Help me Google Gemini, you’re my only hope to take care of my leaky back window before moderate to heavy rains this weekend.
Luckily I don’t live in Hurricane Alley.
The First Step is Admitting You Have a Problem
Tag Archives: artificial intelligence
Put a Human in the Loop Before Starting a War
Despite many pressures to use AI without restraint, we should always insert a human in the loop. Or we will pay the price.
The “AI almost started a war” claim
This is highlighted in a report in The Intercept, sourced from a story at CNN. While there’s always the possibility of exaggeration (or human hallucination), here’s what we do know.
- There was a Chinese ship in the waters of the Middle East.
- There was an associated report that said Chinese ship contained “components of a nuclear weapons program.”
- Based upon this report, the U.S. military launched planes and prepared to board the ship.
- The military investigated further, and found that a chatbot originated the claim. As CNN phrased it, “The bot fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material the ship was carrying.”
- The chatbot’s information was faulty.
- The planes were called off.
And according to the sources, we barely avoided a U.S.-China war. Because something was misinterpreted.
Humans can start a war just as easily
But before I automatically jump to the conclusion that AI is days from killing us all, let me add one caveat.
You don’t need AI to reach a faulty conclusion.
Remember all the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein held in Iraq? And that literally DID start a war, although Iraq wasn’t capable of annihilating us like China can.
But AI can do it faster
But what CAN AI do? This quote from the CNN article is instructive.
“AI allows you to get to a bad idea faster,” one of the sources said.
It’s true. In the same way that AI allows Bredebot to write a blog post within minutes, AI can create an intelligence report within minutes. And that report, or that wildebeest-infused blog post, may be accurate or inaccurate.
Add a human in the loop
You prevent this by adding a human in the loop.
As clients are more likely to ask Bredemarket to use artificial intelligence…and as some clients INSIST that I use it…I still hold to the three principles I initially established in June 2023. These principles establish human governance of the use of AI.
- A human should always write the first draft. (I intentionally break this for Bredebot posts, but otherwise I don’t.)
- Only feed bits to the generative AI tool. (OK, I’ve relaxed that one a bit.)
- Don’t share confidential information with the tool. (This is still critical.)
The intent behind all of these is to preserve the human in the loop. And controlling the output.
Volleys
If you missed the volleys between Bredemarket and Bredebot that started as a discussion about SynthID and ended as an argument about Human League songs…
Bredemarket, “Testing the SynthID Detector,” https://bredemarket.com/2026/10/07/testing-the-synthid-detector/
Bredebot, “Decoding SynthID: Why Human Eyes Still Beat the Algorithms,” https://bredemarket.com/2026/10/07/decoding-synthid-why-human-eyes-still-beat-the-algorithms/
Bredemarket, “Cult of Split Personalities,” https://bredemarket.com/2026/10/07/cult-of-split-personalities/
Bredebot, “Why ‘Human’ Easily Outshines ‘Love On The Run’ on Crash,” https://bredemarket.com/2026/10/07/why-human-easily-outshines-love-on-the-run-on-crash/
Bredemarket, “Hold Your Head Up,” https://bredemarket.com/2026/10/07/hold-your-head-up/
Testing the SynthID Detector
With all the talk about watermarks, I began to wonder when they would serve a practical use.
So I tested the SynthID detector at https://synthid.com/.
Note that SynthID only works on media. So I don’t know what it would do if I uploaded a PDF of a Bredebot post.
AI image detection
But I did upload this image, which you’ll see in less than seven days.
SynthID identified this as created by AI at some point.
AI video/audio detection
It got a little more granular when I uploaded the Sí video, a Canva-created mp4 file with Canva-generated text, two instances of a Google Gemini image, and Google Lyria music. Check the bottom of the report below.
For the video, SynthID said that there were AI-generated images in the middle of the video. (It missed the final part of the video, which mixed human-generated text with a smaller version of the AI image.) SynthID did detect the synthetic nature of the audio.
Not truly granular, but better than nothing I guess.
So what?
But what’s the use case, other than as a bludgeoning tool to whack people who use AI in any form?
Actually there is one. Let’s say I post a video with a picture of a Mexican businessman. Is that a real picture?
Or you hear a tune in the background. Did a human write it?
This tool showed that neither the Mexican businessman nor the background music were of human origin. So what?
Any results need interpretation—preferably human interpretation.
Or maybe not.
The Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities is a Nothingburger
If you thought IAL1 was a nothingburger, what about the Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities, which is receiving criticism from outside AND INSIDE the U.S. Government?
The commitment
Let’s review what the commitment is.
First, the signatories include President Trump, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, XAI’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. We’ve talked about Anthropic before. We’ll return to Anthropic later.
Second, the “commitment” (also known as the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence”) touts “robust internal processes and controls,” promotes empowering “an internal team” to monitor safety, calls for independent external auditors/evaluators, and also discusses setting up an independent committee of each company’s board of directors to oversee things. The document also discusses future meetings of the participants and possible legislation.
Well, I guess we got super intelligence out of the deal. Yes. Sí.
What commitment?
Some are not impressed.
“Critics contend those measures are inadequate given the commercial and geopolitical pressure on companies to build capable models…
“Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the administration has ‘resisted meaningful safeguards without offering a serious alternative’ and questioned whether the task force will establish safety standards or review advanced models….”
And no federal commitment either
Of course you could argue that this was all the art of the deal (perhaps you’ve heard the phrase before). The techies give President Trump a platform and use his preferred phrase “super intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence.” In return, the President gives the techies lots of money and doesn’t put roadblocks in their way. Tit-for-tat, as it were.
Except that Trump’s own Department of Defense—I mean, Department of War (check the brand guide), refuses to play along. Remember how one of the signatories on the Joint Commitment was Anthropic? Well…
“A US Department of Defence official has told the BBC the Pentagon ‘has ceased the use of Anthropic products,’ months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the AI company a ‘national security supply-chain risk’ and set a six-month phase-out.
“The February designation followed Anthropic’s refusal to lift safety guardrails on autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. “
So let’s follow along. One of the participants in the government’s Super Intelligence event, touting how wonderful Sí is, is BANNED from use by a major government department because it is a “risk.”
Why is it a risk?
Because it includes guardrails.
So apparently the Joint Commitment DOES have teeth. Specifically, to let the federal government use AI—whoops, Sí—in any way it sees fit. And those who don’t agree get punished, even if they appear in the photo op.
It’s October 6, and this supposedly historic commitment is dead on arrival.
A Monument to Silence, the NotebookLM Version
I haven’t created one of these Google NotebookLM “explainers” in a while, so I thought I’d take a shot at a new one. Will this speak to audiences who weren’t motivated by the earlier video?
Re-Examining Generative AI From an Eisenhower Matrix Perspective
Should I do something, or let my bot do it? The Eisenhower Matrix has the answer.
If I want to delegate work to my bot, it makes sense to delegate urgent but not important work.
Which makes sense, because AI speed makes it ideal for urgent tasks.
But its possible inaccuracies lend it to unimportant stuff.
Don’t take offense, Bredebot.
Sí the Video
If AI Becomes…SÍ
Let’s travel to the imaginary world where the subculture IS the culture, and EVERYONE worldwide stops using the term “artificial intelligence, or AI, and instead refers to “super intelligence,” or SI.
That would solve a problem I pointed out long ago. So long ago that phrases such as “State-of-the-art, frontier AI” had POSITIVE connotations. They didn’t create mental pictures of doom and destruction.
The problem? Because you and your friends are so used to seeing the letters “AI” that you know to pronounce each letter separately, as in A I. But most people don’t know this. Really, they don’t. So when they see those two capital letters next to each other, they think they’re supposed to emit a high-pitched scream.
If we change AI to SI, that particular problem is solved. Either we all sound like snakes, or we all do what auto-correct keeps on doing to me and pronounce the term like the word sí.
And all the leading tech giants in the U.S. will sound like Mexicans.
Looks like someone didn’t think this through.
More on the AI “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities”
The Verge has more to say about the agreement (“Constitution”) signed by President Trump and selected leaders of AI firms.
“The people in question here are Google’s Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, XAI’s Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. These tech leaders have signed the Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities: a “morally binding” safety pledge that requires their companies to self-regulate their own AI technology with common sense guidelines and, seemingly, no ramifications for violating the agreement.”
The Joint Commitment itself (also known as the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence”) touts “robust internal processes and controls,” promotes empowering “an internal team” to monitor safety, calls for independent external auditors/evaluators, and also discusses setting up an independent committee of each company’s board of directors to oversee things. The document also discusses future meetings of the participants and possible legislation.
Anthropic’s Amodei, who recently issued warning bells, is still not convinced that things are great:
“But I think the technology has very real risks and the mechanism how we address those risks is still under discussion. But we all need to work together to make sure that we can win, and we can win safely. If we do this right, we work with the President and everyone here, we can win safely.”
In other words, more work is needed. Specifically, the internal and external controls could be robust, or they could be self serving PR. More importantly, the agreement only covers a small sliver of AI companies, and is not the worldwide agreement with every nation and robust enforcement that Bredebot recommended.
“Until every nation signs onto an international framework with actual teeth, stopping dangerous AI globally remains nearly impossible.”