AI Megathread
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@Faraday Absolutely. I am always willing to learn and I am willing to admit when I don’t have the expertise to make a good call and adjust accordingly.
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Whelp, now to add ‘Please don’t feed my scenes into an LLM’ to my +finger, too…
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Notepad doesn’t need Copilot.
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@Hobbie I am glad that it has that “you didn’t save this but we’ve kept it in the buffer for you” when files weirdly decide to open in notepad instead of notepad++. Which isn’t AI, but is neat.
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@Pavel that is a genuine QoL feature I use daily.
But I don’t need to have Copilot/Gemini/whatever advertised to me every time I open something that isn’t a video game.
I don’t even read the AWS roadmaps anymore because it’s endless updates to Q and nothing about bringing their existing functionality out of minimum-viable-product stage.
AI has its effective areas of use, but it is far narrower than what has been marketed and sold.
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@Hobbie You mean you don’t want me to tell you your post was PoWeReD bY AI
like has been thrown at us for every. single. fucking. thing. that’s on a computer these days?But on the serious, I’m 100% with you. Tired of seeing Gemini, Copilot, and all the others flung at me as if they’re trying to honeypot me with the latest tech buzzwords*. I don’t need AI to do my job for me; I do need AI to do things for me that are far beyond my capacity. Like massive quantities of data analysis and collation.
AI is way oversold and way underdelivered, and I dare say that the “AI” products being thrown out are not, strictly speaking and technically (pun!) actual AI, but more a heuristic algorithm like pathfinding algorithms such as A*.
* ETA - It’s so bad I just had this comparison come to mind: “They’re acting like MU* sex pests pretending not to be sex pests.”
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@dvoraen This is one of my favourite reads lately: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/
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@Hobbie I love that one.
Friend quoted me this recently:
"It’s like ChatGPT has read everything on the internet, and kind of vaguely remembers some of it and is willing to make up the rest.”
There are so many documented instances of LLMs making up nonsense. Citing books that don’t exist. Making up fake lawsuit citations. Misrepresenting articles written by journalists. Making up fake biographical details. The code it spits out is often garbage (or, worse, wrong in subtle ways). And that’s not even touching on all the random stupidity where it tells people to use glue in their pizza or incorporate poison into their recipes.
The whole GenAI industry is most likely just a big bubble built on a con.
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People call this “hallucination”. I think we should stop letting them assign a new name to an existing phenomenon. The LLM is malfunctioning. It is saying things that are wrong. It is failing to do what it was designed to do.
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she/her | playlist
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“They’re designed to produce statistically probable sentences.”
Exactly. Sometimes what is statistically probable is also correct: “What is the capital of France?” will most likely correctly tell you “Paris” because Paris has a high statistical association with “capital of France”.
But this methodology is inherently unreliable for giving facts. A LLM might confidently assert that George Washington cut down a cherry tree, just because there’s a common association between Washington and that story, even though historians largely believe it’s a myth. Elon Musk associated with Teslas + Teslas associated with car crashes + Elon Musk associated with a car crash leads to a LLM erroneously asserting that Elon Musk died in a fatal Tesla crash. Sure, it’s a statistically probable sentence, but it’s just not true. The LLM doesn’t know whether something is true, and it doesn’t care.
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@Faraday said in AI Megathread:
The LLM doesn’t know whether something is true, and it doesn’t care.
I know this may seem like a quibble, but I feel it’s an important distinction: It can’t do either of those things, because it’s not intelligent. It’s a very fancy word predictor, it can’t think, it can’t know, it can’t create.
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As more and more time passes and AI becomes more and more widespread all I can think is, “When do we declare our Butlerian Jihad?” Because I’m kinda over all this stuff already lol.
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The AI problem is now so bad that people are trying to defeat it with… more AI. I don’t even know. What is life.
What I do know is that if someone fed my poses into ChatGPT or similar, I’d be pretty pissed off about it.
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Is it sad that I’ve met people whose natural writing and RP are so bad that I assumed they were LLMs incorrectly?
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spotted in the wild, made me lol at least as much as it made me groan.
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@Pavel said in AI Megathread:
@Faraday said in AI Megathread:
The LLM doesn’t know whether something is true, and it doesn’t care.
I know this may seem like a quibble, but I feel it’s an important distinction: It can’t do either of those things, because it’s not intelligent. It’s a very fancy word predictor, it can’t think, it can’t know, it can’t create.
(This very obvious rant is not directed to anyone in particular but I still feel like it needed to be said…)
Neither can a computer. It can’t think, it can’t know, it can’t create any more than an AI can. It can’t get nearly as close as AI can. But every person here still uses computers. No one’s given up the machine and accessories filled with toxic metals that have been clawed from the earth as quickly as possible without regard for the environment it might be disturbing for the purposes of profit. Metals that are so valuable they mean the potential end or continuation of wars that kill hundreds of thousands with body counts that go up every day that possession of these metals aren’t agreed upon or bargained away to stop the death and dying. Metals that will go into these computers we all use that will likely return to the earth to sit in a landfill forever with parts that will never biodegrade in exchange for being of limited, non-thinking, non-knowing, non-creative use for just a few short years.
Everyone here also uses the internet with all the filth and hate and disgusting things that can be found online. Darkwebnuffsaid. The same internet that contributed to the death of newspapers and the decline of journalism as well as people’s recognition of truth and facts. The same internet that allowed Amazon to put countless small businesses out of business across the world. But no one here has stopped using that. Everyone is still contributing online to the companies that track and store massive amounts of information on as many people as possible on servers around the globe that devour energy like a bottomless pit and exude heat like a hell-connected furnace, then weaponize that information for profit and political leverage so intense it can turn elections in the most powerful country in the world, very specifically by weaponizing fear and hate and turning those dials up to 11 on people’s internet feeds to sway votes with no regard for what those people might do with their fear and hate outside of the voting booth.
How is it that AI is the problem?
You can’t be serious.
Please.
One might think you are being just a tad too…
Critical.
But okay. Rant done. Get on your computer and tell me on the internet how AI is so problematic you won’t use it.
I’m totally listening.
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@MisterBoring said in AI Megathread:
Is it sad that I’ve met people whose natural writing and RP are so bad that I assumed they were LLMs incorrectly?
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@Jynxbox said in AI Megathread:
But okay. Rant done. Get on your computer and tell me on the internet how AI is so problematic you won’t use it.
I can. I did in previous posts, but I’ll recap briefly: There is a benefit/harm ratio to every invention mankind has ever made.
Harnessing fire can bring warmth, but it can also destroy. Splitting the atom can power a nuclear power plant or wreck untold destruction. The internet contains filth, but it also powers information, education, and human connections.We have to gauge tools based on how they are used. GenAI, by my estimation, brings tremendous harm and next to zero actual good. Every use case I’ve seen - from customer service chatbots to research - is terrible compared to the human counterparts it’s driving out of business.
We also, traditionally, have gauged tools based on their legality. Napster brought free music to millions. Some saw that as a good thing, but it was illegal, and it was stopped. GenAI is committing copyright infringement on a scale that would make Napster blush.
There are many people who boycott Amazon, social media, or whatever based on the harms they perceive. There are environmentalists who would scold me for the plastic soda bottles I use. We’re all allowed to pick our battles. Fighting GenAI is one of mine.
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@Juniper said in AI Megathread:
People call this “hallucination”. I think we should stop letting them assign a new name to an existing phenomenon. The LLM is malfunctioning.
No, it is not. What the AI spits out is meaningless to the AI. It just spits out what the most likely next set of words are based on the input it received it has already given. For it to malfunction, it needs to start writing sentences devoid of grammar. As long as what it writes is grammatically correct and a somewhat rational statement, it has succeeded
It is saying things that are wrong.
Yes, but factually accurate answers are not the purpose. Grammatically correct sentences are.
It is failing to do what it was designed to do.
No. It is doing exactly what it is designed to do. It’s failing at doing what entrepreneurs, marketers, and other Pat Barnum snake oil salespeople want the public to think it can do.
EDIT: To actually contribute something to the thread, about the only thing I am willing to use AI on for MU purposes is played-bys and maybe creating images on the wiki for the various venues on the grid. I grew tired of seeing Jason Momoa as the image for Seksylonewolf McRippedabs.
