Mastodawn

One of the things that is amazing about AI derangement syndrome is that when you call someone out for buying into that shit -- someone you've previously been on quite good terms with for decades -- their response to you saying, "hey, you should stop doing that, there is no ethical use of this tech" is a level of offense as if you have just fucked their cat.

Some of you probably know who I'm talking about. If not, you probably have examples yourselves.

Scott Galloway Feb 18

@jwz Interesting, you don't think small open weight models running as part of a local OSS app are ethical?

Scott Galloway Feb 18

@jwz OR the translation models used on sites like this to enable seamless communication; not ethical (Opus-MT, funded by the EU)?

Preston Is Not My Real Name Feb 18

@scottgal @jwz calm down, your cat is fine.

Jeremy Kahn Feb 18

Also, machine translation models are *at best* a @xgranade Class IV evasion

https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/115772870672213549

Fritz Adalis Feb 18

@scottgal @jwz
He said 'cat', not 'sea lion'.

fedithom Feb 18

Such a slow but beautiful burn .. Chef's kiss.

Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈Feb 18

@FritzAdalis @scottgal @jwz 👏
Excellent work

@scottgal Absolutely the fuck not, you absolute troll. Where did the data come from? Burning down forests and bulk plagiarism. It is fruit of the poisoned, burning tree. "Interesting".

kNeo gHau Feb 18

@jwz @scottgal Hey Mr hostile, what do you think "open weight models" are? I'd like you to explain exactly why you think open weight models are plagiarism and theft? Maybe you should spend less time on the social medias, which cooks your brain traps you in echo chambers and is destroying society.

cobweb 2026 edition Feb 18

@kneoghau you're not familiar with jwz are you

@cobweb @kneoghau
Also not familiar with why "open weights" cannot be called "open source".

https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/how-metas-llama-nlp-model-leaked/

Is there any open weights model that cannot be traced back to Meta's Llama leak, and was trained using data for which licensing permission to use it in this way was obtained from the owners of said data?

How Meta's LLaMA NLP Model Leaked

Meta’s effort to make a large language model available to researchers ended with its escape into the wild. Soon after Meta started accepting applications...

How Meta's LLaMA NLP Model Leaked

@bornach @cobweb @kneoghau I don't think many of the open weights models are derived from Llama, but all or nearly all are trained on datasets like Common Crawl which are problematic. Regardless, having weights is somewhat akin to having a compiled executable in that it is the product rather than the source. There is some research effort to build models which are fully reproducible, like Allen Institute's models, but they still use Common Crawl.

@mirth @cobweb @kneoghau
And there's also the whole ethical minefield of distilled models to consider.

And the ethics of AI research relying on a microtasking gig economy that pays poverty pittances to an exploited class of data annotators.

This part of Fei-Fei Li's ("godmother if AI") talk always disturbed me once I learned how she acquired the training dataset
https://youtu.be/40riCqvRoMs?t=7m7s
(At 7:07)

My unsettled feelings were never assuaged
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/ai-workers-mechanical-turk

How we teach computers to understand pictures | Fei Fei Li

YouTube

@bornach @cobweb @kneoghau Distilled models from that standpoint are essentially the sum of all the input models plus additional training data. More problematic, if anything.

@cobweb Pretty sure @jwz ‘s blog wasn’t in @kneoghau ‘s training set. (Hopefully that training set contains terabytes of the hairyballs.jpg that requests with orange site referrers get.)

kNeo gHau Feb 19

@bigiain @cobweb Yeah I don't follow social media influencers, especially if said influencers give logan paul like vibes in responses. So in answer to your "don't you know who I am?"style comment, no I don't know and don't care too.

David Gerard Feb 18

@jwz i can't tell you how many people are precisely this guy

Simon Zerafa Feb 18

@davidgerard @jwz

It's a cult or perhaps a religion.

Anyone questioning the irrational beliefs of the faithful are automatically heathen unbelievers and to be shunned.

David Gerard Feb 18

@simonzerafa @jwz just had another one coupla days ago

he posted screenshots of how he asked Claude what the roots were of the anti-AI echo chamber

i won't diagnose the bot conversation as AI psychosis, but i will say that's the first thing that sprung to mind looking at it

the crash can't come soon enough

Simon Zerafa Feb 18

@davidgerard @jwz

The crash is long overdue. Hopefully within the next six months.

Charlie Stross Feb 18

@simonzerafa @davidgerard @jwz TESCREAL as a whole is *definitely* a religion—a very familiar looking one to those of us who weren't raised in any variety of Christianity but in another religion, and therefore get to observe Christian behaviour from outside. And I'm telling you the singularitarian/AI bros are just speedrunning the emergence of pre-Nicean Xtianity as a syncretistic evangelical faith (this time without Jesus/God but with the usual salvationist/AI uploading heaven bullshit).

@cstross It's also just the same vibe as crypto was, just grander scale. I must admit that I am missing the crypto or metaverse hypecycle though, as they were a bit more contained than this.

@simonzerafa @davidgerard @jwz

Charlie Stross Feb 18

@ainmosni @simonzerafa @davidgerard @jwz I view the crypto hype cycle as a variation on Prosperity Gospel Christianity (which is more about worshipping Mammon than anything recognizably Jesus-adjacent): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology

Prosperity theology - Wikipedia

David Gerard Feb 18

@cstross @simonzerafa @jwz falling for the chatbot is not the same as TESCREAL (even as there's crossover). what would this one be?

Charlie Stross Feb 18

@davidgerard @simonzerafa @jwz Cognitive bias reinforced by Christian doctrine centering around "souls" and mind/body dualism. I want to see a survey of chatbot believers enquiring into whether they believe in soul/afterlife/etc: I suspect there will be a broad tendency towards "yes" (so crediting chatbots as being a soul embodied in a machine).

@cstross @davidgerard @simonzerafa @jwz I was (sneer-)reading that rathbun post earlier and the twit literally has a `SOUL.md` for the prompt seed. as I remarked in the gc, “that soul.md reads like shitty reddit advice to someone on the edge of a PUA community join-up”

the link, if you long to have a reason to bleach your eyes: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/rathbuns-operator.html

Rathbun’s Operator – MJ Rathbun | Scientific Coder 🦀

David Gerard Feb 18

@froztbyte @cstross @simonzerafa @jwz assoul.md

Jeremy Kahn Feb 18

@davidgerard @froztbyte

i snorted

Account has moved Feb 18

What a cowardly dipshit.

@cstross We really need to write that article @yoginho 🙈

@davidgerard @simonzerafa @jwz

Neo Ehproque Feb 18

@cstross @simonzerafa @davidgerard @jwz yeah, doesn't sound like a scam at all

Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

@ehproque @cstross @simonzerafa @davidgerard @jwz Joel Osteen gave me a virus

Neo Ehproque Feb 18

@foone @cstross @simonzerafa @davidgerard @jwz you must not have been very righteous then, because he turned me into a billionaire

@cstross @simonzerafa @davidgerard @jwz I would argue that it is very familiar looking one to those of us who *were* raised in any variety of Christianity…

Simon Zerafa Feb 18

@ingemar @cstross @davidgerard @jwz

I was raised CofE with a side order or RC and if it looks like a duck ... 😆

@simonzerafa Not surprised at all. Rings quite true with a lot of leftist sects I've brushed elbows with as well. @cstross @davidgerard @jwz

Martin Vermeer FCD Feb 18

@ingemar @simonzerafa @cstross @davidgerard @jwz Marxism as such.

Bruno Nicoletti Feb 18

@ingemar @cstross @simonzerafa @davidgerard @jwz Ex catholic here, agreed.

@cstross @simonzerafa @davidgerard @jwz Full marks for "syncretism". That's not jargon I'd expect to hear outside Biblical scholarship circles. Very welcome. And exactly the right word for this.

Simon Zerafa Feb 18

@agreeable_landfall @cstross @davidgerard @jwz

Well I now follow the Ancient greek pantheon. I do need to organise a pilgrimage to Delphi at some point 🥳

@simonzerafa I'm used to hearing "Friend of the Podcast" after your name. ;)

I have been to Delphi and seen the Oomphalos (IIRC). It's interesting how that worked. As usual, things are more complicated than our history books tell us.

Simon Zerafa Feb 18

@agreeable_landfall

The Oompholos would be the highlight, as the centre of the world 😉

Email Steve on Sunday Evening if you want your thoughts or article included in the podcast 🙂🖖

@simonzerafa I do, and he has. But I'm never "friend of the podcast". Near as I can tell, that's just you. It was just nice to run into you; it's a small Internet after all.

I'm going to have to argue with the Greek government, because there's a benchmark in the street of Wallace, Idaho clearly stating that *it* is the center of the world. And our government wouldn't lie about a thing like that. ;)

Negative12DollarBill Feb 18

@cstross @simonzerafa @[email protected] @jwz Which non-Christian religion were you raised in, Charlie?

Charlie Stross Feb 18

@negative12dollarbill @simonzerafa @jwz Reform Judaism (British, not American —they're different)

Negative12DollarBill Feb 18

@cstross @simonzerafa @jwz Very interesting, thank you.

@davidgerard It's really feeling like a contagion!

David Gerard Feb 18

@jwz memetic prion disease

flere-imsaho 🇺🇦Feb 18

@davidgerard @jwz or ergotism, the neurological version.

David Gerard Feb 18

@mawhrin @jwz a subclass of asshole personality disorder

funbreaker Feb 18

@davidgerard @jwz appropriate because it's so damn persistent

CM Thiede Feb 18

@davidgerard @jwz the term AI has become such a trigger, pushing back on the hype and someone will quickly point to all the AI one isn't concerned about to rationalize their use of the hyperscalers' LLM constantly growing with everyone's use because using their own energy to produce something is so 2010.

I've heard them justify AI music because it's just like hip-hop/sampling was when it came to fore.

Would anyone buy a ticket to see an AI musician perform?

AI art, it's just like the camera and later digital.

Would anyone want to pay money to hang someone's AI art they "created" on their wall?

It's the great democratizer, evening the playing field for all.

At $200/mo + $600 for a Mac mini, really sounds like something everyone can afford. Superusers spending up to $4000 a month to stack their subscriptions to build fleets of agents. FFS

Or, stop using all social media then because it's there too!

Yeah, stop using centralized commercial social media already! You're just feeding their LLMs with more data.

And all this just steals away from the actual good people are doing building algorithms to assist human good.

I can't anymore, my BP is rising every day and...

@jwz OK but first I need to know: DID you fuck their cat?

hunderteins Feb 18

@peterb @jwz just the thought of cat-claws near private parts.

Jenica Lake เหล็ถเลถ Feb 18

@jwz it's replacing our natural bond with other humans, our attachments... On top of the hijacking of attention and capacity to execute things we already know how to do. It's addictive, like an abusive relationship. It's a dangerous beast to the mind. And! And! And! I don't have to preach to this choir.

fedithom Feb 18

@jwz
Oh boy, do I know what you're talking about.

Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈Feb 18

@jwz Men...and it's always Men, who will stick up for Fancy Autocorrect more than they would a human being. Just yelling to the rest of us that they should be avoided, weird, lonely,...anti-Human creeps.....

Ben Rosengart Feb 18

@Lazarou @jwz for what it’s worth, the example in my life is not a man 🤷🏼‍♂️

Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈Feb 18

@fivetonsflax @jwz oh wow! I'm sure it happens but so rare to hear of one in the wild!

@jwz Reading this thread proves the point...