this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Feel like this belongs in [email protected]

Think I should cross-post?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

When I imagine a future with AI ruining the world, I always thought it was going to be some Skynet/CABAL/HAL9000 type of thing

Not this sad, boring, depressing type shit

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 hours ago

These fucking companies.. downing a torrent of annas archive but crawling wikipedia scourge of mankind

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Doesn't make any sense. Why would you crawl wikipedia when you can just download a dump as a torrent ?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 hours ago

AI bros aren't that smart.

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

To have the most recent data?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 29 minutes ago

To just have the most recent data within reasonable time frame is one thing. AI companies are like "I must have every single article within 5 minutes they get updated, or I'll throw my pacifier out of the pram". No regard for the considerations of the source sites.

[–] [email protected] 81 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

wikipedia should install ai mazes on their servers

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Not in this case, to be fair. The only concern is cost - since Wiki wouldn't be opposed to them getting their actual data - and AI mazes are designed to safeguard more sensitive data, not reducing cost

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Nice analysis. Need more smart people like you in the world

[–] [email protected] 1 points 49 minutes ago

I agree with that assessment!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)
[–] skulblaka 8 points 3 hours ago

Nepenthes does about the same thing but isn't managed by a corp.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 20 hours ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

I don't know about stopping entirely. I built a pretty cool RAG system for internal use in my company, it very much facilitates navigating very large amounts of text data.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 19 hours ago (5 children)

I still struggle with a use case for artificial intelligence in my own life. I play around with it all and I'm just like, it doesn't do a good job. Also, I think humanity is missing the plot, you know? Like, we don't need government. If government isn't going to do government. Government serves the people, not corporations. Or at least it should. I don't know, I think we're entering in times. At some point, I think people will pray for nuclear war, because life will be so miserable. That it would be better than just to end it all.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

AI has niches but they're exactly that: Niches. Small duct tape tasks for fudging over "hard problems" where manual code would result in a worse outcome and take far more time. Little esoteric problem spaces, which notably don't actually require you to use several states worth of electrical power training on a 50PB dataset of anime titties.

An example: I have a name generator in my game that strings together several consonant+vowel phoneme pairs into a name. This means that the names are always pronounceable, but often the spelling looks really unintuitive. Eg Joosiffe, which the player would likely pronounce as Joseph. However, the leap we do in our head between those two spellings is a process of declassifying phonemes and then re-classifying phonemes, and is actually a "hard problem" from a coding perspective due to the unintituive, multifarious complexities of written, spoken, and conceptualized human language. Adding this step to my name generator in code would be a project of it's own, larger than the game itself, and wouldn't ever work nearly as well as it needed to. But relatively small (30MB) AI models that do this with something like 99.8% satisfaction already exist. They didn't require a data center's worth of resources to train, and since they're academic projects they have licenses that allow them to be used for free in a game.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 hours ago

Actual AI?

Imagine your phone knows that you have a business meeting downtown today. It's already reserved a parking space for you, set your car to warm up before you leave and looped your contact in on your ETA, along with automatically notifying you of any delays. Then, your kid wakes up this morning in with a horrible toothache, you ask your phone what to do and it rings up your family dentist, who has a full schedule today, but makes you a referral nearby. You agree to try that other dentist today, and your AI books an appointment, checks your meeting today, coordinates with their AIs and approves a 15 minute delay so you can get to the dentist. It also notifies your kid's school of their absence and has their teachers AI automatically queued up to send transcripts, notes and homework assignmenta from today's classes.

That's the kind of stuff actual AI can do. Overgrown autocorrect? It's basically a multi-billion dollar Magic Eightball.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I’m dyslexic and basically a terrible writer. It has helped my professional communication develop. It really helps me speed up my issues with my disability and feel confident in my communications.

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

This is a cool use case. Just make sure you retain your own voice! If you read an AI-generated sentence out loud and think "I'd have said it this way instead", IMO you should absolutely then change it to be that way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

At some point, I think people will pray for nuclear war, because life will be so miserable.

Reminds me of Roll out the Fallout by The Chalkeaters

[–] [email protected] 5 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Like, we don't need government.

Welcome to the anarchist. Now you have to pick your flavor! Social Anarcho-syndicalism, Anarcho comunist, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho christianis, and the list goes on!

I found LLMs helpfuls to develop some scripts and answer some simple trivial questions (like how does house property work in China). I could have looked for that in a regular search engine though. But that's it, I am still happy looking for things myself and investigating since you can't really trust their answers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

even better stop joining major platforms like social media and then they won't be able to create data sets. Be a leach, especially when they give it away for free, but don't contribute to the project. Understand how it works, sure. But it seems like most of humanity says they don't want something, yet they do the contrary. It's like we choose to comply before we even ask to comply for the fear of missing out. But if you look at what is today, what are you really missing out on?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

So, uh. What about Lemmy?

They can also crawl this publically-accessible social media source for their data sets.

I'm on board with abandoning mainstream social media, but my point is that your suggestion would not solve the problem just relocate it. A better solution to the AI conglomerates stealing everyone's data from the open Internet is legislation and regulations - ie tackling the whole 'stealing data' component, along with stronger privacy regulations for everyone to make it harder for them to do the same in the future. It's nice seeing the EU taking some positive steps, but we will not see the US take any steps in that direction anytime soon, due to corporate capture of their politicians and the AI companies all being in the top 10 most wealthy companies in the US.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

They can also crawl this publically-accessible social media source for their data sets.

Crawling would be silly. They can simply setup a lemmy node and subscribe to every other server. Activitypub crawler would be much more efficient as they wouldn't accidentally crawl things that haven't changed, but instead can read the activitypub updates.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

It's nice seeing the EU taking some positive steps

Yet they helped introducing the super cookies and are trying to end encryption on communications.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

This is an example of corporate terrorism sponsored by our own government. Elon Musk loves to see himself as the villain in Ready Player One. And this is not a joke you can look it up. Big tech is waging war against American citizens, and no longer do we have any control of our government, and the Democrats will not save us. The electoral processes will not save us. This is just hard for some people to accept, that's why things have to fall apart before they get a clue. Unfortunately, those that are wiser are going to feel the flames first.

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[–] [email protected] 189 points 1 day ago (3 children)

what assholes .. just fucking download the full package and quit hitting the URL

[–] [email protected] 28 points 20 hours ago

The amount of stupid AI scraping behavior I see even on my small websites is ridiculous, they'll endlessly pound identical pages as fast as possible over an entire week, apparently not even checking if the contents changed. Probably some vibe coded shit that barely functions.

[–] [email protected] 106 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Right‽ This is ridiculously stupid when you can download the entirety of Wikipedia in a single package and parse it to your hearts desire

[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Not only that, but we make it goddamn trivial for not just Wikipedia but for other Wikimedia projects. Doing this is just stealing without attribution and share-alike like the CC BY-SA 4.0 license demands and then on top of that kicking down the ladder for people who actually want to use Wikimedia and not the hallucinatory slop they're trying to supplant it with. LLM companies have caused incalculable damage to critical thinking, the open web, the copyleft movement, and the climate.

[–] ChaoticCookie 17 points 1 day ago

Yay interrobang :D

[–] gravitas_deficiency 13 points 21 hours ago

If I was running infra for them, I’d just start blacklisting abusive IPs without warning

[–] [email protected] 41 points 23 hours ago (6 children)

And the quality of the AI output sucks. I was recently looking for information about positive convention for yaw, pitch, and roll in aircraft. I was looking at az and yaw and got reasonable results from the AI, but when I looked at pitch and el all of the results were about elevator pitches. Even when I spelled out elevation it insisted on elevator pitches. I scroll past the AI results as a matter of principle, but I usually look at them so I have something specific to complain about when people ask why I am so virulently anti-AI.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

The other day I tried to have it help me with a programming task on a personal project. I am an experienced programmer, but I only "get by" in Python (typically just by looking up the documentation for the standard library). I thought, "OK. This is it. I will ask Llama 3.3 and GPT4 for help."

That shit literally set me back a weekend. It gave me such bad approaches and answers, that I could tell were bad (aforementioned experience in programming, degree in comp sci, etc) that I got confused about writing Python. Had I just done what I usually do, which is to look up the documentation and use my brain, I would have gotten my weekend task done a whole weekend sooner.

It scares me to think what people are doing to themselves by relying on this, especially if they're novices.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

It scares me to think what people are doing to themselves by relying on this, especially if they're novices.

Same here. There's a lot of denial going on but, LLMs are not good for anything that requires factual information. They likely will never be on account of just being statistical models for language. Summarizing long text where correctness isn't an issue is really one of the only places where I still think that they are good.

Search? Not if you want anything factual with citations.

Code? Fuck no. They constantly produce code of poor quality that may depend on non-existent libraries or functionality. More time it's spent debugging than writing code and it leaves the dev with a poor understanding of what the code actually does and ways to optimize/extend/etc.

Generating literary smut? Well, it's not going to do as good of a job as a person who can create something completely novel but can be passable without likely harm to authors (I'd classify it as a tier below erotic fan fiction).

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

We're going to be entering a golden age of hacks in the next 5 years, I'm calling it now. All this copy-pasted bad ChatGPT code is going to be used in ways that generate security holes the likes of which we've never seen before.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 22 hours ago

AI is useful for basic, mundane tasks and that's about it. Trying to force it to be some sort of Uber search engine is such a bad idea.

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[–] pelespirit 11 points 18 hours ago

Support Wikipedia! They're awesome and are our backbone.

[–] [email protected] 118 points 1 day ago (10 children)

Laws should be passed in all countries that AI crawlers should request permission before crawling whatever target site. I haver no pity to AI "thiefs" that get their models poisoned. F...ing plague, wasn't enough the adware and spyware...

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