4 Viral Science News Stories The Media Totally Screwed Up

4

Those "I Made A Bot Watch X" Stories Were Never Meant To Be "Scientific"

Tech journalists cannot stop freaking the hell out whenever they see one of those "I had a bot watch X" tweets.

Mashable

Bloody DisgustingOf course, the fact that it's a human writing this means robots will never replace wri[SYNTAX ERROR]

These are mostly thanks to Keaton Patti, a comedian who has made bots watch everything from Family Feud to TED talks to commercials for Olive Garden, after which he tells them to produce scripts replicating what they've seen. The results are often hilarious gibberish, because them computers think they people when they clearly ain't even word correctly. One little problem: The whole thing is horseshit. (People posting things on social media that aren't true in order to go viral? Say it ain't so!)

As neutral net researcher Janelle Shane explains, this isn't how bots work. For one, "forcing" a bot to watch endless hours of television won't result in a written script -- it'll produce video. After all, to echo the words of our friends in the human centipede community, you get back what you put in. We can forgive a human writing in the stage directions after the fact, but this is like asking a Roomba to scooch around your kitchen for a few hours and then demanding it build you a new one.

If you want to know how a real bot-written script reads, here's a hint: It doesn't make any goddamn sense.

Also, as Gizmodo pointed out, there likely aren't "1,000 hours" of this stuff to pull from in the first place. There are only nine Saw movies, for instance, and Olive Garden certainly hasn't made over 120,000 30-second commercials. Also, one of the scripts includes the work "fuck," which, unless we've missed the most hardcore Olive Garden commercial in history, kind of throws the whole endeavor into question.

3

We Really Shouldn't Have To Explain Why "Dimming The Sun" Is Not A Practical Proposal

Hey, remember that scene in every disaster movie in which the lead scientist announces that the world is on the brink of destruction, and then everyone goes on coffee break for the next few hours? No? Well, that's pretty much the situation we're in right now with global warming. We've tried nothing, we're all out of ideas, and there's nothing left for us to do except take up scuba diving.

2

There Were No Sonic Attacks On The Cuban Embassy

In 2016, American embassy personnel in Havana began suffering a variety of "concussion-like" neurological conditions, possibly because they'd been attacked by sonic weaponry.

The New York Times

Gizmodo

NBC News"We've seen no indication that it gave the diplomats sonic superpowers yet, but we're still hopeful," reports the State Department.

While sonic weapons are definitely a real thing, the idea that they're being used to secretly bump off embassy workers isn't supported by any of those ... whaddya call those things? Oh right, facts. As neuroscientist/journalist R. Douglas Fields explains, sonic weapons are hard to conceal, and even harder to focus on single targets -- especially ones inside a building.

1

The GOP Didn't Block The CDC From Using Certain Words In Its Reports

In 2017, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had outright banned the CDC from using several words in any official reports: "diversity," "entitlement," "evidence-based," "fetus," "science-based," "transgender," and "vulnerable." Media outlets like CNN and The Guardian swung into action and called out the government -- not just for attempting to stifle discussions about these topics, but also for trying to erase the topics entirely.

The Guardian

CNNAdmittedly, an imperiled, nonconforming protohuman does sound cooler.