Navarro, a fixture on ABC’s “The View,” has been an embarrassment to all of her media employers; they have just been too foolish to realize it. She’s a fake Republican/conservative, initially hired by CNN as a token so she could bash Donald Trump and claim objectivity. She isn’t witty, analytical or smart and has a speech impediment: if she were a white male, she would be defending DUI cases.
That tweet is special. She’s allegedly a lawyer, and she doesn’t know what a precedent is? The precedent is a President giving a suspiciously extensive pardon including crimes that haven’t been charged yet that the President might have directly benefited from to his son. That’s never happened before because it directly benefits the President and has the appearance of impropriety.
The whole tweet, moreover, is based on a passel of rationalizations falsely applied, like “Everybody does it” (#1) and “There are worse things” (#22). “Every President” doesn’t pardon their immediate family. The closest analog was Bill Clinton pardoning his half-brother for a cocaine conviction, but Roger’s crimes were neither as numerous nor as serious as Hunter’s, nor did anyone think Bill had any connection to them.
Saying that Trump also appointed his father-in-law as French ambassador is as relevant to Navarro’s argument as writing, “And he has bad breath, too!” That factoid has nothing to do with the pardon.
Additionally, citing Wilson, Clinton and Trump as Presidential role models in a matter of ethics is idiotic strategy. They are three of the most ethically-inert of all our Chief Executives, and those pardons match their proclivities. Defending Biden by comparing him to that trio is desperate.
I saved the best for last, though: Navarro-Cárdenas is making Americans dumber by spreading Presidential fiction. Woodrow Wilson had no brother-in-law named “Hunter DeButts,” so he couldn’t have pardoned him.
This pure fiction, the results of Navarro being hoaxed or the victim of an AI “hallucination”: either way, it’s irresponsible journalism. She obviously didn’t check her facts before making a false statement, one that impugned a President (though one who earned a lot of impugning).
Ethics Alarms 
“On Tuesday, Navarro-Cardenas admitted where the unusual name came from: ChatGPT.
She posted a screenshot of the AI bot’s answer to her question of whether any US presidents had pardoned any relatives or in-laws and wrote: “Hey Twitter sleuths, thanks for taking the time to provide context. Take it up with Chat GPT …”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/hunter-debutts-joe-biden-pardon-b2658300.html
Yup, AI it is and she blames it on a machine. This tells me that she is no longer necessary as a political pundit. ABC could save a lot of money dumping those who merely use what a computer barfs out. Hell, her gardener or pool boy could do that job.
Hunter DeButts…?
Precisely as real as Biggus Dickus- close friend of the Roman Emporer.
And Hugh Jazz
The Biggus Dickus scene is one of the great achievements in sophomoric humor of all time. “Do you find me wisible, centuwian?”
Don’t forget Dickus’ wife, Incontinentia Buttocks.
Apparently she got Mr. DeButts from ChapGPT.
Speaking of habitual liars….
As I thought.
Her reply-
’She posted a screenshot of the AI bot’s answer to her question of whether any US presidents had pardoned any relatives or in-laws and wrote: “Hey Twitter sleuths, thanks for taking the time to provide context. Take it up with Chat GPT …”’
No, it was up to her to check her sources.
She’s such an idiot.
Jack, I think the better response would be, “We did take it up with ChatGPT and it confirmed you are an idiot.”
However, apart from how amusing this is, and people are rightly making fun of her, this misses a point that should be explained with a huge explanation point: she is spreading MISINFORMATION! For the side that thinks they are always dealing with facts, what she put out is exactly the sort of thing she condemns–and she did it unapologetically.
-Jut
Excellent point. More projection. Like Hunter Biden’s laptop being “Russian misinformation.” Assholes.
According to noted presidential historian, Bartholomew J. Simpon, the first name of President Wilson’s brother-in-law is Seymour….
Mel Brooks would approve.
jvb
The most disturbing aspect of this story is the use of ChatGPT to prepare commentary or viewpoint by someone that is supposed to be doing the work themselves. ChatGPT doesn’t know anything; it doesn’t know the meanings of the words it uses and it surely doesn’t think. ChatGPT’s designation is Artificial Intelligence but it possesses no level of real intelligence. I experimented with ChatGPT over a year ago and I was not impressed. It may be better now with time elapsed but there are certainly diminishing returns on improvement with AI.
When I experimented with ChatGPT (which I might have mentioned here before), I tested it with the sock drawer puzzle. That’s where you are in a dark room and have a sock drawer with 10 white socks and 10 black socks. How many socks do you need to pull from the drawer to ensure you have a pair of socks the same color. Well, of course it’s 3. ChatGPT told me I only had to pull 2 socks from the drawer to ensure I have a pair of matching socks. I said, “WRONG”. Then it apologized and said, (paraphrased) you are correct, you would only have to pull one sock from the drawer to ensure you have a pair of matching socks. It has no idea what words mean; it didn’t understand the simple concept of pair.
Of course, ChatGPT could vomit up the definition of ‘pair’ or any other word you ask it to define; however, it doesn’t know the meaning itself. It’s just a neural net large language processor. It does a relatively good job of back-and-forth conversation but it’s just providing output based on speech patterns. There is no intelligence to it.
ChatGPT doesn’t know fact from fiction and hence you get what we call hallucinations. It makes things up because that’s all it does anyway; makes things up based on speech patterns. It can answer many questions and, depending on its actual training, provide useful information but it doesn’t think or know anything about what it is outputting.
Too many people are relying on these AI engines like ChatGPT to do the work they are supposed to do themselves. What is going to happen when so many people rely on AI to do their work; we will have a whole society of people that can no longer think (we’re close to that already)? ChatGPT is not capable of thought. Good analysis and good writing requires thought not a collection of related words spewed out by a neural net.
In many cases, you can think of it scouring the internet and trying to find the most common answer to the question. That is why when you ask an AI about snakes in a master’s thesis defense, it gives you a wonderful story.
In a defense of a master’s thesis, after the candidate has finished the presentation, the snake handler chooses a snake. The size and dangerousness of the snake is inversely proportional to the strength of the defense. The candidate must defeat the snake to earn the master’s degree.
Now, I admit that this procedure has much to commend it, but I am also sure this isn’t how it works. It turns out, this is a joke on the internet and it is in numerous places. So, the AI finds a story in several places on the internet about snakes and master’s defenses and regurgitates it because it is the most common answer out there. Imagine if you ask it a question that even slightly touches on a common internet meme.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/faq-the-snake-fight-portion-of-your-thesis-defense
My snake was very small and easily defeated. I ate it raw in front of the committee as a show of dominance.
Inbreeding is another apt metaphor for Artificial Intelligence, or a least a warning regarding its limitations.
With genetics, if two people who are too closely related have children, the child is at increased risk of inheriting diseases or disabilities associated with recessive genes, or other genetic errors shared by both parents.
With artificial intelligence, as Edward says, the algorithm has no actual knowledge of whether anything is “true” or “false”. It is given a data set, and the programmers label information as “true” or “false”. The algorithm then takes novel questions, and then produces answers that are statistically similar to the information label “true” by the programmers.
The algorithm cannot know if the answer is true, only that it shares mathematical similarities to a true answer.
If the end-user accepts the answer, then the answer likely get fed back into the dataset that the AI is trained on. If the end user verified that the answer is correct, then the dataset is improved, and future answers are more likely to be correct.
However, if the end user accepts the answer blindly, then data of unknow veracity is added to the dataset. Future answers will be statically similar to information that is unverified. Like inbreeding, future answers produced by the algorithm are more likely to be flawed.
This need not be all within a closed system. Artificial intelligence algorithms that scour the internet at the present time mostly parse human-generated content. This human generated content is of course itself full of lies and bias. Only the human programmers can judge which parts of the internet are most reliable, though the algorithm will simply inherit whatever biases of the content the human programmers limit it to.
However, as AI becomes more prevalent, the percentage of AI-generated content on the internet will slowly rise. Humans who use AI-tools to generate content will post it on blogs and news articles, and other AI-algorithms will input this content and use it to produce new content for other users.
If the human editors do not carefully verify and grammar check the AI-content they post, the utility of AI as a whole will soon collapse!
Most AI science fiction focusses on the Hal’s and SkyNets. We fail to consider the Hapsburg jaws of the AI world that will only produce gibberish and cause machines to breakdown.
I love the pardon for Hunter. It’s the best thing thing that’s ever happened. The only reason Hunter was a target is because the conspiracy is bigger than him and he was the thread upon which to pull.
The pardon goes through December 1, 2024 (a few days ago when it was issued.) If he accepts the pardon, he no longer (as I understand it) can plead the fifth and these investigations are still ongoing. Put him on the stand, under oath. Either he commits a new crime by perjuring himself or he answers truthfully about the identity of “the big guy” and where proceeds of money provided to him from Ukraine went.
He has full blanket immunity. Time to put absolutely everything on the record and take down everyone in his vicinity that does not have such a pardon.
And if he refused to answer, I assume he can be deemed in contempt and thrown into jail until he answers the questions! Maybe he should have taken whatever sentence he was looking at.
Exactly. If he doesn’t talk, he will be held in contempt. If he says something provably false, he will be tried for perjury. Otherwise, he lines up all of the pieces of the puzzle and the investigations continue until the full scope of the conspiracy is known and documented. This is single handedly the most fantastic thing Joe Biden has ever done.
Now, Hunter can still reject the pardon, and we know what that means, the investigation continues and he faces time for convictions already gained. Let’s see what he choses.
Boy, Jill’s going to be PISSED!
“If he doesn’t talk, he will be held in contempt.”
Even so, how many buckets of warm spit might that actually be worth? Barry’s “wingman” Eric Holder is in contempt of Congress….never prosecuted per Obama’s claim of executive privilege. Also cited him for civil contempt, and did nothing.
At least theoretically, a federal court is a different kettle of fish than Congress is.
I don’t think so. He could still be incriminating himself at the state level (for unpaid taxes, for instance) and could still plead the fifth. IANAL of course.
Okay. Here’s minor pet peeve of mine: This woman was born in Nicaragua to wealthy Nicaraguan landowners. She and her mother moved to Miami when she was a child while the Contras were busy in her homeland. She attended the Catholic girl’s preppy K through 12 day school in Coconut Grove. I knew a number of well to do society girls who attended the school (and dated two of them). It’s a really exclusive and expensive school. How is it these foreigners from Carribean countries immediately move into the upper echelons of American politics? Just some of the Cuban Americans who fit this profile: Robert Menendez, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and various Congressmen and Congresswomen from South Florida. But I have to admit, this woman’s ascendance has always really bugged me. She’s evidently a Bush family never Trumper because her father was a beneficiary of Bush Senior’s Iran Contra efforts on behalf of, you know, wealthy landowners … in NICARAGUA! And now she’s an American lefty?
My theory is these people from shithole Carribean countries immediately get into American politics because they are from families who ran their homelands and/or they are familiar with the levers of power from being in their homelands, and they get into government for the same reason John Dillinger robbed banks: that’s where they keep the money.
My reaction to anything this woman says is, “Buzz off!”
Rant over.
And I forgot to include the likes of Ilhan Omar (Somalia), Rashida Tlaib (Lebanon), and Sandy Cortez (Puerto Rico).
To be fair, Puerto Rico might be a shithole island but it’s not a shithole country.
. . . unless you’re a Democrat.
–Dwayne
Large language datamining models are NOT “AI”. They are “GIGO” (Garbage In, Garbage Out).
Eventually the popular culture will catch on and the HYPE will die down. I hope.
Asking a question of something like ChatGPT is not the same as asking “Is X true?” It’s more correctly characterized as asking “What have you read on the Internet that includes these keywords?”
–Dwayne