DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — When Ellie, a British-Iranian living in the United Kingdom, tried to call her mother in Tehran, a robotic female voice answered instead.
“Alo? Alo?” the voice said, then asked in English: “Who is calling?” A few seconds passed.
“I can’t heard you,” the voice continued, its English imperfect. “Who you want to speak with? I’m Alyssia. Do you remember me? I think I don’t know who are you.”
Ellie, 44, is one of nine Iranians living abroad — including in the U.K and U.S. — who said they have gotten strange, robotic voices when they attempted to call their loved ones in Iran since Israel launched airstrikes on the country a week ago.
They told their stories to The Associated Press on the condition they remain anonymous or that only their first names or initials be used out of fear of endangering their families.
Five experts with whom the AP shared recordings said it could be low-tech artificial intelligence, a chatbot or a pre-recorded message to which calls from abroad were diverted.
It remains unclear who is behind the operation, though four of the experts believed it was likely to be the Iranian government while the fifth saw Israel as more likely.
Only the second most terrifying story I’ve read today
All countries in the world suck. I’m from Canada, do you think my country sucks? Maybe not because Canada generally has a good reputation, but I can assure you Canada has done many horrible things in the past. Doing some bad stuff now (pumping out a lot of oil, not good for global warming) but is also doing some good stuff now. Countries are made up of many different people and governments have many departments doing many different things. So Canada sucks and Canada is good. The US sucks and the US is good.
And yes, Israel sucks and Israel is good. Just saw a photo of the hospital in Israel Iran hit with a missile and out in front there was a rainbow flag. It’s the only country in the Middle East where there are gay rights, being gay is illegal everywhere else in the Middle East. Or worse, the Houthis literally crucify gay people.
The thing about LLMs is it’s only aggregating things it finds on the internet. And nation states can (and do!) fill the internet with shit to skew things in their direction. So there’s no such thing as an unbiased LLM. There will be bias within the dataset. If the developers make adjustments to make the answers less biased, that’s just making the LLM match the developer’s bias. Also LLMs don’t really understand things like time and will miss a lot of nuance.
How relevant is a coup in 1953? Maybe to some really old people might remember it, but for most of us it’s just something in a history book. It doesn’t mention the Iran Hostage crisis which is way more relevant. I didn’t mention these (or W’s Axis of Evil bullshit, another instance of a US President being an idiot) because it’s kind of irrelevant once nations make a treaty. The you make a treaty you’re supposed to settle any grudges over the past, otherwise why are you signing the treaty? The Iran hostage crisis might be the one worth mentioning as it’s a big reason why the US won’t be establishing an embassy in Tehran anytime soon. I didn’t mention it because we have phones so it’s probably not that big a deal, but then again the US might be less likely to bomb Iran if they had an embassy there.
Also Israel has tried to make peace with Palestinians in a land for peace deal in the past. It obviously didn’t work out, but the LLM should mention that if it’s going to mention the occupation has been going on a long time. There have been failures in Palestinian leadership, Yasser Arafat was a lying corrupt asshole. Remember what I said about not being supposed to hold grudges when you sign a treaty? That lying bastard signed a treaty with no intention of following it. This is a major reason why Israel doesn’t trust Palestinian leadership.
See if you compile a list of the bad things a country has done, they will always seem evil. But they aren’t sports teams it’s stupid to support them or be against them. I think it’s fair to say to say there are political groups with this countries that suck. And countries will seem to suck when those suck political groups get into power, but it’s really that group within the countries that suck.
Netanyahu sucks, Israelis in general don’t suck. Hamas sucks, Palestinians in general don’t suck. The Ayatollah sucks, Iranians in general don’t suck. Donald Trump sucks, Americans in general don’t suck.