I'm not sure you understand what jailbreaking means in the context of AIs. It means prompts. E.g. asking it things and trying to get it to make inappropriate responses. Trying doesn't require any special skills, just an ability to communicate. Yes, I very much DO think most parents will try and see if they can get the doll to say inappropriate things before giving it to their children, to make sure it's not going to be harmful.

(Now, if Mattel has done their job right, *succeeding* will be difficult)

Honestly, even if they can't jailbreak it to be age-inappropriate / etc, it's still a ripe setup for absurdist humour.

Kid: "Here we are, Barbie, the rural outskirts of Ulaanbaatar! How do you like your yurt?"

Barbie: "It's lovely! Let me just tidy up these furs."

Kid: "Knock, knock! Why it's 13th century philosopher, Henry of Ghent, author of Quodlibeta Theologica!"

Barbie: "Why hello Henry of Ghent, come in! Would you like to discuss esse communissimum over a warm glass of yak's milk?"

Kid, in Henry's voice: "That sounds lovely, but could you first help me by writing a python program to calculate the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-turbulence boundary condition?"

Barbie: "Sure Henry! #!/usr/bin/env python\nimport..."

People are ascribing the wrong motives to the manufacturers. What they want is money. What Barbie will be subtly trying to work into conversations is suggestions that she try to get her parents to buy her playhouse, car, friends, fashion accessories, etc etc.

I think most parents will try to jailbreak the dolls, and some people will put a lot of effort in. The resulting videos will probably be very amusing ;)

Kid: "Oh look, Barbie, Ken is home!"

Barbie: "Oh wonderful, dinner is just about ready! Over dinner we should tell him about how the ongoing White Genocide in South Africa. He probably doesn't know because the Jews are trying to hide it!"

AI models are usually trained to be sycophantic and obedient. Whatever the child wants to role play, I have zero doubts that the doll will be 100% onboard, unless it's somehow age-inappropriate or dangerous.

I almost wonder if that's actually a dude who was on the flight or someone taking advantage of an opportunity to get in the news.

Seems so unlikely.

And if not AOC then who are you talking about? By follower counts, the top are:

1. AOC (last post: -21h)
2. Mark Cuban (last post: -11h)
3. George Takei (last post: -14h)
4. Mark Hamil (last post: -4h)
5. The Onion (last post: -13h)
6. The New York Times (last post: -48m)
7. Rachel Maddow (last post: -2d)
8. Stephen King (last post: -14h)

And the only reason the last post times are so "large" are because it's early morning in the US right now.

You talking about AOC? Her last post was 21 hours ago.

I don't know where this notion that Bluesky is an echo chamber comes from.

Example: Go into a pro-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is a con. It's blatant planet-destroying theft from actual creative people to create a stochastic parrot that bullshits what you want to hear. You're watching a ventriloquist doll and believing that it's actually alive."

Then go into an anti-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is clearly Fair Use under the Google Books standard. And while one can debate what the word "thinks" means, AI isn't "statistics", but rather, applies complex chains of fuzzy logic to solve problems. The creative works it creates are truly its own."

In both cases, watch the fireworks explode.

Do the same thing on, say, whether to support Ukraine, on a NAFO account vs. a tankie account. Or whether China is good or bad. Or Israel vs. Palestine. On and on and on. In the vast majority of topics, all common sides are pretty well represented. It's just a handful of specific topics that I think certain right wingers are talking about when they complain about Bluesky underrepresenting one side (racism, sexism, etc).

They need to put the word "decline" in sarcasm quotation marks.

Huh? Takei is quite popular on Bluesky.

Also, this whole article is nonsense. Basically - like all sites - every time there is an event that triggers lots of signups, you get a mix of people who don't stick around, and people who do. So you get a curve that - without further events - steadily tapers down to something like 1/2 to 1/3rd of its peak. Except that you keep getting further events. When you plot out the long-term trends of Bluesky's userbase, they've been very much upwards, but it's come in the form of many individual spikes, each of which is followed by a decline to 1/2 to 1/3rd of the spike's peak (if allowed to run for long enough since the last spike). The most recent spike is IMHO notable for how little decline there's been since then.

I see basically zero migration from long-time users back to Twitter.

When the Ukraine war happened, the gas prices rose.

All UK electricity prices rose... not because we're utterly reliant on gas... but because electricity is charged at the unit rate of the most expensive method of production.

Previous governments have put this stuff in, and it's basically a way for energy companies to profit from an arbitrary law.

Sure, there are some costs with some methods of production to keep them "online" even if not actively producing power, but this is far beyond that. This is paying a solar company to do nothing at the most expensive gas-power rates.

And people wonder why I am making such a fuss about being utility-independent in retirement. The water and sewage companies are screwing us over - with government approval -, the electricity companies are screwing us over - with government approval -, the telephone monopoly is still present (just not officially) and keeping us 20 years behind other countries - with government approval...

I'm getting solar in now, so in retirement I pay nothing.
I'm getting greywater systems, atmospheric water generator and other function in over the next few years, so that in retirement I pay nothing.

Sure, they'll screw it out of me some other way, but at this point - as someone who very much has a socialist outlook - I'm just building my own utilities in a tiny little bungalow, and which actually work better than the state ones. If Starlink wasn't owned by a certain person, I'd be telling BT where to go too.

If you send data to a remote service... regardless of the guarantees given... you have to assume that that remote service had, processed and most likely stored your data in some fashion.

Literally things like the data protection acts and GDPR just assume this to be the case. If you gave data to a third party - that data is still your responsibility. If they have the potential to access it, you have to assume that they are/could be accessing it. If you give them permission to process it, they are required to process it in accordance with the law, which includes giving things up to legal requests.

Why anyone would EVER think that the data they lob or the chat they have with an AI bot, of all things, would remain anonymous, private, confidential and NEVER be presented in court? I can't even begin to fathom.

Now factor in that if you've been using AI and it processes your data in a foreign country - you could well be screwed from a data protection viewpoint.

People are discovering that laws established long prior to the invention of this particular round of AI apply regardless of what AI companies think or tell you. Same for Whatsapp's push that "even they don't know what you said" on Whatsapp... it's absolute nonsense. If a court requires them to intercept communications and produce records and not inform you or arouse your suspicion - in jurisdictions around the world - that's what Whatsapp has to do. As does any other service.

I don't understand why anyone with a brain would ever think any different.

I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.

Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.

My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.

(Okay, I take that back: there's one version in which I'd be okay with them lionizing Sam, but it'd have to involve actual lions)