Headless chickens are a good example of this. If the chop leaves enough of the brain stem intact, then the now headless chicken can still run around and “live” for some time. Since “running around like a headless chicken” is a saying in several languages, this probably wasn’t an ultra rare occurrence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken

I can see a few uses for a smart oven like that, for lazy cooking by inexperienced chefs.

For example different meats require different cooking temperatures. If the computer knows that it’s cooking beef and that you want it medium rare, then it should be able to calculate from the shape + weight + evolution of outside temperatures when the inside of the beef is at the right temperature. With a normal oven you’d have to guesstimate the time yourself (hard without experience) for when you should start probing the meat with a meat thermometer.

The added value for an experienced chef is probably nil. They know when the meat is ready by look and feel and they might probe it once to confirm that they were right.

The best succinct description of llm that I’ve read was “plagiarism machine”, because that’s basically what they are: automated plagiarism. At best they create a collage of other works, at worst they copy one work verbatim, but they never create something original because they can’t.

Copying something is a lot easier and thus cheaper than creating an original work from scratch, so genuine creators cannot hope to compete on cost. Which leads to less people being able to afford to earn a living from creating works, which leads to less original works being created.

Short term that’s great for the neoliberal company executives: fire the expensive artists, create cheap slop with the plagiarism machine, and thus maximize profits now. That the plagiarism machine becomes stagnant because not enough new original works are being created is a future problem, by which time the current executives will have already jumped ship.

But while it’s great for the neoliberal business model, for the rest of society it will suck. So now that we have confirmation that the AI executives know how bad their products are, and that they were just publicly lying about it in the style of tobacco executives, will anything be done about this “astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”? Personally I doubt it, there’s too much regulatory capture.