Found elsenet: seems reasonable to me.
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Yeah. As a mental model, it works, but I don't think I want my code written by hungry ghosts, either. 🤔
@cstross
One of the short SF stories in #Nature #Futures described the situation of a simulated or copied rather than wholly artificial machine intelligence, once human, which had been put in a phenomenal number of jars and shaken, and then discarded, of course, over a long period into the future.
Seemed bad.
One of the #basilisks , perhaps.
@cstross hey, at least it's going to fulfill two of your wishes before taking your soul down to hell to cash in your third...
@cstross feeling sad and directionless in your life? Why not whisper all your darkest thoughts and confessions to a hungry ghost trapped in a jar?
@cstross
"The hungry ghost in a jar continues to wail 'use me! use me!' while I ignore it."
Yeah. Fair. Tracks.
only because the truth about genAI, (its social and economic cost, its unnecessary contribution to uncritical spam in daily life, hyped marketing, and the audacity of its deceitful producers to arrogantly insist they know best about the ethics and intelligence of humans) is not pithy enough for a meme.
@cstross While I never had any issue with SQL, I inherited a codebase where the last developer hand rolled a SQL builder library just to avoid having to write SQL! It concatenated strings! Surely it had an injection vuln! Why didn't they use AI?!! 
@qgustavor Are LLM code-generators magically immune to SQL injection exploits? (Blinks naively.)
@cstross no, but I guess a LLM would have used a library instead of hand rolling one (although there are AI comments✅ in the code, maybe they used AI to make this tragedy)
@cstross Uh, okay ... but as far as I can see there are no reasonable use cases for hungry ghosts trapped in a jar. Why the F would it be reasonable for a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars to write SQL queries for someone?
That said, there's more than one technology that we call "AI", and not all of them are useless garbage LLM generative AI or stable diffusion.
ML is very good at steering an drone or a missile (not so much for driving a car). No generative LLM here, just a simple feedback loop.
@cstross
Doesn't Laundry Files Bob routinely trap hungry ghosts in expensive, Shiny!, warranty-voided Apple jars?
Damn, I've forgotten Bob's surname. Since he's an inverted Jimmy Bond, his initials must be BJ, but I forget the second name.
@cstross “A hungry ghost in a jar can’t do your job, but a hungry ghost salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a hungry ghost in a jar.”
@cstross
> My girlfriend is a hungry ghost in a jar
sounds more deranged when you replace "hungry ghost in a jar" with "AI" though
@cstross At least you wouldn't have to worry about her breath fogging up the glass so you couldn't see her.
@cstross New GF just dropped...
@cstross Speaking of hungry ghosts, I'm just reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_of_Ashes_(book) and James Angleton is a much less sympathetic character than the Laundry Files led me to believe.
@bencurthoys IIRC that book came out a few years after I wrote my version into the series.
@cstross
I'm not searching for it but "My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar" sounds like a plausible genre of fiction under rule 34
@5ciFiGirl @cstross
Or the Dr Who episode Love & Monsters, with the girlfriend a face trapped in a paving stone
@sabik @5ciFiGirl This may come as a shock to you, but when I say "I don't watch TV or movies", that includes Dr Who.
@cstross this is a slopmonger who thinks this is good marketing
@davidgerard If so, it's an unwitting self-own.
@cstross
"The hungry ghost in a jar sometimes writes my stupidly convoluted regex queries" still sounds quite insane, but -- crucially -- a qualitatively different kind of insane to "I asked the hungry ghost in a jar if my essay was any good".