Bernie the WordsmithFeb 23
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.
Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23

Look, we do not have a lot of ways to avoid that shit in the workplace lately. But people like to select their own fun.

Books about AI are fun.

Books made by AI are not.

Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23
And please spare me with the "both sides" argument. Because one of them is trying to force feed things to the other. And one of them has all the money and resources and the other has not. This is not people taking sides. This is people trying for the boot to stop pressing against their face.
Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23

You keep mentioning fear of the machines.

Not about that.

You keep mentioning grammar checking and transcription functionality.

Not about that.

Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23
Look, we get it. AI sounds hot. We read the same science fiction books and it is nice to think that maybe one day LLM technology can be leveraged against oppression. News about fake open models are fun in a sense because every time one of those pops up, some idiot is going to lose millions yadda yadda. But you are missing a very important point here: a permission structure is being built around us, and stopping it is absolutely crucial
Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23
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.
Show threadFrank HeijkampFeb 23
@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.
Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23
@alterelefant I also worry about this. There is certainly an effort to convince people to settle with "just ok" stuff
Show threadFrank HeijkampFeb 23
@berniethewordsmith That 'just ok' might work for certain cases and people also need to respect that it just doesn't work in other cases.
Show threadHollieK
@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.
Feb 23 at 9:55amWeb
Show threadFrank HeijkampFeb 23
@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
Show threadBernie the WordsmithFeb 23
@alterelefant @HollieK72 @pluralistic called this "Habsburg AI" and I find the name incredibly fitting
Show threadFrank HeijkampFeb 24

@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.

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

@HollieK72 @pluralistic

Model collapse - Wikipedia

Show threadNuwagaba GiftMar 7
@alterelefant
If AI dominates completely, how will people be able to free themselves from it?
Show threadFrank HeijkampMar 7
@nuwagaba2
My fear is that we are already past that point.
Show threadNuwagaba GiftMar 7
@alterelefant
There's no hope for freedom from AI?
Show threadFrank HeijkampMar 7

@nuwagaba2
I have several reasons.

Music platforms like #Spotify are being bombarded by #ai generated music and I get the impression they are not interested in stopping that massive influx of mediocre content.

Online comment sections in some places are flooded by bots. It has become almost impossible to distinguish between a human and a bot as #LLM's are able to convincingly mimic the behavior of average humans in comment sections. We can pick up on two bots, but identifying hundreds of them?

Show threadNuwagaba GiftMar 7
@alterelefant
Who benefits more from this when AI is becoming inevitable?
Show threadFrank HeijkampMar 7
@nuwagaba2
It is not the humans in the comment sections who benefit from this.
Show threadNuwagaba GiftMar 7
@alterelefant
Exactly, if humans knew that AI is meant not to serve them but to replace them , they would do something to minimise it . Can I share with you about my project?
Show threadFrank HeijkampMar 7
@nuwagaba2
Sure, is what you created somewhere in the public domain?
Show threadNuwagaba GiftMar 7

@alterelefant

It's about fighting hunger in my community, I work with 12 young volunteer farmers to make this a reality by growing food for the needy, educating local farmers with advanced agricultural skills to help them improve on their production as well as equipping beginner farmers with required tools like seeds , fertilisers and organic pestcides to help them produce the best out of their gardens as well combat climate change through tree planting. Do you have such initiatives there?

Show threadFrank HeijkampMar 7
@nuwagaba2
Here in The Netherlands agriculture is highly mechanised, not to say industrialized. I am sure there are collaborative projects out there, it is however not my area of operation.
Show threadNuwagaba GiftMar 7
@alterelefant
That's okay. If I had an opportunity, I wouldn't hesitate to connect with them. Our initiative is currently under a crisis where we have been forced to evacuate the land that we have been renting to do our activities. We're seeking funds to buy our own land to make our dream a reality. Your support either through sharing or donating to our compaign would make a great impact
https://gofund.me/3f38fe9d0
Show threadCory DoctorowFeb 24
@berniethewordsmith @alterelefant @HollieK72 Stole it from Jathan Sadowski of "This Machine Kills"