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Zaktor

@Zaktor@sopuli.xyz

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'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement (www.theatlantic.com)

As soon as Apple announced its plans to inject generative AI into the iPhone, it was as good as official: The technology is now all but unavoidable. Large language models will soon lurk on most of the world’s smartphones, generating images and text in messaging and email apps. AI has already colonized web search, appearing in...

Zaktor ,

Sometimes. Sometimes it's more accurate than anyone in the village. And it'll be reliably getting better. People relying on "AI is wrong sometimes" as the core plank of opposition aren't going to have a lot of runway before it's so much less error prone than people the complaint is irrelevant.

The jobs and the plagiarism aspects are real and damaging and won't be solved with innovation. The "AI is dumb" is already only selectively true and almost all the technical effort is going toward reducing that. ChatGPT launched a year and a half ago.

Zaktor ,

You're lovely. Don't think I need to see anything you write ever again.

Zaktor ,

Yeah. AI making images with six fingers was amusing, but people glommed onto it like it was the savior of the art world. "Human artists are superior because they can count fingers!" Except then the models updated and it wasn't as much of a problem anymore. It felt good, but it was just a pleasant illusion for people with very real reasons to fear the tech.

None of these errors are inherent to the technology, they're just bugs to correct, and there's plenty of money and attention focused on fixing bugs. What we need is more attention focused on either preparing our economies to handle this shock or greatly strengthen enforcement on copyright (to stall development). A label like this post is about is a good step, but given how artistic professions already weren't particularly safe and "organic" labeling only has modest impacts on consumer choice, we're going to need more.

Zaktor ,

Except those things didn't really solve any problems. Well, dotcom did, but that actually changed our society.

AI isn't vaporware. A lot of it is premature (so maybe overblown right now) or just lies, but ChatGPT is 18 months old and look where it is. The core goal of AI is replacing human effort, which IS a problem wealthy people would very much like to solve and has a real monetary benefit whenever they can. It's not going to just go away.

Zaktor , (edited )

Yes? AI is a lot of things, and most have well-defined accuracy metrics that regularly exceed human performance. You're likely already experiencing it as a mundane tool you don't really think about.

If you're referring specifically to generative AI, that's still premature, but as I pointed out, the interactive chat form most people worry about is 18 months old and making shocking levels of performance gains. That's not the perpetual "10 years away" it's been for the last 50 years, that's something that's actually happening in the near term. Jobs are already being lost.

People are scared about AI taking over because they recognize it (rightfully) as a threat. That's not because they're worthless. If that were the case you'd have nothing to fear.

Zaktor ,

This is a post on the Beehaw server. They don't propagate downvotes.

Zaktor ,

Bonus trivia, sometimes you may see a downvote on a Beehaw post. As far as I understand the system, that's because someone on your server downvoted the thing. The system then sends it off to Beehaw to be recorded on the "real" post and Beehaw just doesn't apply it.

Zaktor ,

Except when it comes to LLM, the fact that the technology fundamentally operates by probabilisticly stringing together the next most likely word to appear in the sentence based on the frequency said words appeared in the training data is a fundamental limitation of the technology.

So long as a model has no regard for the actual you know, meaning of the word, it definitionally cannot create a truly meaningful sentence.

This is a misunderstanding of what "probabilistic word choice" can actually accomplish and the non-probabilistic systems that are incorporated into these systems. People also make mistakes and don't actually "know" the meaning of words.

The belief system that humans have special cognizance unlearnable by observation is just mysticism.

Zaktor ,

I'm referencing ChatGPT's initial benchmarks to its capabilities to today. Observable improvements have been made in less than two years. Even if you just want to track time from the development of modern LLM transformers (All You Need is Attention/BERT), it's still a short history with major gains (alexnet isn't really meaningfully related). These haven't been incremental changes on a slow and steady march to AI sometime in the scifi scale future.

Zaktor , (edited )

The problem is that shit art is what employs a lot of artists. Like, in a post-scarcity society no one needing to spend any of their limited human lifespan producing corporate art would be awesome, but right now that's one of the few reliable ways an artist can actually get paid.

I'm most familiar with photography as I know several professional photographers. It's not like they love shooting weddings and clothing ads, but they do that stuff anyway because the alternative is not using their actual expertise and just being a warm body at a random unrelated job.

Zaktor ,

GameStop also went up. It doesn't mean GameStop is a good company that's valuable to own, it just means that dumb people will buy things without value if they think they can eventually pass the bag to someone else. If someone purchased every share of Amazon they'd own a massive asset that would continually produce value for them. If someone bought every outstanding Bitcoin, it both wouldn't produce ongoing value, but the value would actually go to zero.

Zaktor ,

Is a photographer an artist? They need to have some technical skill to capture sharp photos with good lighting, but a lot of the process is designing a scene and later selecting among the photos from a shoot for which one had the right look.

Or to step even further from the actual act of creation, is a creative director an artist? There's certainly some skill involved in designing and recognizing a compelling image, even if you were not the one who actually produced it.

Zaktor ,

No, both of those examples involve both design and selection, which is reminiscent to the AI art process. They're not just typing in "make me a pretty image" and then refreshing a lot.

Zaktor ,

I don't disagree, just pointing out that it's not "good riddance" for a lot of artists that depend on that to have any job in art.

Zaktor ,

It isn't. People design a scene and then change and refine the prompt to add elements. Some part of it could be refreshing the same prompt, but that's just like a photographer taking multiple photos of a scene they've directed to catch the right flutter of hair or a dress or a creative director saying "give me three versions of X".

Ready to get back to my original questions?

Zaktor ,

No, not even remotely. And that's kind of like citing "the first program to run on a CPU" as the start of development for any new algorithm.

Zaktor , (edited )

None of these appeals to relative complexity, low level structure, or training corpuses relates to whether a human or NN "know" the meaning of a word in some special way. A lot of your description of what "know" means could be confused to be a description of how Word2Vec encodes words. This just indicates ignorance of how ML language processing works. It's not remotely on the same level as a human brain, but your view on how things work and what its failings are is just wrong.

Zaktor ,

What? Alexnet wasn't a breakthrough in that it used GPUs, it was a breakthrough for its depth and performance on image recognition benchmarks.

We knew GPUs could speed up neural networks in 2004. And I'm not sure that was even the first.

Zaktor ,

All of my artist friends also found it soul sucking, they just needed to make (real) money. Friends of friends with the occasional $20 to spare for a commission just don't pay the bills. I think the only artist friends I have that make a living off their chosen medium and don't hate their job are lifestyle photojournalists.

Zaktor ,

But in this case it seems like an entirely good thing? The offer was made by an actual friend, the guy himself wanted this, his wife too, and they're both pretty cognizant about what this is and isn't.

Zaktor ,

This is a very patronizing view of people who all seem to be well informed about what this is and isn't and who have already acknowledged that they will put it aside if it scares them. No one is foisting this on the bereaved wife and the husband has preemptively said it's ok if her or her children never use it.

This might fail in all the ways you think it will. That's a very small dataset of information, so it's likely to be either be an overcomplicated recording or to need to incorporate training other than what he personally said, but it's not your place to tell her what's best for her personal grieving process.

Zaktor , (edited )

This is speculation of corporate action completely divorced from the specifics of this technology and particulars of this story. The result of this could be a simple purchase either of hardware or software to be used as chosen by the person owning it. And the person commissioning it can specify exactly who such a simulacrum is presented to. None of this has to be under the power of the company that builds the simulacrums, and if it is structured that way, then that's the problem that should be rejected or disallowed, not that this particular form of memento exists.

Zaktor ,

This is a weirdly "you should only do things the natural way" comment section for a Tech-based community.

Humans also weren't "meant" to be on social media, or recording videos of themselves, or even building shrines or gravesites for their loved ones. They're just practices that have sprung up as technology and culture change. This very well could be an impediment to her moving on without him, but that's her choice to make, and all this appeal to tradition is patronizing and doesn't actually mean tradition is the right path for any given individual. The only right way to process death is:

  • Burn their body and possessions so that no trace remains
  • Pump their body full of chemicals so they won't be decomposing when people ceremonially visit their corpse weeks later
  • Entomb them with their cats, slaves, and riches
  • Plant a tree nourished by their decomposing corpse
  • Turn their ashes into a piece of jewelry to be carried with you always
  • Make a shrine to the dead in your home to be prayed at regularly
  • Cast a death mask to more accurately sculpt their bust
  • Freeze their head so they may be resurrected later
Zaktor , (edited )

So just more patronizing. It's their life, you don't know better than them how to live it, grief or no.

Zaktor ,

Sure, and that point is being made in multiple other places in these comments. I find it patronizing, but that's neither here nor there as it's not what this comment thread is about.

Zaktor ,

since some people use the terms casually without understanding that they have specific meanings, and since both phrases use English words that could be interpreted to mean something else. (For example, “free software” doesn’t mean software whose price is zero, and “open-source software” doesn’t mean software whose source code is published in the open.)

The Free Software Foundation can make whatever definitions they want, but they don't supersede regular English. That's not a problem with "some people" being casual, it's a problem with a small entity trying to claim a common term. The confusion is entirely their fault.

Zaktor ,

The Free Software Foundation isn't a broad industry body defining standard terms for general software development, and even if they were, a term of use doesn't supersede regular English. People using "free software" to mean "without cost software" aren't in any way wrong, unless maybe they're actual members of the FSF.

Zaktor ,

Ambiguous words with context-dependent meanings don't make trying to define only one meaning as correct a useful and reasonable task to attempt for a small foundation. There are also notably synonyms for "free" that don't have that issue.

Zaktor ,

But in context of software, free software means Libre.

It doesn't though. It's an awkward attempt to define what words mean by a niche group that even those who value its goals don't commonly adhere to. I've been writing software for two decades now. If a colleague comes up to me and asks "is that software free?" they're probably talking about cost. You can't define away common usage. Pick a word that means what you want it to mean or make up a new term.

We all know what FOSS means, because it's a unique term (yes, despite F being Free). We also all generally understand what "open source" means, even if there's some confusion with "source available". But "free". That's a total failure and people trying to pretend FSF has any power to define the word in relation to software are just delusional.

Anyway I can’t find synonyms for theese two free in english, what are they?

https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/free

"Unrestricted" or "permissive" both look good to me. Or as above, just use a term unique to software like "open source" and then you can define it to exactly the meaning you want.

Zaktor ,

If you're going to complain that the GPL isn't unrestricted (true), then it's just as much a complaint about it not being "free" (as in freedom). Just use "open source". It's its own thing that people understand and is free from definitional conflicts that it will assuredly lose.

That there are these dumb mnemonics for "free as in..." just demonstrates how muddled the supposedly defined term is. If you need to continually explain what you mean by "free", then it's a failure as a descriptor.

Zaktor ,

"Free" vs. "open source" is a distinction without a practical difference. It's not about what it is or what it does, it's about vibes.

There's no future step of "popularizing it". They've been trying for 40 years and it's been an abject failure. Another decade isn't going to finally get it to stick, it's just a dumb idea. It's is a very up-their-own-asses grognard thing to just reject reality and keep demanding it happen. "Could it be that I am wrong? No, it must be everyone else who haven't just done what I wanted them to do because I told them to."

And yeah, "open source" and "source available" have some confusion, but that's at least a battle that can be won, and in most cases if you call a source available software package (an actual package with license terms, not just every github project) "open source", you'll usually be right (source available and not open source is already a minority). Pointing to that like it justifies instead continuing the crusade for "free" isn't even remotely comparing issues of similar difficulty.

Trying to jump in whenever someone calls costless software "free" with a "free as in beer"/"free as in speech" explanation or "no, that's costless software, not free software" just makes FOSS look like an arcane and exclusionary movement for unpleasant nerds, like Richard Stallman.

Zaktor ,

I also think you're an idiot for wasting your time with two contentless comments, so take that as a vote of confirmation.

Zaktor ,

This isn't an existential problem. Just block threads.net.

Zaktor ,

Even better, that should be their primary social network site. It's inherently restricted to valid government accounts and under their control so all the right data protection and preservation procedures can be followed. Then Threads users can follow potus@socia.whitehouse.gov or whatever.

Zaktor ,

The best place to go is Z, which federates with both.

Zaktor ,

If it helps bring perspective. I've never even heard of Fedi Garden before this post. I did a lot of puzzling over choosing instances for Lemmy and Mastodon when I first joined and never saw a link to them. I'm not sure why they'd even be seen as a trusted list for a new users, since at joining the user also doesn't know anything about them or their values, reliability, or reputation.

Plus, once you're in the Fediverse you then learn you can just change instances. Once someone points out that [other instance] can talk to Threads users the individual can just switch or stay depending on their preferences.

Zaktor ,

And their target is specifically people who likely can't think about Reddit, the company, objectively because being on Reddit, the website, is such a large part of their personality.

Amazon- and Google-backed AI firm Anthropic says “general-purpose AI tools simply could not exist” if AI companies had to pay licences for the training material (www.computerweekly.com)

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) company Anthropic has claimed to a US court that using copyrighted content in large language model (LLM) training data counts as “fair use”, however....

Zaktor ,

By and large copyright infringement is illegal. That some things aren't infringement doesn't change that a general stance of "if I don't have permission, I can't copy it" is correct. The first argument in the EFF article is effectively the title: "it can't be copyright, because otherwise massive AI models would be impossible to build". That doesn't make it fair use, they just want it to become so.

Zaktor ,

Then your argument is non-falsifiable, and therefore, invalid.

Wow this is some powerful internet word salad, just shot gunning scientific sounding words at the wall to try to pretty up a basic internet debate. Falsifiability is about scientific hypotheses, not statements of belief. "Nothing you can say can convince me that murder isn't wrong" may mean there's no further use in debate, but it isn't "non-falsifiable" in any meaningful way nor does it somehow make the argument for the immorality of murder "invalid".

Zaktor ,

Fucking scooters lying all over the sidewalk.

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