I was sitting at a cafe with some friends, and we got onto the subject of weird anime we have watched. None of us are heavy anime consumers, so it's not really a topic that comes up often. I recalled a time I was at my brother's house a couple months ago and we got WAY too high and started digging through his Crunchyroll to find something dumb to watch, and found this movie from 2014 called "Satellite Girl and Milk Cow". So I described the premise, a guy who was turned into a literal bipedal cow by some wizard happens upon a sentient satellite that falls to earth and becomes a humanoid girl... I don't remember anything else I was REALLY high lol.
Over the next couple of minutes, I ended up saying "Sattelite Girl and Milk Cow" a couple more times. When eventually one of the friends doubted my recollection, they took out their phone to look it up. They started typing, and then stopped dead, stared at the screen for a few seconds and blurted out "What the fuck?"
They turned their phone around and they had typed "Satellite" into google and THE FIRTS RECOMMENDED RESULT was "Satellite Girl and Milk Cow". A goofy relatively obscure animated movie from 2014.
Ok, what? How? That's such a specific and obscure thing to pull as a first result. There are hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of other things that would be immediately more relevant to any random person's life than that. I don't have a smartphone so couldn't try on the spot, but when I got home, neither my laptop or desktop gave any similar behavior on multiple different search engines. It gave me a few seconds of dread that even though I have consciously made the choice to exclude myself from the constant data gathering of smartphones, other people's phones are still listening to me, which is something I hadn't really thought about before.
I'm sure plenty more people have stories like this, but the specificity and obscurity of this example is just so baffling to me, like there's NO way that it wasn't picked up as an audio cue.
I can almost feel the tinfoil hat beginning to grow out of my skull.
@SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone @Bags@piefed.social
I don't watch anime, I browse on Linux, but I often use Google.
I pulled up Chrome on my desktop (connected to the same account from Android) and typed in "Satellite". None of the suggestions involved "girl and milk cow":
- Satellite Map
- Satellite Images
- Satellite Imagery
- Satellite Tracker
- Satellite Weather
- Satellite Internet
- Satellite [a product from a billionaire that I refuse to mention]
- Satellite Phone
I sometimes access NASA and satellite imagery (SOHO and LASCO), hence the "Satellite imagery" suggestions. I also access cartography quite frequently, hence the "Satellite map". Anime is such a very absent thing from my personal interests (and Google, of course, knows this), hence the absence of anime suggestions.
Yes, phones listen, electronic devices can be made to listen, and it have been happening before LLMs came into being, "ECHELON" (from the 60s) is worthy mentioning. Even the Scunthorpe Problem isn't new: saying "bomb" on a landline phone used to trigger automatic recording of the calls for "national security purposes" (even though the mentioned "bomb" was some kind of gossiping between two friends). AI just made it "easier" as electronic devices have lots of power, thus decentralizing part of the data processing from their servers.
And while I may sound like some tinfoil hat (I indeed was at some point of my existence) I don't say this with legitimate concern: I simply don't care anymore (at least, not fully), sometimes I even dare to say... explicitly "concerning" things... near "my" phone, and I don't care... Because it already knows who I am anyways.