Saying that you do not want GenAI in the #books you read, the things you watch or the games you play is an understandable and NORMAL position.
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@iamada @alterelefant @berniethewordsmith which renders it useless. In fact worse than useless as time and effort of specialists is diverted from more useful work.
@seb321
In some cases it might save a couple of minutes here and there but it is definitely not the revolution they try to make us believe it is. At least if you value the quality and correctness of your work.
@iamada @berniethewordsmith -
@iamada @alterelefant @berniethewordsmith which renders it useless. In fact worse than useless as time and effort of specialists is diverted from more useful work.
@alterelefant @berniethewordsmith @iamada it reminds me of the scene in Blade Runner where Tyrell explains to Roy how his life is inhibited and any way around the inhibitor leads back to the same result. Any argument for how a flawed LLM can be used by human intervention renders the function obsolete.
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Saying that you do not want GenAI in the #books you read, the things you watch or the games you play is an understandable and NORMAL position. Maybe they have ethical concerns, maybe they love their artist homies. Maybe they don't like the bland garbage that AI generates. Stop framing this like an horde of neoluddites is starting the Butlerian Jihad (would be fun doh) just because they do not want to follow a romance autor who has a computer shitting novels instead of writing them herself.
and bring back the people who make handwritten copies, stop guttenberg...
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@berniethewordsmith That 'just ok' might work for certain cases and people also need to respect that it just doesn't work in other cases.
@alterelefant @berniethewordsmith Also, if the "just ok" books are being shat out at several times the rate of actual proper books that have been written by an actual writer, then they become a fire hose that drowns out the good books. It's not just romance, either. I came to the unpleasant realisation that I've recently read some psychological thrillers that are very probably AI-generated, with varying degrees of "author" edits to make them readable. Some of them were ok, albeit with some elements that didn't seem to work that well, one degenerated into an unholy mess for the last 20% of the "novel." I don't know exactly how many AI books I've read, as a lot of it comes down to the rate of publication being too high, and that can be hidden by the use of pseudonyms, or using different publishers. I don't really want to read books that people haven't bothered to write, either fully or in part, but it's going to become more difficult to do that.
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@berniethewordsmith might be good to include that you're talking about (american, big-tech) LLMs
We've used various forms of ML&AI for decades, everything from video-games to produce logistics and vaccine research. It's a group of technologies not singular thing (LLMs is not the whole group!)
@iamada @berniethewordsmith
It's too late. Tech bros have co-opted the AI term. If you don't want to be confused for them, use more specific terms.Say pattern recognition, not AI.
Say grammar check, not AI.
Say NPC logic, not AI. -
Saying that you do not want GenAI in the #books you read, the things you watch or the games you play is an understandable and NORMAL position. Maybe they have ethical concerns, maybe they love their artist homies. Maybe they don't like the bland garbage that AI generates. Stop framing this like an horde of neoluddites is starting the Butlerian Jihad (would be fun doh) just because they do not want to follow a romance autor who has a computer shitting novels instead of writing them herself.
@berniethewordsmith Sure, at least today I completely agree. AI stories lack a lot compared to good human stories to the point it's a waste of time. That won't be any different for movies, tv, even web pages as it is. It's low effort junk.
At the same time, for writing code, AI is increasingly helpful.
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@berniethewordsmith @Remittancegirl it is not only hype vs doom. Most of the time when AI ML is applied, it is an excuse for continuing current societal inequities with the excuse of it being "just math" and logic. See "Weapons of Math Destruction", " Algoritms of Oppression", etc.
There is also tons of AI washing. 404 media had an interesting interview recently with a data labeler in Kenya whose work includes being basically a sex worker for people getting off on chatbots. I wonder if their fantasy life would be as good if they knew they were dealing with a stressed low wage worker getting PTSD from catering to their kinks.
I have also been at academic meetings where most of the research used the "wizard of Oz" method: A human being pretended to be a chatbot, because these experts were unable to get an LLM to produce a useful output reliably.
In my mind it is slop and grift
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Saying that you do not want GenAI in the #books you read, the things you watch or the games you play is an understandable and NORMAL position. Maybe they have ethical concerns, maybe they love their artist homies. Maybe they don't like the bland garbage that AI generates. Stop framing this like an horde of neoluddites is starting the Butlerian Jihad (would be fun doh) just because they do not want to follow a romance autor who has a computer shitting novels instead of writing them herself.
@berniethewordsmith
️ "Butlerian Jihad" is a fictional event in the Dune series, where people destroy advanced technology.https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
Judith Butler has nothing to do with it
(Had to look this up myself)
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Every time you do a "both sides" stuff between "AI hypers and deniers" you are basically telling me that the person worried about the destruction of their life, their job and the environment has the level of delusion of a person like Peter Thiel, an eldritch horror in a vessel made of flesh that thinks humanity, umm, should not exist.
I think you're misrepresenting the "both sides" people. Sure, some are just like the "just asking questions" people, but the LLM/AI discussion has been derailed.
The LLM peddlers are hyping up their machines as general AI that is perpetually 2 months away from achieving sentience. It probably started as naive optimism and has devolved into a need to keep stocks up to justify insane bubble-like valuations.
Simultaneously, people against it insist it's nothing more than a T9 dictionary without any merit or use. That is a false dichotomy and IMO disingenuous as it gives the LLM peddlers an easy counter: LLMs are more than prediction machines, even if they are not the super-intelligences the other side claims.
LLMs (and similar generative neural networks) are useful for certain things. Photoshop is augmented with tools for cleaning up images. If you pay "a real artist" to make an image "without AI," you can be 100% certain they have used "AI" as part of their process. Textual LLMs can be useful to get a starting point or reference for research, or to massage text.
"Both sides" is not saying that both the people that underplay and those that overplay the abilities of LLMs are right. It's saying they are both wrong and that LLMs can have uses even if they are not general thinking machines.
Refusing opinions other than "LLMs are useless for everything" allows people to (rightfully) ignore actual good points about ethics in training. -
This is Mastodon. There is people here that can install GotoSocial in a smart oven toaster and then proceed to launch it in low orbit just for fun. Please stop making allusions to technophobia. It's irritating and disrespectful
@berniethewordsmith I actually just started my own GotoSocial instance a few days ago, and I only use #AI in really limited ways. BTW: My account there is @gtsadmin . Would like to make new friends there.
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@alterelefant @berniethewordsmith Also, if the "just ok" books are being shat out at several times the rate of actual proper books that have been written by an actual writer, then they become a fire hose that drowns out the good books. It's not just romance, either. I came to the unpleasant realisation that I've recently read some psychological thrillers that are very probably AI-generated, with varying degrees of "author" edits to make them readable. Some of them were ok, albeit with some elements that didn't seem to work that well, one degenerated into an unholy mess for the last 20% of the "novel." I don't know exactly how many AI books I've read, as a lot of it comes down to the rate of publication being too high, and that can be hidden by the use of pseudonyms, or using different publishers. I don't really want to read books that people haven't bothered to write, either fully or in part, but it's going to become more difficult to do that.
@HollieK72
Now the fun starts when a new generation of LLM's is trained on the output of LLM's. What could possibly go wrong?
@berniethewordsmith -
This is Mastodon. There is people here that can install GotoSocial in a smart oven toaster and then proceed to launch it in low orbit just for fun. Please stop making allusions to technophobia. It's irritating and disrespectful
@berniethewordsmith technophobia, when half of my room is cables from one side to another, and 4 desktop computers, 3 laptops and 4 netbooks in different stages of "working", 2 raspberry pi's, 3 conosoles that also run Linux and also the wii running windows NT 4 with wordperfect just because fuck it, it's cool. I fucking love puters.
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Saying that you do not want GenAI in the #books you read, the things you watch or the games you play is an understandable and NORMAL position. Maybe they have ethical concerns, maybe they love their artist homies. Maybe they don't like the bland garbage that AI generates. Stop framing this like an horde of neoluddites is starting the Butlerian Jihad (would be fun doh) just because they do not want to follow a romance autor who has a computer shitting novels instead of writing them herself.
@berniethewordsmith
It is interesting to see so much commentary about LLMs by people who are aligning as a tribe to oppose them. How much do people really know about what they are? How much do people think they should know, before assuming that they know enough? -
@PixelRobot @berniethewordsmith or the film industry, in general.
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This is Mastodon. There is people here that can install GotoSocial in a smart oven toaster and then proceed to launch it in low orbit just for fun. Please stop making allusions to technophobia. It's irritating and disrespectful
@berniethewordsmith Excellent thread Bernie. Rather than technophobes I'd class those sounding the warnings and rejecting LLMs/"AI"/Emporers New Clothes as the Canary in the mine.
I've been involved with computing/programming since the early 1980s and have been enthusiastic about many of the technological developments. Most of the tech was used to produce tools which we could use to help get stuff done. We knew how it worked, and outcomes could be tested and predicted. LLM are not this! -
@berniethewordsmith I am more worried about the absolute mediocre output of ai. For some it might be 'good enough' and that is ok. Please do understand that for most of us 'good enough' is just below our standards. Don't let an ai that is 'good enough' drive your car or have an ai that is 'good enough' do your finances. Accidents will happen and those accidents will be very costly.
@alterelefant @berniethewordsmith A small recent example that could have ended in tragedy : https://www.surfertoday.com/environment/chatgpt-wrong-tide-times-wales-rescue
Belief in "AI" information is a shortcut to obtaining the Darwin Award....
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@alterelefant @berniethewordsmith A small recent example that could have ended in tragedy : https://www.surfertoday.com/environment/chatgpt-wrong-tide-times-wales-rescue
Belief in "AI" information is a shortcut to obtaining the Darwin Award....
@MyricaGale
Yes, why would you source official information when you can have ai lie to you?
@berniethewordsmith -
@berniethewordsmith might be good to include that you're talking about (american, big-tech) LLMs
We've used various forms of ML&AI for decades, everything from video-games to produce logistics and vaccine research. It's a group of technologies not singular thing (LLMs is not the whole group!)
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Saying that you do not want GenAI in the #books you read, the things you watch or the games you play is an understandable and NORMAL position. Maybe they have ethical concerns, maybe they love their artist homies. Maybe they don't like the bland garbage that AI generates. Stop framing this like an horde of neoluddites is starting the Butlerian Jihad (would be fun doh) just because they do not want to follow a romance autor who has a computer shitting novels instead of writing them herself.
@berniethewordsmith
und 🥰 
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Every time you do a "both sides" stuff between "AI hypers and deniers" you are basically telling me that the person worried about the destruction of their life, their job and the environment has the level of delusion of a person like Peter Thiel, an eldritch horror in a vessel made of flesh that thinks humanity, umm, should not exist.
@berniethewordsmith “[…] an eldritch horror in a vessel made of flesh […]” Too much honour to the Thiel-human, I think. He may believe himself to be beyond mortality and with his influence he most probably »can« do an incredibly great amount of damage to the world, yes. But neither do I believe him to be beyond the fear of death himself, nor would I dare to compare his mind with that of any eldritch horror — except, maybe, with Azathoth from the Lovecraftian mythology.
