ebu

ooh, just found out he has a post tripling down. it’s a rather rich text, maybe could stand to be its own post on techtakes

the obnoxious self-aggrandizement is dripping all over the text, not the least of which when he conceptualizes himself as a part of a “new and potentially valuable class of contributors”, as if the addition of a slop-generator can transform the layperson into someone capable of contributing to a complex software project. but that’s old news. here’s what’s getting me now:

For a project like Mesa, which uses the permissive MIT license, accidentally incorporating a snippet of code that carries the “viral” obligations of the GPL could potentially trigger a legal catastrophe. Faith Ekstrand drove this point home with a chillingly practical example: “If we piss off Nvidia and they sue us, the project is over. It doesn’t matter whether or not we can theoretically win.”

this is a legal issue – this should be Seyfarth’s home turf! obviously he can’t code and has a sneering contempt for anyone who learns to do so, but in this micro-instance, giving an informed legal opinion on how this issue could be handled would actually be in the Mesa project’s best interests! let’s see how he

However this is a hypothetical scenario and there are several ways to mitigate such legal risks. Most projects already shift the legal burden to the contributor. The project still has to reject any code that openly violates the licensing terms, but if such violations are not obvious, there is little legal risk to the project itself.

“it wouldn’t happen, and even if it did, you could just try to sacrifice your individual developers to NVIDIA one at a time and hope that makes them go away.” great cool thank you. this is the best you’ve got with your legal background. fantastic. what an utter tool

you definitely did in fact say that the idea that “copyright is about trading art for money” is bollocks. that is in fact a thing you said, straightforwardly

compare and contrast with “real artists do it for love, not money”, which is a thing nobody in this entire thread said

and wouldn’t you know it, a complete devolution into full-tilt “”“debate”“” shadowboxing is my cue to turn off notifications. best of luck in the ring, i hear the spectre of communism has a nasty left hook

the concept that copyright is about art or artistic value and not money, is about as attached to reality as the ai technorapture

this barely has to even be argued, in spirit or in practice. even the concept of “ownership” as ascribed to creators is basically just a right to sell the work or sublicense said “ownership”

i think her takes make a little more sense if you think of the infinite noise machine as the art object itself rather than any particular output of it. i obviously can’t read her mind but if you think of a music-generating model as an interactive music toy rather than “a replacement for a musician”, then her position makes way more sense. why wouldn’t you want more people doing Poet Laureate Infinity? i think for her the crime isn’t scraping, but scraping in service of overmarketed smoothed-over slop generators instead of actually interesting art

aside from the rest of the assheadedness of this comment, this jumps out to me:

Look, sorry dude, but if you vape, you haven’t given up smoking. If you take nicotine pills, you haven’t quit.

and, uh, no? if you stop smoking, you’ve stopped smoking. there’s not yet solid scientific evidence that vaping is a reliable path to nicotine cessation but it is, in fact, not smoking.

if it is nicotine cessation you’re talking about, then nicotine patches and pills are known effective tools. they’re often prescribed to people quitting. in that case, taking pills is literally “quitting”.

but let’s be real: you don’t care about either the physical act of burning tobacco or the medical act of kicking a nicotine dependency. you’re just invoking “smoking” as linguistic shorthand for a(nother) group of people you feel smugly superior to for having problems you don’t have

and people get very defensive about this one too. like i’m pretty confident that coolboy004 on reddit is not giving a nuanced delivery on the ethics of a company running an ai-powered call center when he types “screws will not replace us” in all caps on /r/fuckai, and yet

i think it sucks that we’re stuck with, say, bluesky engineers genuinely trying to pull the most moronic variant of “but what if the stochastic text generator might have feelings in the future too”, but we still need to be able to talk about why people feel the need to make “clanka with the hard r” jokes (answer it’s racism)

from what i see, white people simply clamor for a context in which they’re “allowed” to finally call someone the n-word, and are willing to accept substitute targets for their racism

add in a protective cloak of “it’s ironic and a joke and YOU’RE the real racist for pointing this out” and you get a whole lot of people who are extremely okay slinging around barely modified racial slurs

dictionaries are obsolete bricks remembers that they are useful that’s why they’re actually ai when you think about it

replacing ChatGPT with a script that replies “Great, I’ll finish that for you by ${Date.Now() + 86400}”

stolen from cohost but i appreciate the succinctness of “capitalism make computer bad”

and so i pass on the burden, like a virus, to all those who seek truth but must instead whip out their phone to scan a QR code and then get welcome-pinged 18 times in #general

50% success rate? sorry, all this for a coin flip?

i needed this giggle, gods bless our dubbers

you have to scroll through the person’s comments to find it, but it does look they did author the body of the text and uploaded it as a docx into ChatGPT. so points for actually creating something unlike the AI bros

it looks like they tried to use ChatGPT to improve narration. to what degree the token smusher has decided to rewrite their work in the smooth, recycled plastic feel we’ve all come to know and despise remains unknown

they did say they are trying to get it to generate illustrations for all 700 pages, and moreover appear[ed] to believe it can “work in the background” on individual chapters with no prompting. they do seem to have been educated on the folly of expecting this to work, but as blakestacey’s other reply pointed out, they appear to now be just manually prompting one page at a time. godspeed

“AI is just like smartphones” yes thank you for this statement that we definitely haven’t heard dozens of times before

ah, yes, i’m certain the reason the slop generator is generating slop is because we haven’t gone to eggplant emoji dot indian ocean and downloaded Mistral-Deepseek-MMAcevedo_13.5B_Refined_final2_(copy). i’m certain this model, unlike literally every past model in the past several years, will definitely overcome the basic and obvious structural flaws in trying to build a knowledge engine on top of a stochastic text prediction algorithm

no worries – i am in the unfortunate position of very often needing to assume the worst in others and maybe my reading of you was harsher than it should have been, and for that i am sorry. but…

“generative AI” is a bit of a marketing buzzword. the specific technology in play here is LLMs, and they should be forcefully kept out of every online system, especially ones people rely on for information.

LLMs are inherently unfit for every purpose. they might be “useful”, in the sense that a rock is useful for driving a nail through a board, but they are not tools in the same way hammers are. the only exception to this is when you need a lot of text in a hurry and don’t care about the quality or accuracy of the text – in other words, spams and scams. in those specific domains i can admit LLMs are the most applicable tool for the job.

so when ostensibly-smart people, but especially ones who are running public information systems, propose using LLMs for things they are unable to do, such as explain species identification procedures, it means either 1) they’ve been suckered into believing they’re capable of doing those things, or 2) they’re being paid to propose those things. sometimes it is a mix of both. either way, it very much indicates those people should not be trusted.

furthermore, the technology industry as a whole has already spent several billion dollars trying to push this technology onto and into every part of our daily lives. LLM-infested slop has made its way onto every online platform, and more often than not, with direct backing from those platforms. and the technology industry is openly hostile to the idea of “consent”, actively trying to undermine it at every turn. it’s even made it all the way through to the statement attempting to reassure on that forum post about the mystery demo LLMs – note the use of the phrase “making it opt-out”. why not “opt-in”? why not “with consent”?

it’s no wonder that people are leaving – the writing is more or less on the wall.

1. no one is assuming iNaturalist is being malicious, saying otherwise is just well-poisoning.
2. there is no amount of testing that can ever overcome the inherently-stochastic output of LLMs. the “best-case” scenario is text-shaped slop that is more convincing, but not any more correct, which is an anti-goal for iNaturalist as a whole
3. we’ve already had computer vision for ages. we’ve had google images for twenty years. there is absolutely no reason to bolt a slop generator of any kind to a search engine.
4. “staff is very much connected with users” obviously should come with some asterisks given the massive disconnect between staff and users on their use and endorsement of spicy autocorrect
5. framing users who delete their accounts in protest of machine slop being put up on iNaturalist, which is actually the point of contention here, as being over-reactive to the mere mention of AI, and thus being basically the same as the AI boosters? well, it’s gross. iNat et. al. explicitly signaled that they were going to inject AI garbage into their site. users who didn’t like that voted with their accounts and left. you don’t get to post-hoc ascribe them a strawman rationale and declare them basically the same as the promptfans, fuck off with that