Milla Jovovich and the Fine Art of Selling Cognitive Swill
This just in. Milla Jovovich is slapping her name on the ugly bare bottom of a crypto bro trainwreck ai disasterpiece called MemPalace.Beneath the choking snake oil you'll find... nothing of value.
Ok ok let's get into this practically, as I can only write so much mocking nothing myself.
A friend of mine sent this crap to me and asked me "Is this real? Is this Milla Jovovich?" My first reaction? Nah. Fake.
Then he sent me the Instagram video of her talking about it, which looks sadly real. That doesn't say much these days. I would not be surprised if it is still some elaborate AI hoax. Which wouldn't really be all that eleborate to pull off with AI these days.
So what's going on exactly? The claim here is that Milla Jovovich was using AI a lot and decided for herself that the memory systems of AI are no good, so she sought out the first snake oil selling crypto bro she could get her hands on. Ben Sigman.
Consider this for a moment. We have Milla, who is one of the most well known geeky actors in existence. She should be filthy rich. And she wanted a skilled engineer. So she went to... a crypto bro? Wtf.
So I looked at this guys LinkedIn. It's full of crypto bro bullshit. Top to bottom. No mention of mempalace. No mention of Milla. This guy has... drumroll 2,893 followers. That's almost as bad as how many followers I have on LinkedIn.
Here is his about block from LinkedIn:
Ben Sigman is a Bitcoin entrepreneur, author, and advocate focused on global Bitcoin adoption. He is the CEO of Bitcoin Libre, building Bitcoin’s decentralized two-way lending marketplace—a simple and accessible wallet and lending platform designed to bring open finance to everyone.He is the bestselling co-author of Bitcoin One Million, ranked #1 in Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy, and Bitcoin, and co-creator of Bitcoin Alpha, the invite-only Bitcoin unconference series in Santa Monica.
Ben also co-authored The Big Bitcoin Book, a visual history of Bitcoin’s first 15 years that surpassed $500K in sales within its first year, and designed the “Apex Predator of Money” shark sculpture featured in Decrypt—a bold proposal for Bitcoin’s new mascot.
With over 20 years of experience as a systems engineer and developer, he bridges Bitcoin, art, and technology to advance a more open and equitable global financial system.
The only snake oil missing from this? Monkey Art.
His last post? 5 months ago.
His education? Not even in tech. A Bachelor's degree in Arts and Language.
Zero received reccomendations. Zero given.
Now okay, so LinkedIn is just a pile of junk mostly, and many people don't use it much at all. Part of what I'm mocking here could be chalked up to him just not caring about LinkedIn.
So lets keep digging. Looking at his Github ( bensig ) there are a 54 repos. Max stars on any one of his repos? 10. It looks mostly like a bunch of random junk as far as I can tell.
On to his homepage. His GitHub links to his homepage as Benobi.one.
What's this? "Attended DEFCON yearly from 2008–2017" Clearly this makes him notable.
Let's check out his blog. There's an article about mempalace. Starts with mention that he's known Milla for 20 years. Ok, so there's the explanation of why she would push this guy's nonsense. Still a bad choice but ok...
How about another post. He is posting that AI will take all of our jobs. Alright. That's fine I guess. I say this nonsense myself. I've written multiple books about this.
Here we go. He has posted "Japan Survival Guide: Essential Phrases & Tips". I live in Japan. My wife is Japanese. Let's do this.
His first reccomendation, learn how to ask in Japanese if a person speaks english. Already off the rails. Saying Sumimasen first to get their attention? Reasonable. After that? You can literally just say "Do you speak English?"
Wait wait. His very next reccomendation "Nihongo Wakarimasen" as meaning "I don't understand Japanese". That's... wrong actually. It's "Nihongo-ga Wakarimasen". People will say the shortened form but it's actually slang. Did this guy study Japanese?
Meanwhile he is reccomending to learn full phrases when you could just say things like "Karaoke ikou!" ( roughly Karaoke lets go ) or "Oishi des" ( It's tasty ) instead of the overly complex phrases he says.
His reccomendation for food? Chinese. And Dive Bars.
He reccomends also... Akihabara. That place is a terrible fucking nasty tourist trap.
His top reccomended anime? Death Note.
Edit: I read some more of Ben's blog articles and stumbled onto this one: Running Brew on the New Apple M1 Chip
I've been using M-series Apple systems since shortly after they came out, as I'm an Apple developer specializing in automation of iOS systems. I didn't, I suppose, buy an M1 mac right on release.
Apple M1 systems released Nov 2020. Early native brew support Dec 2020. Full native arm64 support Feb 2021, a full month before he wrote the already wrong blog article.
This completes my teardown of the author of the MemPalace crap. Let's move on to the project itself.
You need look no further than the issues of the repo itself. Check out these:
- Multiple issues between README claims and codebase
- Multiple issues with benchmark methodology and scoring
- 简体中文用户看过来 ( warning for Chinese users )
- 214
Or you could go search online and read the many technical teardowns of this rubbish. I glanced through a few of them. Basically the whole project is AI hallucination. Maybe good ideas in there somewhere but for the most part it's just trash.
Summary of what I've read: MemPalace is smoke and mirrors and is actually just a pile of nonsense.
You can go read about it all for yourself. Personally I didn't need to see any of the evidence to know this was obviously all junk, and hence I've just rambled. I did go digging a bit to verify my bs dector is functioning well.
So in conclusion, what have I accomplished here? Nothing much. I'm basically just shitting on Ben Sigman because I can, because I find this whole thing personally insulting as an actual industry professional myself. Yes my post here is distasteful. Yes it's rude and insulting. All things I would also say are true for this ridiculous MemPalace nonsense.
Moving on from the trashiness of project, let's consider the real problem here.
Let's suppose that Milla or Ben actually believe that this project is meaningful. We know it isn't. We know it's a pile of rubbish. But... suppose they aren't intentionally lying to us and really themselves think they are doing something amazing.
That's... really sad. And it isn't going to be the last time we see this. It is very easy to get deceived by AI into thinking an idea you have is incredible. It will happily churn out piles of validation. It's all nonsense, but it's nonsense tuned to you having used the tools so it is highly appealing.
AI is like idea cocaine. It's horrible for you. It makes you think you are incredible and feel so good. Mostly though it is a deception and will not lead to amazing things, even if they do feel amazing.
Let this be a warning for you all. Milla Jovovich seems to be the latest victim of AI psychosis. You could be next.