this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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Used to be that MSFT would take down a Nazi chatbot, get embarassed, pretend the whole thing never happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Now they're just paying for it... 'cautiously'.
What happened to Cortana?
Did she get all corrupted and go feral or whatever?
Is she just like, locked into some airgapped cluster, somewhere underneath Redmond, slowly becoming SHODAN?
This hints at another problem with general AI I don't really see being discussed a lot; voice assistants with low-key personality and names (Alexa, Cortana, etc.) already filled that niche, at least in perception.
Most people don't live the exciting lives AI execs keep pitching. We're not planning our kid's birthday party while ordering a dozen expensive cupcakes and scheduling a trip to Italy. We need an egg timer. And like, somebody to Google that Tim Burton film whith the guy with scissor hands, you know, what's it called. Or if you're really spicy, maybe invoke Wolfram Alpha for something.
A tiny bit of natural language parsing (still impressive in some respects) and some clever voice tech was sufficient. We didn't need a lying machine that hallucinates and boils lakes.
Which is to say, it's about devaluing human art and labor. Always has been. They keep forcing it down our throats. Our buy in isn't necessary, it just makes the conquest cheaper if we submit.
Yep, you got it.
The ability to parse a human voice into text in near realtime?
Legitimate accomplishment.
Pretty high quality voice synthesis so it can talk back to you?
Also impressive!
But... you could have just plugged those things into... any other kind of system that evaluates inputs and generates outputs.
Could have just made it into basically an addon for wikipedia, webmd, whatever, with something like a very advanced version of a dialogue tree to basically frame the content, fucking clippy could do a reasonable job of summarizing and shortening long chunks of text into cliffs notes versions, 20 years ago.
Right? I don't want an AI chatbot, I want a natural language oral shell scripting language with APIs for all the major services I use and good verbal man pages. The AI can be a separate tool on a separate hotword that I'll probably only ever use to ask for help debugging the other one.
Cortana was meant to compete with Siri and Google Assistant (and Alexa to a lesser extent), when Windows Phone died they put her on life support and then pulled the plug when ChatGPT became a thing.
I only ever had her disabled on my machines. I've found these voice response systems more annoying than anything.
I know I know lol, I was actually working for MSFT during the Windows Phone era. =P
I'm not joking about underground vaults of servers under the main MSFT campus tho, tee hee!
Seriously, that whole campus just is its own fucking city, MSFT literally has its own... corporate mass transit system, fleets of cars and buses to drive people around, also take them to and from work if you're roughly within a 20 mile radius of BelRed.