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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@berniethewordsmith Thank you for this outstanding thread. You've said everything I have wanted to say, but much more eloquently.
@Remittancegirl @berniethewordsmith
Seconded! And instantly followed as a result. Brilliant
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@cygnathreadbare Which one is the most bulky?
@berniethewordsmith bulkiest destkop, my newest one, a ryzen 5 with rtx 5070, it's not huge but it's like 10 cm taller and 5cm wider than my old one. Bulkiest laptop, a 2008 celeron upgraded to core2duo, now inactive because the charger died two months ago (probably because the core2duo takes almost twice the power).
Still should have an even bulkier desktop at my old place, a 2005-ish athlon I set up on a tower I found in the garbage, never measured it but was like 2x standard pc towers. It was empty except some SCSI cables so I guess it was used for (literal) mass storage or mass cd/dvd burning.
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@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?@johntinker I do not know a lot of those religious groups that knock on my door from time to time, but I can definitely tell you that it is getting really exhausting having to answer the door and listen how I need to read a particular gospel to avoid an Apocalypse. I do know how LLMs work and I do not "oppose" them. I just know they do not fix all the things and that their misuse is damaging human beings. I don't want them on EVERY soup I eat. And I do not want them on the fiction I read.
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@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!@MyricaGale A lot of very smart people I know are constantly tapping the sign about the non-deterministic nature of these models. I see they are tapping the sign louder and louder every time there is some news about healthcare applications and stuff
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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.@michael @berniethewordsmith What are LLMs, then, if not merely next-token prediction? Obviously they're more sophisticated than a markov chain, but if they're more than prediction, *what* more?
Also you're flat-out wrong about artists. A great many of them hate AI enough that they won't use it on principle, and avoid tools that might sneak it into their workflow without their consent.
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@MyricaGale
Yes, why would you source official information when you can have ai lie to you?
@berniethewordsmith@alterelefant @MyricaGale At least in previous iterations of "was online, must be true" you had an actual creative human inventing the bullshit. There was passion in the lie
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@michael Gotta be honest and say that I do not see very often a discourse that says "LLMs are useless for everything". Like, ¿Does anyone actually said that? I definitely have seen the "fancy autocorrect" one, but.. it is kind of a tongue in cheek more than a scientific thesis about the full scope of those models.
The "two months until" is always very funny because they always try to explain why the next two months are so different to the previous amounts of two months
@berniethewordsmith Hi it's me I'm saying it. Or rather, it's not that they have literally *no* use, but of the few things they can do reliably with no major downsides, I'm not aware of any that a more primitive tool can't do as well or better.
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@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.
@ojelabii Yah, maybe you are right. I just see how his skin melts every 2 months or so and I wonder what will be the final form
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@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 And nobody will be responsible for those accidents, because the AI itself can't be responsible, and the people who make it, sell it, and market it as able to do things it can't really do will be able to get off consequence-free because of an asterisk in the fine print.
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@berniethewordsmith
definitely no lack of technical ability around these parts... #antiai@noiseician I would not mess with people capable of accessing AO3 from a metro ticket vending machine
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@berniethewordsmith
If a person can't be bothered to write it, why should I read it?Soon they will have to invent an artificial AI User, so that AI will have someone to AI with.
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@ojelabii Yah, maybe you are right. I just see how his skin melts every 2 months or so and I wonder what will be the final form
@berniethewordsmith Don't wish to offend them either, but … maybe he's a reptoid or one of their thralls?
(Just kidding of course.
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@WellsiteGeo @berniethewordsmith @Remittancegirl then why not talk dirty to a homeless person in their neighborhood?
@rrb @WellsiteGeo @Remittancegirl I know that if I Google this I will find a real life example and that is a fact that scares me about the world
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@berniethewordsmith bulkiest destkop, my newest one, a ryzen 5 with rtx 5070, it's not huge but it's like 10 cm taller and 5cm wider than my old one. Bulkiest laptop, a 2008 celeron upgraded to core2duo, now inactive because the charger died two months ago (probably because the core2duo takes almost twice the power).
Still should have an even bulkier desktop at my old place, a 2005-ish athlon I set up on a tower I found in the garbage, never measured it but was like 2x standard pc towers. It was empty except some SCSI cables so I guess it was used for (literal) mass storage or mass cd/dvd burning.
@cygnathreadbare I have a lot of respect for your craft
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@rrb @WellsiteGeo @Remittancegirl I know that if I Google this I will find a real life example and that is a fact that scares me about the world
@berniethewordsmith @WellsiteGeo @Remittancegirl not meaning to give people ideas. The homeless have enough problems
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@alterelefant @HollieK72 @pluralistic called this "Habsburg AI" and I find the name incredibly fitting
@berniethewordsmith
Yes, that one. Always something fun to read.From what I understand this is a great challenge for all companies out there trying to assemble a high quality dataset to train the next generation of ai. Humans generate new content however ai generates much more new content and you simply do not want ai generated output to end up in your ai trainingset as you know the quality of that content is sub par and unreliable. The irony.
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@alterelefant @MyricaGale At least in previous iterations of "was online, must be true" you had an actual creative human inventing the bullshit. There was passion in the lie
@berniethewordsmith
When people try to convince the reader that something is true where it isn't, your 'bullshit meter' should be able to pick up on that and say, hold on, that doesn't add up.It feels like some people are not critical enough towards #LLM's pulling the same tricks as it mimics human text writing. Those individuals probably also weren't too critical about those human generated stories to begin with.
@MyricaGale -
@alterelefant @berniethewordsmith And nobody will be responsible for those accidents, because the AI itself can't be responsible, and the people who make it, sell it, and market it as able to do things it can't really do will be able to get off consequence-free because of an asterisk in the fine print.
@Linebyline
Yes, accountability doesn't seem to be a thing here.
@berniethewordsmith -
@hopeless I decided to leave the coding part aside on the thread just for the fact that I am not a coder and I do not want to make assumptions about something that I do not know a lot of. But I gotta say I'm a bit concerned about all of that vibe coding I hear about. Although I'm almost certain that the thing you are speaking about and vibe coding are not the same
@berniethewordsmith Vibe coding is really the same problem you identified, they asked for a whole program, like a "book" or a "script", and used what came out of the AI wholesale. AI took the most direct, unmaintainable, hacky way to do what was asked.
The coding AIs can give fast, excellent results if you ask it for something narrower on top of a project that's already well written and high quality, which naturally guides it to "fit in". Even then it needs some manual cleaning to be usable.
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@alterelefant @HollieK72 @pluralistic called this "Habsburg AI" and I find the name incredibly fitting
@berniethewordsmith @alterelefant @HollieK72 Stole it from Jathan Sadowski of "This Machine Kills"
