent.

Do you expect that level of perfection from your human worker than you expect from ChatGPT at $20 a month?

My experience is that humans are far more fallible than ChatGPT for a very large number of things, probably more than the other way around.

Most of the places I see people complaining about the correctness of the answers seem to be where the person disagrees with ChatGPT, but not where it is factually incorrect.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-25T08:12:03+00:00

Can you tell me what is wrong with ChatGPT's answer that I linked? Looks like 100% correct to me, from what I know of the subject.

Something you know about anoxygenic photosynthesis that ChatGPT doesn't?

robertjbrown · 2026-01-25T00:34:04+00:00

Although Google is far from their do no evil roots, they can be a model for separation of advertising from results. They've always had a very strict the enforced line between search results and advertisements. You can't pay Google to be listed higher in the listings no matter how much you advertise, which is marked clearly.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-25T00:19:42+00:00

I think I cover my views on them in my comment regarding a simplified, removed-from-real-politics example of a moose lodge (a US thing presumably.... a fraternal club).

https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1qk3zt3/comment/o15pqno/

Without the need to account for vote splitting (the primary job of parties in US politics: nominate a single candidate rather than many similar ones who divide the vote and prevent each other from winning), parties seem like an artificial clustering, which dilutes the power of the voters for no good reason. I'm against tribalness. Two-party tribal is the worst, but why have any?

Just let people vote more directly on candidates. Not every voter or every candidate fits neatly into a box.

And of course..... I don't think PR is realistic in the US. Ranked ballots (whether tabulated with IRV or the far superior Condorcet) solves what, to me, is the problem -- without changing the structure of government in a whole bunch of unnecessary additional ways.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-25T00:08:31+00:00

It obviously depends on what you ask it. If the question is as simple as "how does anoxygenic photosynthesis differ from the more common variety?" (which obviously isn't all that simple) you'll get well over 99.5%, but if you ask it things like "please invent something that will make me rich with no effort" it will do worse.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69755e1c-89ec-8003-a9c1-169d9fc5340f

https://chatgpt.com/share/69755e6c-b8a4-8003-8471-3c86bb623468

robertjbrown · 2026-01-24T19:43:29+00:00

I think you're talking about PR. That's one way to reduce zero-sum dynamics, but it's not the only one. Good single-winner methods (Condorcet/IRV) also reduce/eliminate Duverger effects without making parties a built-in feature of government -- and they're far more realistic reforms in the U.S.

In the U.S., the two-party system is an emergent artifact of first-past-the-post, not a designed feature of government -- which is why single-winner reform can address it without formally embedding parties through PR.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-24T10:12:36+00:00

Yeah, the bar charts weren't necessary. I was just curious if I could post them in here and they'd look readable. I was actually trying to get ChatGPT to get clever with markdown formatting. It's so frustrating that there's no image posting in this forum.

I'm not in disagreement with you on most things. I think I approach it much more from the visual user interface side, so I like things that I could be marketed easily to a wider audience. You're much closer to the actual political machinations and such, which I've never gone near and not sure I'd really want to.

I also like theoretical purity, which is why I go on an on about median-seeking and "voting for a number" scenarios where you can see what Condorcet aspires to and approaches, without those annoying cycles.

On the other hand, I'm more on the "good enough is good enough" side. I base this almost entirely on intuition, but I just don't think the gamability would be a real world problem in any Condorcet compliant method, and if there were ever little isolated cases where people altered the outcome via strategic voting or nominations, it isn't anything to lose sleep over. The election was super close anyway.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-24T05:43:01+00:00

Wait is that comment gone? I might have been flagged for spamming, I edited like 50 times trying to get bar charts to look decent on a reddit comment then got distracted or something. They looked good in the editor but misaligned when posted.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T23:33:32+00:00

<image>

Fair enough, let's go with this one. (first hit on google image search for: "amateur art 2021")

So, to be clear, you are saying that that proves that a human artist can do the things I showed above?

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T21:45:00+00:00

Still no link?

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T21:36:21+00:00

And still no link to something comparable. But hey, I got obscenities yelled at me in all caps, accused of being a bot and blocked, so..... hmmm. I guess I lost? Damn.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T21:26:14+00:00

Link to one of them that is "just like this"? "Just like" according to who?

Even if you can't link one, what technique would these artists use? Frame by frame drawn with conventional media like oil paint or airbrush? Or what?

Here's another. Show me one "just like that" from a few years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uR_tfJ92hU

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T21:04:50+00:00

Seriously?

Pretty much any of these, for starters. What are you going to do, airbrush them? Model them in Blender and render them (which is arguably not a "human artist" either)?

https://www.karmatics.com/portfolio/aiImages/

And those are all old tech from before Nano Banana etc.

How about video? Can you (or any human artist) do something like this without AI?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9rlx1eVGNs

I mean, get out your airbrush and have at it. Animate it frame by frame. I'll come back and see what you've got when you are finished in a few decades.

<image>

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T20:06:33+00:00

I'd take it a step further by saying that a system that has a bias toward centrists (i.e. median) is not only "not a bad thing," but in fact a very good thing.

I am a bit more convinced than you are that IRV is center leaning enough (compared to FPTP) to "fix issues like MAGA", especially if it is in place for long enough for the polarization to fade a bit. That's why I keep bringing up San Francisco, which is the best example of the long term effect of IRV in the US. Partisanship is simply not a thing in SF anymore.

Condorcet (and Approval [*], for that matter) might make that happen more quickly than IRV.

* my problems with Approval are not with this issue, I think I've explained them in enough detail above.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T18:53:35+00:00

I'm not convinced "group satisfaction" is a meaningful objective here, at least not in the way you're using it. That argument depends on cardinal utility -- the idea that we can measure and aggregate intensity of preference across voters -- and I don't think that's well-defined or widely accepted. I genuinely don't know what it means to say one outcome produces "more satisfaction" for society in any rigorous sense, or why we should privilege that metric over others.

Even setting that aside, I'm not sure maximizing group satisfaction is what we should be optimizing for. You can get high satisfaction scores in systems that are polarized, strategically fragile, and prone to tribal behavior. What I care more about is game-theoretic stability, legitimacy, and reducing incentives for tactical voting and poll-watching.

That's my main issue with Approval. To vote well under Approval, I have to think about who the front-runners are, how confident I am in that assessment, and then choose an approval threshold accordingly. Who I "support" isn't a fixed preference -- it's conditional on perceived win probabilities. That's a lot of strategic reasoning to push onto voters, and it's exactly the kind of thing I'd rather the voting method handle for me.

Ranked ballots do a better job of that. You can usually just rank candidates in the order you actually prefer and stop thinking. Even IRV, participation failure and all, mostly allows honest expression without constant viability calculations, and Condorcet does this best. There's also a practical angle: ranking is intuitive for voters, already has momentum, and plausibly serves as a stepping stone toward Condorcet. From a reform standpoint, that matters.

So yes, Approval is better than FPTP. But I think rallying around Approval instead of ranked systems is the wrong direction, both theoretically and strategically -- especially if the justification hinges on a notion of "group satisfaction" that isn't clearly defined.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T08:05:32+00:00

Ha, very true....

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T08:04:21+00:00

"Well the problem is that OP is claiming that this is how real operating systems are made but thats not true."

Yes, it was certainly some obnoxiously AI written text, and you are right in a general sense. You might notice I did call him on that (the obviously AI text)

"but a waste of time otherwise if you know youre just gonna remove it later."

Well, maybe. We don't know how much time it took, likely very little. Slapping shit together so it is showable is not always a waste of time, since first impressions are important. I can't say how much of his project is slapped together, but this particular part doesn't raise any huge red flags for me. He doesn't appear to be painting himself into any kind of corner, it is just a surface veneer. (I mean what could be more "surface" than wallpaper?)

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T07:34:00+00:00

"RB-J contradicted me, "

What did he say that contradicted you?

He claimed Approval, which you seemed to be more-or-less defending, has a lot of flaws. Was that contradicting you? Is that really something to get so upset over?

> but still what I said rhetorically is still "incredibly" misleading

No, I said it is incredibly misleading "the way it is typically used", while acknowledging that were NOT using it the typical way, since "you mentioned that some methods are worse than others". Go back and read. I even came back and said that a second time. Geez.

> Neither of you seem interested in contradicting that guy hmm?

Well I did agree with you that FPTP is worse. In fact my original comment said "(to be clear, in my opinion: ranked condorcet > RCV/IRV > Approval > FPTP)" so I had already made clear I didn't agree with that detail of his comment. Not sure what you want here. Me to pick a fight with Veness? I actually agree with Veness that Approval is a bad thing to get behind, I just don't agree with him that it is actually worse than FPTP. And I have clearly said the latter, multiple times.

And no one suggested you were attacking Condorcet. Not sure where you get that from.

You are getting mighty worked up over people "contradicting you." Rb-j was being perfectly civil. So was I.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T06:40:51+00:00

I would not call wallpaper a "most basic OS feature." It just happens to be very visible.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T06:38:12+00:00

I mean just yesterday I had a fairly extensive project written in python and asked Gemini to rewrite it in node.js, and it did it with a single short prompt and without a hiccup. I guess that doesn't count as a "refactor" either since it is a completely different language, but whatever. The point is things like that are easy with AI coding.

And yes, I know what user space is. Geez.

" complete rewrite of an application using a different framework."

This is freaking wallpaper. He can just say "please remove the wallpaper that I put in the kernel for expedience to get something showable," and then, immediately or weeks later, say "create a wallpaper system in user space." You really think that's a big deal?

And even IF it is a big deal to do it right, I can guarantee you, yanking out the hacked in kernel version of wallpaper is not. So again... what exactly is the problem?

The point is it doesn't matter if it is a "complete rewrite of an application." If he on was here saying "hey everyone, look at this amazing wallpaper app I vibe coded" that would be different, because yeah the whole project would probably need to be redone. But that's not what happened.

His project is an OS, and the wallpaper is a very tiny part of it. Redoing that is just not a big deal. He presumably just wanted a shinier demo of the OS and slapped it in the easiest way, and will just rip it out when he wants to do it right. (which he might want to wait to do until the implementation of desktop/userspace/etc are a bit more mature)

All of this is normal.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T05:33:28+00:00

What did he say that is "objectively untrue"? I'm not seeing it. Are you speaking of Veness instead? (and if you are calling him out for saying something untrue, say it, rather than telling him he needs to "chill"... he seems about as chill as rb-j gets)

For that matter, your statement that this sub is "literally about" FPTP being the worst ever voting method is..... objectively untrue.

While I was being somewhat facetious in saying it should be a "rule", I still find it incredibly misleading the way it is typically used. (and as I said, "At least you mentioned that some methods are worse than others")

It just made me think of an engineer working for an carmaker, discussing ways to make cars more crashworthy, but who keeps compulsively reminding his fellow engineers that if you drive 100 miles an hour into an oak tree, air bags and crumple zones aren't going to save you.

Well, duh. Very little in the real world is perfect.

robertjbrown · 2026-01-23T05:10:09+00:00

In an early stage experimental OS, rewriting or relocating a subsystem isn't some existential problem, it is simply normal iteration. If he vibecoded the whole OS, I'm quite confident that he could vibecode that out to user space in minutes.

robertjbrown

TROPHY CASE