I agree! I think it's because there's so much cooking material in its training data. I wonder what proportion of the internet is food blogs and recipes... Probably a lot!
What's happened to HackerNews? Look at the vitriol of this comment thread - it looks like a 2 Minutes of Hate thing. Set aside your feelings about the author of the linked article and just look at the HackerNews comment chain. What is going on? Since when do HackerNews users write like this?
I notice that today's populist right is willing to experiment with new technologies. For example, left wing photojournalism seems to rely on still images, whereas right wing photojournalism is more likely to use video. Kamala Harris gave an interview to NBC; Trump went on podcasts. And while the left hates AI, the right is happily using it.
I like it! I was watching a YouTube video of someone driving in a big city. I saw an interesting skyscraper and asked Chatgpt what it was. After Chatgpt answered, I asked for a photo of the building to confirm, and Chatgpt helpfully showed it in-chat. It was the correct building!
And because the voice is so frictionless to talk to, I asked about what company owns the building, then that company's industry, then how that industry works in this particular country etc. I probably wouldn't have bothered going down a rabbit hole like this if I'd had to type. Voice is much easier than typing.
I agree! Vancouver has lots of stuff going on. It's a particularly great city to see different kinds of transport. Bikes, cars, trains, subways, float planes, yachts, sailboats, passenger jets.
Common sense is gold. It's also hard to find. Ask yourself where, if you were interested, you might find a book full of common sense about say, the airline industry. It's a hard question, right? Most stuff will be either too technical, or too shallow, or simply annoying.
Relatedly, I've found that AIs are spectacularly good at common sense. Nowadays, if I ask myself where I can find common sense about the airline industry, the answer is "Ask an AI, of course." We've never had the ability to find common sense so easily.
I find this phenomena happens with viral posts on Reels and TikTok. The first time I see an example of a trend, I'm delighted! I've never seen anything like this before, and what a great idea! But then I see a second example of the same trend, then a third. Soon I'm sick of them.
For the Reel creator, it doesn't matter if their Reel is the "second time" for many people. As long as they happen to catch enough "first timers" in their dragnet, their post will perform well.
The web comic XKCD built a brand around this, I think. I'm not sure whether the creator did this intentionally, but much of XKCD's success is based on saying things that we all think but haven't articulated. On Reddit, it's very common to see posts where OP complains about a tech issue, and the top voted reply is simply a link to an XKCD comic.
Eddie Van Halen is interesting to read about. It's tempting to dismiss him as a "hair metal guy", but he was actually frighteningly intelligent. Read up about his equipment experiments.
I think the quest thing works because it gives you both roles: you are the Quester, they are the Helper. Both of you know what's expected of you. You are supposed to ask questions passionately, they are supposed to answer helpfully. Random gym conversations are hard because your roles are undefined ("How am I supposed to react?"). In general, many shy people do better socially when they can adopt a role. A shy person might become un-shy when they work as a barista, because they have a role ("barista"). And on a grand scale, a celebrity singer might become un-shy on stage, because she has a role ("singer").
One example I like to use is schadenfreude. The emotion makes us feel good and bad at the same time: it's pleasurable but in an icky way. So should social media algorithms serve schadenfreude? Should algorithms maximize for pleasure (show it) or for some kind of "higher self" (don't show it). If they maximize for "higher self" then which designer gets to choose what that means?