this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 55 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (3 children)

If the product is as unethical as mass ip theft and replacement of workers with ethics or comprehension skills, then I get the feeling expectations aren't the major issue.

[–] kata1yst 32 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There are many ML/AI models that are doing a lot more good than harm. The shitty mass market chat bots and art generators are mostly hype and greed.

But Mathematics, physics, healthcare, and many other industries have embraced models that accomplish amazing things humans with similar resources just could not.

It's a problem of application.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sure, and I thank you for the clarification, but the AI in this context seemed pretty clearly the mainstream LLM products.

[–] kata1yst 8 points 2 months ago

Entirely fair.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

mass ip theft

That's not a thing, both because "IP" is dishonest loaded language and because copyright infringement is different from theft.

I 1000% agree that what they've done is completely unethical -- particularly because including copyleft works in the training data ought to require every single output to be copyleft -- but I do not concede to your framing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Copyright*

They're using the works of others for commercial gain without permission. There is no world where that isn't a clear violation.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago

Thank you; that's all I wanted. Rhetorical framing is important.

[–] mindbleach 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Because copyright is sooo important and beloved.

Nevermind that distilling all books ever written down to a gigabyte of linear algebra is pretty darn transformative.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

If you take an artist's work and sell it as your own without giving any credit or remuneration at all to said artist, you're an asshole regardless of legality, but since it's also illegal then there should at least be some repercussions for the assholery.

Fun fact, books get written because publishers pay people to write them.

[–] mindbleach 1 points 2 months ago

Who's talking about copies? We're talking about an inscrutable network that tried to guess the next letter when shown part of a book. When it was right, weird math shit happened through umpteen layers of random numbers, and a zillion guesses later, it'll churn out new books. Not good ones. Not sensible ones. But a lot more than the ctrl+c / ctrl+v accusations.

We already had the technology to copy text on a computer. In fact you can find any book ever published, for free, sometimes by accident. Yet the industry wasn't strangled by piracy. That's never how it works. Books were written for thousands of years before copyright existed. You're on a website rooted in open-source ethos, demonstrating that artificial control and even monetary incentive are not strictly necessary.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Whatever. I just used a.i. to write my performance evaluation at work. I fed it a bunch of garbled, incoherent nonsense and made me sound productive AF.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And whoever received your review probably fed it into a chat bot to summarise.

There's an inefficiency here....

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] PiJiNWiNg 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

true, even nonbullshit jobs have a load of bullshit tasks now.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

That was to be expected. It's not the answer to everything and has inherent limitations that can't be solved quickly by throwing money at it.

The problem is that so much money is tied up in this. It has been pushing up the stock market. People have been fired because AI was going to take over the job. The fallout from that is going to be painful. Dot com crash like, maybe subprime mortgage crash painful.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

There fallout from that is going to be painful. Dot com crash like, maybe subprime mortgage crash painful.

Yep. And folks on the news are gonna be all confused how this could happen.

They laid off their talent to bet on bullshit. That's how it happened.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

[Off-topic] the name of your instance is awesome.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Thanks! It was funny buying the domain enjoying.yachts since I don’t own nor will ever own a yacht.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

My bad I thought this was The Hanker News: it's way more hank than this.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

What's disturbing to me is this:

Coworker: There's a study in Denmark where they were able to train ten penguins to do clerical work. Three of them make as few errors as humans.

Upper Manager Excellent. Lay off the entire office staff and find us four-hundred penguins.