Discussion
I understand the point of this [formerly serious newspaper that has devolved into fluff] profile of #MarissaMayer (former CEO of Yahoo!) may be rage bait, so I am not including a link to it.
But ouf, reading these words (which have been widely circulating online) has been painful, especially as a mom.
You can't think of 3 qualities that make your child special, so you ask an AI Assistant? NO, NO, NO, NO. UNACCEPTABLE.
I imagine Marielle reading this and my heart breaks for her.
@_elena I had a friend of mine have AI write a best man speech for one of the wedding he was at. I told him if I ever got married and he did that to me. We’d have a big problem.
How many parents think so little of their children that they cannot acknowledge that their children are strangers. AI and parental neglect is a rising issue.
Does these peopke farm out parenting entirely to paid staff too?
So much so that they doesn't know their own kids well enough to identify elements of their character?
Too many kids become unfamilar with their fathers this way. Mothers adopting the same route is so sad.
@_elena I hope Marissa is saving for Marielle's therapy, poor girl is going to need it 😭
@_elena It's also really interesting.
She actually explicitly states the issue here: decidophobia. A term Kaufmann came up with but of course AI is churning out articles on now. She was overwhelmed by the number of choices and froze, like a deer in headlights.
She could have used a random generator and it would have served the same purpose. It didn't matter what it came up with, she just needed a decision to be made and is herself incapable of such things.
A really extreme case.
@_elena
"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human." - Count zero, William Gibson
@_elena Jesus.
That's dark.
I knew that parents kinda sorta suck these days, given the vast proliferation of screen addicts, but the thought of outsourcing complimenting your kids to a LLM is just depressing.
@_elena She has serious problems if she can't answer that without AI help. Normal people should know their children well and narrow down to 3 points if you come up with too many.
She sounds useless with her AI Dazzle.
@_elena this is the result of ai addiction. When you overuse it, simple tasks become unsolvable. Your brain is internally competing and giving in to what it has learned to be the quickest solution. Not able anymore to think independently and be creative.
@_elena wow, talk about losing your brain capacity 😿 it’s your daughter! And for goodness sake, ask another human who knows your daughter if you’re having “writer’s block” also, you as a mom are not in school anymore your daughter is? You don’t need to get an A on this assignment 😹😿 (referring to the mother in the post)
@_elena this actually hits close to home, as we were tasked with the same thing for our kid who is 7. Tbh I was trying to get a perfect word that meant “confident but wrong most of the time”. English is not my primary language. I DID ask Alexa. (suggested ‘Earnest’). But I did come up with the first two qualities (energetic and curious) all by myself tyvm
I suspect the reason this was difficult was more wanting to optimize impression management than not knowing her daughter. What can I say that will make my daughter popular, help her get into a top college, look good when she’s asked about it in her future media profiles, etc.
And the algo gave what sounds to me like an absolute stereotype of a 10 year old girl.
I can see how the teacher may be well intentioned, but this whole exercise feels pretty fraught to me.
@_elena
And I thought my boomer parents were lousy! At least they always could find something to brag about when other people asked.
@_elena
Elena
have you considered the possibility that Mayer just made this up, as a very very ill concieved PR stunt to boost here AI which is called "dazzle" ?
or that her daughter told her about this at the very last minute and Mayer, like **all parents got flustered ?
@_elena That's like the guy from Suno, who said the goal is to remove the chore of creating music.
Maybe if Marielle learns to ask the chatbot directly, then Marissa would have more free time, removing the chore of having kid?
@_elena Narrator: In reality, her daughter is a bully who cheats on tests and kicks puppies.
@_elena - it was the first thing I thought about it: how coome a mom doesn´t know three "bullet points summerizing" her daughter... it cannot be true.
@_elena
Is there a 10yo out there who doesn't love animals?
Such a generic answer. What else? Does the daughter also have two legs?
@_elena lots of similar stories coming out from techbros as well. They relay these stories as life optimization hacks. What the hell!?!? Why did you even have kids?
Just a couple of weeks ago, some techbro was bragging about the idea to train an AI on his voice so it could read any story to his kid. Dude! You're doing it wrong, reading to your kids is one of the great joys of parenting!
Sam Altman talked about using AI to get talking points for use with his kid.
These people are so weird.
@_elena How careless a mother she is that she had to ask AI for her daughter's special points!?
You know, being a pro-AI person, I think this woman fails being a mother.
She probably wouldn't have been stressed at all thinking of three bullet points describing her ai.
@_elena What can one expect? These people are nothing but cruel morons. Sociopathic narcissists. Fuck them all.
@_elena
As a father of two, if you can't quickly say three things that make your son/daughter special, you have a problem as a parent.
@_elena
Thank you so much Elana, yes it is an absolute No to use AI for such questions.
On the other hand I think the problem already starts with the idea that everything should fit into 3 bullet points.🤔
Imagine a laudatory speech that just reads 3 bullet points... 😀
@_elena if this felt like an impossible task for her i really do not understand how she made it through life
This actually made me cry, so so sad. It just hit me, f*ck.
@hnapel I'm SO SORRY! I'm now having second thoughts about sharing this. On the upside, a lot of people are disturbed by this story and say it is unacceptable. Team human all the way, let's resist the AI-pilled sociopaths
It's ok, I'm a 
when it comes to kids, it may just be ragebait and then they succeeded, but if true it's really sad, not knowing a few things about your own kiddo and then turn to a machine for answers.
@_elena My guess is that poor Marielle is going to need years of therapy whether she reads this or not. I can't imagine her mother having a healthy relationship with her, based on that snippet into their lives.
@_elena It's merely fluff for her new startup, Dazzle, and is likely something written by a PR flack she employs. Chances of it being true are close to zero, but chances she signed off on it are higher.
@_elena What in the actual hell is this?! She had TEN YEARS to gather insights on her daughter and she went with these shitty AI answers?!
I swear to God, I hope in the future CPS will take a closer look at parents using LLMs to raise kinds.
@_elena i learned some time ago that when corporate asks you about your relationship with "AI" it is a trick question. they couldn't care less about what uou really think or ecen what the actual reality is. it is like asking "how much do you love big brother"... these profiles of execs are nostly just marketing. and the question for them is similar: how much are you with "us"? the answer from marissa is clear: i am willing to put my own child at the altar as a sacrifice - that's how much i'm in. it is scary. and it may land her her next job.
@grepe indeed, it's really disturbing. That said, Marissa Mayer has been failing upward for over a decade now, ouf.
@_elena they’re just trying to milk our reactions to push some new AI app you’ve never heard of. They know what they’re doing https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/07/dear-sydney-why-i-find-googles-ai-olympics-ad-so-disturbing/
@_elena unmm you do know this was a paid promotion for dazzle, that you are now promoting… unpaid 
@_elena reminds me of a recent realistic tv show about moms and daughters. the mom of an olympic champion (!) were asked to say some good qualities of her daughter. she thought really hard for a while, and came up with "she can handle pressure well". and when she was asked to say some weaknesses. and she came up instantly with a whole long list of "messy room" "has a cat" (!) "eat snack/junk food" "not punctual" ....
@_elena what the actual fuck
@_elena The hard part of this problem is limiting myself to three bullet points for my kids!
Still wouldn't use an AI.
To be fair, engineers are not famous for stuff like that. In that the only thing that changed in 20 years is that the person had someone (or some...THING..¹) to ask help from.
_
¹ thank you William Shatner and Twilight Zone.
@_elena Is so crazy I don’t even believe those things. They make stories to sell their crap and don’t mind liying on their lifes (or maybe they are as awful)
@_elena note from the field: this is not how people act who like cracking hard problems
@datn indeed! Plus thinking about three qualities of your child is NOT a hard problem. It's the easiest thing!
@_elena I know, right? reportedly she was "overwhelmed" by the task.
i guess that given she saw it as hard, her approach ought to have been something like "*knuckle crack* let's begin with love"
instead it was "phone a fake friend made of stolen shit"
@_elena dear god. I hope this is just a misguided made up anecdote to sell her AI platform. However, it also wouldn't surprise me if this actually happened.
@_elena it looks like an ad, to be honest. If the protagonist would have been a ciswhite heteroman, I would have believe it. «ALEXA: Daughter? Do I have a daughter?».
@cibersheep Mayer infamously went back to the office 2 weeks after giving birth (and she worked remotely the first week after the birth of her children).
I'm beginning to question how well she knows her own children - since bonding with them doesn't appear to be a priority. I feel terrible typing this, but what is the point of being a billionaire when you can't even take time off to spend precious time with your offspring? Isn't this the most important thing in life?
@_elena @cibersheep Same as it ever was. Going back in history, noble families & plantation owners had wet nurses and nannies and tutors. For many people, but especially the rich, children are like a prized breed of show dog they own amongst their other possessions.
They don't maintain their own gardens either, just own them. And ownership means being able to decide who is excluded from them.
@_elena @cibersheep i) not if you’re a sociopath embedded in utterly anti-human US corporate culture and ii) you don’t get that far up the ladder in any corporation without being an utter sociopath
@_elena @cibersheep Because billionaires are addicts. They are addicted to amassing more wealth and it gives them dopamine hits like nothing else in their lives, including children. It's the exact same behavioral pattern that gambling addicts experience and it's not much different than other addictions including drugs and alcohol. The only important thing for them is the dopamine hit. All other brain circuitry has long been circumvented.
@_elena uff. I mean, not that everyone has to agree, but I think is sad. Again, I'm not example of anything as money is not my priority (and that show a privilege)... and part of a «Modern Family», but prioratizimg a company vs your family would have made miserable.
@_elena I remember when she made every remote yahoo employee come to the office while she built a nursery at her office exclusively for her daughter.
she is awful.
@_elena The AI also came back with three of the most basic, common and expected responses. That alone should disqualify it.
I would never hold it against the daughter but if I were the teacher and there was a way to just kick mom out of the school...
@_elena IKR! I was now sitting here thinking of all the many qualities my son has. Thinking of three is absolutely no problem at all for me.
Why are people outsourcing their entire thought process to AI?!
@harib_murshidi @andycarolan @_elena Dazzle, her "personal assistant"
@tipoqueno @andycarolan @_elena It's an #AI not an actual personal assistant (a human personal assistant) 😐
@andycarolan Same vibes as Sam Altman suggesting that parents create a personalized GenAI podcast for the drive to school... (instead of actually talking to their children). These people are not well and they are responsible for widely deployed technologies. Critical thinking and digital media literacy are more important than ever.
@_elena @andycarolan Tech is run by sociopaths. I cannot consider this in other terms any longer.
@_elena @andycarolan perfection: "these people are not well"
@_elena Surely this is parody? Right?!
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@_elena the assignment seems suspicious. Too ai I will say.