Asklemmy

You're arguing opinions and trying to convince someone as if they are facts. There's plenty to criticize about how AI is used, but it is a valuable tool for those that use it.

The amount of value it provides is very subjective, and even if you don't find it useful, many others do. You might as well be trying to argue that you don't like photography because it doesn't provide the same experience of drawings and paintings. You wouldn't be wrong to feel that way, but you would be wrong to tell someone else that they need to feel the way you do.

Sometimes it's okay to just disagree. With a topic like AI, the effectiveness of arguments against it will vary heavily depending on one's subjective opinion on things like intellectual property, what is and isn't art, how we should deal with emerging technologies etc.

It seems like a quite pointless discussion since you both seem to have already decided your minds.

They don't accept your sources? Why? If they really are valid and they just cherry-pick sources, then there is no way of convincing them.

On the other hand, you also just seem to dismiss their counterarguments without much thought. If they can give a counterargument for your every argument, then maybe your arguments actually aren't good?

Maybe he is just feeding your arguments to AI and you argue with AI instead of him. 😁

But yes. As others have stated, you argue opinions. Not facts. And neither of you is really correct. You value different things. For example he values progress more than authors copyrights. And I find his points you mentioned valid. As are yours.

I however believe, you can agree on any topic with a "smart/sane enough" person with "enough time/motivation" and "similar enough values" as you if you are also such a person.

In that case one or the other will change his mind.

Those conditions are rarely met and the most important part is you also have to be open to changing your mind.

If you simply don't want to engage in a discussion with him, then that's fine, you should let him know that you're not interested in talking about it. You don't have to justify your choices to him, if you want to use a particular browser then that's fine and if he spontaneously decides he needs to "talk you out of it" then that's a dick move. Tell him that you don't want to debate the subject and it's no skin off of his nose so he shouldn't try to engage you in one.

But if you're asking "how can I convince him that he's wrong", well that is engaging in the debate. And if you're going to engage in a debate you should try to be as open about it as you'd like your debate opponent to be in turn. Have you considered that perhaps he has some valid points and is not taking that position just to be contrarian?

Personally, I find that it's pretty much impossible to talk someone with a strongly-held position out of that position. The value of Internet debates with people like that is that lots of spectators who don't have such strongly-held positions may be watching, but when it's a one-on-one situation it's likely to be a futile and frustrating effort with no benefit. So I would advise going with the "don't bother engaging" route. But of course, if you feel strongly that you want to engage, I can't change your mind on that and won't try. It's your time to spend.

The secret to life is...

You rarely convince anyone out of their views. Live and let live.

Why is it so important for you to convince him? Sometimes people won't agree with you and that's fine. You can still be friends.

For starters never shut the fuck up about books3.

Every AI company used it. They all knew where it came from. It was not hidden that the provenance was piracy. It was well known that the entirety of books3 was pirated via Bibliotik, a private tracker known for disseminating tools for removing DRM from ebooks. (Last I checked, that last part about removing DRM isn't just a civil penalty, it's an actual fucking crime in the US)

They can say all they want. The reality is they're playing a game of "as long as do a bigger crime than anyone else, it's totally okay."

We harass the living shit out of "pirates" who do nothing but share media and don't make a profit. We still have laws aimed at attempting at removing internet access wholesale to people accused of piracy.

But when your piracy makes a cool billion, suddenly its totes okay bro.

They always knew where books3 came from and they didn't care. They can try to claim otherwise and stop using books3 now, but the reality is they wouldn't have been able to grow their businesses at all without it.

Copyright is bullshit and broken, but I don't understand how copyright violation on a mass scale is somehow okay when we put the admins of The Pirate Bay in prison for far fucking less. Like we literally saw private corporations lobby an entire country and it's courts into changing how they worked just to prosecute The Pirate Bay admins. They went after them because they knew they didn't have the money to fight it, even though so much of the case hinged on the "obscene" amounts of money they were making off of it. Not enough for good legal counsel.

It's just one more example of "rules for thee, not for me." Rich scumfucks are asking for it.

They're happy to put us under the boot of copyright, but the big players? For them it's fine because they're making so much money, you see?

We live in a system built on exploitation and this is just the newest flavor.

For me it's not even that I hate the concept of AI. It's that we're shoving half baked AI literally everywhere we can without any fuck given to reliability, accuracy and safety, or even sustainability.

• GitHub Copilot: code so bad I won't even bother reviewing the PR. It doesn't save time at all unless you suck at coding already.
• Google Gemini/Bing Copilot: completely off the mark more often than not, it's still faster to do a standard, well written web search.
• AI assistants: they've always sucked and still sucks but hey at least the voice is realistic right. It still doesn't understand what you say to it half the time.
• Recall: nobody ever asked for that
• AI summaries: I'd rather skim through articles, at least I know what I skipped.
• AI translations: better than Google Translate I guess, but more of the same: it gets you by when reading foreign sites but the quality is still too bad to use it to translate my apps with it in a professional setting.

They're all impressive products on a technical level, but they're basically really expensive alpha quality software that sucks a stupid amount of power for dubious gains.

My other gripe is most of the time those feed your personal data to Microsoft/OpenAI for processing, because most people don't have a quad RTX 4090 Ti setup to run any decent model locally at reasonable speeds. It's using a jackhammer to nail a nail.

kinnda reminds me of discussions around the automobile when it was a new, incredibly dangerous and unrealized product.

is it stupidly dangerous? yep. should we ban them? naw, then they wouldnt get better. should i at least make sure i invent a seat belt and utilize it while people make fun of me? absofuckinglutely.

AI is a hot topic and most info in the public space is dead wrong. Unless you're a developer and getting into the code base, you're likely wrong. I've spent a year dabbling with that code base and have only barely scratched the surface.

Sam Altmann is behind a massive misinformation campaign to try and create a monopoly in AI. That is hard to prove, but in abstract, ALL the pieces fit well into this puzzle.

AI in the public space is a joke. It is all based off of the transformers library in one form or another. Go read the introduction page for the Transformers documentation on hugging face. It clearly states that it is incomplete and its intended use is as a simplified example code only. AI is enormously complex in its real capabilities. Most of the issues are due to the simplifications made to allow the ignorant public to use it.

Models have very limited scope, and the model itself is static. It can't learn, predict, remember, or abstract ideas with mobility across information spaces.

The fear of AI in the present is based on a Greek pantheon like mythos of the machine gods. That has no basis in reality. At present the only thing to really fear is image recognition AI in drones just because that combo is poised to massively change war technology and cost effectiveness relative to any prior breakthrough in technology. There is very little relationship between this tech and what is in the public space.

Arguing with a belief system is an entirely pointless affair. If the person is more attached to their fantasies than reality, you're never going to influence them with reality. The easiest tell is if they are spiritual. If they have exceptions to factual reality in this space, they will be gullible and blind to their biases elsewhere as well.

You typically cannot change someone like this with evidence. They must be personally affected or isolated from their politics before they will even consider it

I mean idc about ai either, what other people choose to like has no effect on me whatsoever

Start by becoming an area matter expert, otherwise you two just have different opinions

Offer to bet him money about the outcome of some real world event that is contingent on the way he is claiming that things are

IDK how you can apply that to AI; that’s not the best one. But you can bet that there are no workers dying of heatstroke in Amazon-supplier warehouses. You can bet him that Trump has agreed to honor the results of the election. Etc etc.

It’s very easy to just make statements at each other. If you offer to back up your statements, then he can either refuse (in which case it’ll be harder for him to say he’s definitely right and you’re definitely wrong), or agree and then one or the other of you will learn something.

It’s up to you. You can also just let it go. But if you want to prove him wrong it is easier to do with questions and real-world actions than it is by coming up with the perfect statements. As you’ve discovered, he’s not obligated to react to statements any way other than how he’s decided to react to them.

You explained to us that this is a general problem with this schmuck, so I don’t see how counter-arguments specific to AI will be of use.

I'd say its time to disengage from the conversation.

Having the conversations and sticking to your points is good and all but they didn't come to their opinions based on "facts and logic" so you're not going to facts and logic them into a different opinion.

Possibly try to pay attention to when your friend has gotten to the point in the conversation that they've effectively shut down and wind down the conversation when it gets to that point. Talk about something else, everybody goes outside and touches grass, or just call it a day.

You're probably out of luck trying to convince this person of your opinion. However if it comes up again and you want this person to walk away, I'd recommend mentioning the horrible working conditions that content moderators have to go through. Contrarians don't like unassailable facts.