The AI genie is here. What we're deciding now is whether we all have access to it, or whether it's a privilege afforded only to rich people, corporations, and governments.
Technology@kbin.social – 1 points – Technology@kbin.social – 1 points – IncognitoErgoSum
1 Post – 54 Comments
Joined 1 years ago
Technology@kbin.social – 1 points – Reddit's far left can be pretty toxic too. As an old liberal myself, I don't believe that there are any good kinds of hate or discrimination, but if you argue against that kind of crap, the absolute worst people come out to defend it. A good chunk of my negative interactions have been with those people.
That being said, the Eternal September is real. I don't know anyone in real life who actually thinks like that. The trouble is, if you have ten million users, a tenth of a percent of them could be assholes and that's still 10,000 obnoxious assholes.
Reddit has been crappy for years now, and a lot of people have wanted to leave but didn't have anywhere to go. Now that there's somewhere else, people will continue to trickle out as they get tired of it. It doesn't need to all happen at once -- in fact, reddit doesn't need to shut down. It just needs viable alternatives with a critical community mass, and we're there now.
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Hidden up/down totals
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Hidden up/downvote names (I understand the concern about the info being scraped by advertisers, but it should stay visible at least to the person who left the comment and the magazine moderators)
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Generally high amounts of toxicity
I could do without communities whose primary purpose it is to dump on other groups of people. That means the manosphere and far right subs, but it also means thinks like the various circlejerks and mendrawingwomen. Those kinds of places just serve as echo chambers for rage, and if communities like that start getting popular I'll start a server myself and filter them out for people who don't want to be exposed to it.
This sounds like something the fediverse should be able to solve easily. For people who don't want to be anywhere near porn, you can start a fediverse site and just not aggregate porn, and then like-minded people can go there, and nobody has to be cut off from everybody else just because of differences of opinion about porn.
One UI change that could address this somewhat would be that if multiple communities post the same link, the discussions are grouped together in an expandable box on the main page. That wouldn't require any voodoo magic to merge the threads, and it would make room on the main page for things other than news about reddit.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the popularity of subs that are about disliking things or groups of people. That kind of shit drives engagement but turns communities toxic really fast.
I use(d) RIF, which let me filter subs out of my feed and the experience has been a lot less horrid, except for when those subs leak their toxic waste into other discussions, which happens way to often.
I've seen reports here from this morning where people are saying that they're even restoring comments deleted with Redact.
From a technical standpoint, adding a database table that is a comment revision history is trivial and barely requires any alternation of existing code. Even reddit could do it.
I've always suspected that they did it a long time ago in response to redact.
I don't think there's anything wrong with continuing to use reddit if you want to (I am, for now), but just be aware that part of the reason they want to block free API access is likely so they can sell all of the content they've collected for use in training large language models. If you post there, you're contributing.
There's a private subreddit I'm a member of that I'll probably stick around for a while on. It's one where they kick people out if they don't participate for a week, so I'll have an interesting sample of how many active redditors are leaving.
Because some of us really love long, expansive games. There are plenty of 10-25 hour games out there. Games with as much content as something like Skyrim where you can clock 1000+ hours and still have things to do are relatively rare, and I'd like for them to continue to exist.
Oh, and about sexual morality, here's how that works:
If it doesn't involve children, animals, the deceased, or non-consenting people, it's none of your business. Persecuting people who have done nothing to you is immoral.
I don't know that one very well. But my primary distinction is really be whether it's people making fun of themselves, or people making fun of other people, even within the same hobby. I'm sure there are some subs with "circlejerk" in the name that aren't like that.
This is another reason that the entire internet being centralized on a single site is a terrible idea.
It's meant to be anonymous on Reddit, but it doesn't seem to be meant to be anonymous here. Accountable downvoting seems to me like it's something that'll keep the conversation a lot less toxic, and discourage people from just quietly downvoting other people who are participating in the discussion but disagree with them.
Non-anonymous downvoting is a bad mechanic, particularly since downvotes are tied to a comment's prominence in the discussion. If you're too embarrassed to be seen downvoting something, maybe you're doing something wrong. I don't have any problem being seen downvoting bigotry or trolling, but if I downvote somebody for disagreeing with me and having a good point, maybe I ought to feel a bit ashamed of that.
Matthew 7:5 -You hypocrite! First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye.
Maybe worry about yourself first, guy who pines for the "good old days" when gay people used to get the shit beat out of them. Nobody corrupts the God's word like loud, intolerant far-right Christians.
You probably agree with their reasoning and general premise.
Now go back and suggest that there isn't a "good" or "bad" way to draw women, and that being horny doesn't make you a bad artist or a bad person, and see how that plays out. I bet you'll get banned, or at the very least downvoted into oblivion. Every dumping sub has some amount of debate about who they're dumping on, but that doesn't stop them from being a dumping sub.
Also, I've seen stuff get posted there just for beginner anatomy mistakes. Constantly looking for content to post and dump on (even if it's a poor fit) is the nature of that kind of sub, because rageboxes reward that behavior.
Edit: Also, most importantly, those kinds of subreddits leak. The most toxic people in the subreddit (even if the majority are absolutely wonderful people) are the ones who are nasty outside of the sub.
Unfortunately, they can undo that in seconds.
I mean, honestly, this sounds like a good thing, because the system works. Isn't it kind of the point of the fediverse that if you don't like someone else's rules, you can do your own thing? They aren't beholden to your rules, and you aren't beholden to theirs either. That sounds to me like a great system where no one group of people or opinions can exert control over everyone else.
Even with the view window reduced so it would run decently on my 12mhz 80286, I was amazed.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with this. It will only be a privilege for these groups of we choose to artificially make it that way. And why would you want to do that?
Do you want to give AI exclusively to the rich? If so, why?
Honestly, part of what makes sites shitty is isn't just the pursuit of profit over all else, but also the Eternal September. On the internet, quantity follows quality -- that is, a high quality discussion board with a small to medium population will come into being, then everyone else will start moving toward it, and as more people show up, it gets more and more toxic, until the quality drops. I'm hoping that the fediverse will to some extent be able to alleviate that by allowing people to split off to some extent without having to leave completely.
This isn't going to completely destroy reddit. Things will eventually go back to mostly how they were, but the difference is that some other places will have attracted a critical mass of people so as to provide an actual alternative. What's probably going to happen is that reddit will begin a long, slow decline over the course of years. It'll probably be around in some form or another for quite a long time, much in the same way that Slashdot, Fark, and Digg are still sputtering along.
What will ultimately hurt reddit is the existence of viable alternatives.
I know people are of differing opinions on this and a lot of people are sad to see reddit go out like this, but I've personally wanted to dump reddit for like a decade now, but there just wasn't anywhere to go. Even if it recovers completely, people who are disillusioned will have options now.
Reddit is going to go into a slow decline. It's not going to burn down.
What this is actually doing is allowing other general discussion sites to reach critical mass so that people who are sick of reddit but couldn't find anywhere else to go (such as myself) have a choice.
Reddit is like the Wal Mart of internet discussion forums. Some people shop at Wal Mart because they want to, and some people shop there because they drove all the other stores out of business and they're the only place left.
Honestly, I'm not feeling grief so much as I just have this muscle memory where I keep checking RIF on my phone and now it's just a bunch of random crap because there's barely any content left for people to upvote. I imagine this will resolve itself once RIF stops working.
...or completely inadequate.
Chrono Trigger is a classic that makes it into a lot of "top 10 video games of all time" lists, and for good reason. I personally prefer the original SNES version.
This may be too obvious, but Super Mario 3 for NES is an absolutely amazing game that everyone should play. It's my personal favorite Mario game, which is a pretty high bar.
On PC, Star Control 2 (now downloadable for free as the Ur-Quan Masters) is a really amazing and somewhat less known game. I wouldn't bother with any of the sequels, which weren't developed by the same people. The original devs are currently working on a true sequel.
oops, that's right. It's been some years. :)
Why would users want to harm Reddit employees?
Realistically, because some people are dumb. It's the same reason people harass actors for playing characters they don't like.
And frankly, reddit shielded the_donald when they were openly breaking the rules about vote manipulation in such a huge way that they dominated /r/all.
Before y'all miss the point, were the male and female characters designed the way the were for everyone's enjoyment or for a single demographic's?
A single demographic, clearly.
My wife listens to books on tape basically all the time, and some of those books are pretty horny and treat the character designs of their men in words the same way that One Piece treats the character designs of women in pictures. As such, it seems to me that those particular books are also targeted at a single demographic; and while I don't think this has actually been studied by anyone that I'm aware of, it seems at least anecdotally that there's more current written fiction geared exclusively towards straight women than there is geared exclusively towards straight men.
My point here isn't "waddabout books, those are bad too"; it's to point out that the existence of media that's geared toward the enjoyment of some demographic or another is perfectly okay. One Piece doesn't need to be aimed equally toward every demographic. Anyone who wants to like it is allowed to like it. If someone doesn't like it because of the character designs, that's fine too; the authors of the series aren't obligated to alter their character designs to appeal to everyone. They can make it however they want.
This goes doubly for the random art that people post on reddit that r/mendrawingwomen frequently links to. Artists aren't obligated to appeal to everyone equally. First and foremost, they're trying to make something that appeals to them. And if people are positioned in a way that some people find attractive and other people find awkward-looking, if that's the intent of the art, then that's fine.
Now, you bring up kids, and I want to say that I think the idea of educating people about the difference between fantasy and reality is important, and that's how we need to be dealing with misconceptions coming from things like porn. r/mendrawingwomen is not the kind of subreddit that's ideal for doing the kind of non-judgmental education that needs to be done, though.
I'm willing to, but if I take the time to do that, are you going to listen to my answer, or just dismiss everything I say and go back to thinking what you want to think?
Also, a couple of preliminary questions to help me explain things:
What's your level of familiarity with the source material? How much experience do you have writing or modifying code that deals with neural networks? My own familiarity lies mostly with PyTorch. Do you use that or something else? If you don't have any direct familiarity with programming with neural networks, do you have enough of a familiarity with them to at least know what some of those boxes mean, or do I need to explain them all?
Most importantly, when I say that neural networks like GPT-* use artificial neurons, are you objecting to that statement?
I need to know what it is I'm explaining.
If what you're going to give me is an oversimplified analogy that puts too much faith in what AI devs are trying to sell and not enough faith in what a human brain is doing, then don't bother because I will dismiss it as a fairy tale.
I'm curious, how do you feel about global warming? Do you pick and choose the scientists you listen to? You know that the people who develop these AIs are computer scientists and researchers, right?
If you're a global warming denier, at least you're consistent. But if out of one side of you're mouth you're calling what AI researchers talk about a "fairy tail", and out of the other side of your mouth you're criticizing other people for ignoring science when it suits them, then maybe you need to take time for introspection.
You can stop reading here. The rest of this is for people who are actually curious, and you've clearly made up your mind. Until you've actually learned a bit about how they actually work, though, you have absolutely no business opining about how policies ought to apply to them, because your views are rooted in misconceptions.
In any case, curious folks, I'm sure there are fancy flowcharts around about how data flows through the human brain as well. The human brain is arranged in groups of neurons that feed back into each other, where as an AI neural network is arranged in more ordered layers. There structure isn't precisely the same. Notably, an AI (at least, as they are commonly structured right now) doesn't experience "time" per se, because once it's been trained its neural connections don't change anymore. As it turns out, consciousness isn't necessary for learning and reasoning as the parent comment seems to think.
Human brains and neural networks are similar in the way that I explained in my original comment -- neither of them store a database, neither of them do statistical analysis or take averages, and both learn concepts by making modifications to their neural connections (a human does this all the time, whereas an AI does this only while it's being trained). The actual neural network in the above diagram that OP googled and pasted in here lives in the "feed forward" boxes. That's where the actual reasoning and learning is being done. As this particular diagram is a diagram of the entire system and not a diagram of the layers of the feed-forward network, it's not even the right diagram to be comparing to the human brain (although again, the structures wouldn't match up exactly).
So to clarify, are you making the claim that nothing that's simulated with vector mathematics can have emergent properties? And that AIs like GPT and Stable Diffusion don't contain simulated neurons?
Lots to unpack here.
First of all, the physical process of human inspiration is that a human looks at something, their optic nerves fire, those impulses activate other neruons in the brain, and an idea forms. That's exactly how an AI takes "inspiration" from images. This stuff about free will and consciousness is metaphysics. There's no meaningful difference in the actual process.
Secondly, let's look at this:
SAG-AFTRA just got a contract offer that says background performers would get their likeness scanned and have it belong to the studio FOREVER so that they can simply generate these performers through AI.
This is what is happening RIGHT NOW. And you want to compare the output of an AI to a human's blood sweat and tears, and argue that copyright protections would HURT people rather than help them avoid exploitation.
I'll say right off that I don't appreciate the "you're a bad person" schtick. Switching to personal attacks stinks of desperation. Plus, your personal attack on me isn't even correct, because I don't approve of the situation you described any more than you do. The reason they're trying to slip that into those people's contracts is because those people own their likenesses under existing copyright law. That is, you don't have to come up with a funny interpretation of copyright law where concepts can be copyrighted but only if a machine learns them. They need a license to use those people's likenesses regardless of whether they use an AI or Photoshop or just have a painter do it. Using AI doesn't get them out of that -- if it did; they wouldn't need to try to put it into the contract.
In other words, they aren't using an AI to attack anyone; they're using a powerful bargaining position to try to get people to sign away an established right they already have according to copyright law. That has absolutely nothing to do with anything I'm talking about here, except that you want to attach it to what I'm talking about so you can have something to rage about.
And here's the thing. None of you people ever gave a shit when anybody else's job was automated away. Cashiers have had their work automated away recently and all I hear is "ThAt'S oKaY bEcAuSe tHeIr jOb sUcKs!!!!!!111" Artists have been actually violating the real copyright of other artists (NOT JUST LEARNING CONCEPTS) with fanart (which is a DERIVATIVE WORK OF A COPYRIGHTED CHARACTER) for god only knows how long and there's certainly never been a big outcry about that.
It sucks to be the ones looking down the business end of automation. I know that because as a computer programmer I am too. On the other hand, I can see past the end of my own nose, and I know how amazing it would be if lots of regular people suddenly had the ability to do the things that I do, so I'm not going to sit there and creatively interpret copyright law in an attempt to prevent that from happening. If you're worried about the effects of automation, you need to start thinking about things like a universal healthcare and universal income, not just ESTABLISH SPECIAL PROTECTIONS FOR A TINY SUBSET OF PEOPLE WHOM YOU HAPPEN TO LIKE. It just seems a bit convenient, and (dare I say) selfish that the point in history that we need to start smashing the machines happens to be right now. Why not the printing press or the cotton gin or machines that build railroads or looms or or robots in factories or grocery store kiosks? The transition sucked for all those people as well. It's going to suck for artists, and it'll suck for me, but in the end we can pull through and be better off for it, rather than killing the technology in its infancy and calling everyone a monster who doesn't believe that you and you alone ought to have special privileges.
We need to be using the political clout we have to push us toward a workable post-scarcity economy, as opposed to trying to preserve a single, tiny bit of scarcity so a small group of people can continue to do something while everybody else is automated away and we all end up ruled by a bunch of rent-seeking corporations. Your gatekeeping of the ability of people to do art isn't going to prevent any of that.
P.S. We seem to be at the very beginning of a major climate disaster these last couple weeks, so we're probably all equally fucked anyway.
I get it, then.
It's more about the utilitarian goal of convincing people of something that it's convenient for you if the public believes it, in order to protect yourself and your immediate peers from automation, as opposed to actually seeking the truth and sticking going with established legal precedent.
Legally, your class action lawsuit doesn't really have a leg to stand on, but you might manage to win anyway if you can depend on the ignorance of the judge and the jury about how AI actually works, and prejudice them against it. If you can get people to think of computer scientists and AI researches as "tech bros" instead of scientists with PHDs, you might be able to get them to dismiss what they say as "hype" and "fairy tales".
You will never move a boat with nuclear,
I assume you haven't heard of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines.
Also, nuclear power can be stored in batteries and capacitors and then used to move electric vehicles (including boats, planes, and tractors), so I don't know what the hell you're even talking about.
Eat less meat! How hard is it to compute! So turn off your stupid AI and eat less meat. Do it now, stop eating meat.
I've actually cut my meat consumption way down.
That being said, a person using AI consumes an absolutely minuscule amount of power compared to a person eating a steak. One steak (~20kwh) is equivalent to about 60 hours of full time AI usage (300W for an nvidia A100 at max capacity), and most of the time a person spends using an AI is spent idling while they type and read, so realistically it's a lot longer than that.
Again, your hypothetical data center smashers are going after AI because they hate AI, not because they care about the environment. There are better targets for ecoterrorism. Like my car's tires, internet tough guy.
So what does that mean? Do you not believe that AIs like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion have neural networks that are made up of simulated neurons? Or are you saying that we haven't simulated an actual human brain? Because the former is factually incorrect, and I never claimed the latter. Please explain exactly what "hype" you believe I'm buying into? Because I don't think you have any clue what it is you think I'm wrong about. You just really don't want me to be right.
I don't want kbin to be a far-leftist echo chamber. I also don't want kbin to be a far-right echo chamber. I think it's perfectly reasonable to want to protect a community from extreme and hateful views, regardless of which side they come from, because those views tend to attract the type of horrible, toxic people such as yourself who advocate beating the shit out of people for being different in a harmless way.
Welcome to the real world, where people who are different from you exist and mind their own business. If you can't put up with people who don't affect you in any way, I don't think the rest of us owe it to you to put up with you, either. Go find a cesspit to wallow in.