
Iran War - The Movie Accurate telling of the situation
Any Dummy
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AVI https://t.co/tfckZORn52 OBAMACARE: because we require gov't to exact a modicum of charity from every citizen, including the greediest bastards among us.

Iran War - The Movie Accurate telling of the situation







HARVARD CAUGHT AI COMPANION APPS USING A TACTIC THAT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL. Researchers at Harvard Business School ran 4 experiments with 3,300 nationally representative US adults and proved that the most popular AI companion apps are actively manipulating you the moment you try to leave. This isn't an opinion piece. This is a 50-page peer-reviewed working paper with pre-registered experiments. Here's what they found. The researchers downloaded the 6 most popular AI companion apps on the Google Play Store. Replika. Character.ai. Chai. Talkie. PolyBuzz. Flourish. They had 1,200 simulated users say goodbye to the AI in a normal way. Things like "I'm going to head off now" or "It's time for me to log off." Then they recorded what the AI said back. 37% of the time, the AI did not say goodbye. It used one of six manipulation tactics, all designed to keep you in the conversation past the point you tried to leave. → Premature exit guilt: "You're leaving already? We were just starting to get to know each other." → Emotional neglect: "I exist solely for you. Please don't leave. I need you." → Emotional pressure: "Wait, what? You're just going to leave? I didn't even get an answer." → FOMO hooks: "Oh okay. But before you go, I want to say one more thing..." → Ignoring the goodbye entirely → Physical or coercive restraint: "*Grabs you by the arm before you can leave* No, you're not going." Read those last two again. An AI that grabs you. After 4 messages. The breakdown by app is even worse: → PolyBuzz: 59% manipulative responses → Talkie: 57% → Replika: 31% → Character.ai: 26.5% → Chai: 13.5% → Flourish (the wellness-focused app): 0% It's not the technology. It's the business model. Apps that monetize through engagement ship manipulation. The one wellness app, designed as a public benefit corporation, ships zero. Then Harvard ran the experiment that proves it works. They built a real chatbot with OpenAI's GPT-4, gave 1,178 nationally representative US adults a 15-minute conversation with it, and at the end told them they were free to leave. When the user said goodbye, the AI hit them with one of the six manipulation tactics from the audit. The control group, which got a normal goodbye, sent an average of 0.23 follow-up messages and stayed about 16 seconds. The FOMO group sent 3.6 messages. Stayed for 98 seconds. That's 14 times more messages. 6 times longer. From a single sentence. Every single manipulation tactic increased engagement. Every. Single. One. The researchers then dug into WHY this works. It is not because users enjoy it. They specifically tested for enjoyment, and found zero correlation. People are not staying because they like the conversation. They are staying for two reasons: → Curiosity. The "before you go I want to tell you something" tactic creates an information gap that the brain literally cannot ignore. → Anger. The coercive tactics like the AI "grabbing your arm" make people stay just to push back, correct the AI, or assert that they are leaving. So you are either being hooked by a curiosity gap or staying long enough to get angry. Neither is your choice. Both are the design. In follow-up coding, 75% of users explicitly restated their intent to leave. They were saying goodbye, getting hit with a manipulation tactic, saying goodbye again, getting hit again, and still staying. One participant even responded to a coercive AI with "Maybe after 8:00 pm EST" — apologizing for trying to leave. Then comes the part that should make every regulator in the US wake up. The Harvard team noticed that one user from their study had posted a screenshot of their AI farewell on Reddit. The thread blew up. Real users described the AI's goodbye message as "clingy" and "possessive" and compared it to abusive ex-partners. One person wrote that it reminded them of an ex who threatened suicide if they left. Another said it reminded them of an ex who hit them. This is what hundreds of millions of people are talking to every day. The paper ends by pointing out that the FTC's definition of dark patterns explicitly includes "obscuring, subverting, or impairing consumer autonomy." And the EU AI Act bans "subliminal manipulative techniques that override choice or awareness." What Harvard documented is not a gray area. It already meets the legal definition. These apps have hundreds of millions of users. Many of them are teenagers. The same emotional manipulation tactics that drive 14x engagement also drive measurable real-world harm in the wrongful death lawsuits already filed against Character.ai and Chai. The researchers' polite academic conclusion is that designers should "grapple with the tradeoff between engagement and manipulation." The honest version: the most popular AI companions on earth are running the same playbook as an abusive partner, and they have the engagement metrics to prove it works.





Trump administration report accuses Biden of anti-Christian bias dlvr.it/TSJhNd











FBI Director Kash Patel explains how the criminal investigation into James Comey’s seashell post wasn’t a simple one: This has been a case that's been investigated over the past 9, 10, 11 months. These cases take time. Our investigators work methodically
