this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago (14 children)

That anti David Gerard Wikipedia nontroversy from awhile back has made it to Elon Musk's twitter feed: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1849862303614894223

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I wish I was cool enough to have the world's worst people get so mad at me that they make fan art and put it up on their website.

They're just making DG look bad ass.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

david gerard refuses to respond to my allegations that he wears an awesome trenchcoat and uses magic to trap his opponents in a realm where everything is made of the pages of a failed novela, and I think that says a lot

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

no no, that one i totally did and i'll fuckin do it again

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

Update on LLM reviewer situation:

PM is down to let us pitch them our argument. Good news: PM seems like a cool person, is open minded, and is being pretty frank about the forces at work here. Bad news: taking action on this will open a whole can of worms, so any proof has to be ironclad. After conferring with our local grant wizards, the battle plan is to crank out a 15 minute pitch consisting of:

  • a 2 min elevator pitch of our tech, highlighting what the reviews mangled
  • intro to LLMs for people who know what glycosylation is
  • intro to semiotics for the same
  • show how transformer architectures transform symbols into symbols to produce text-shaped objects without actual intent, ideas, or context (and why "automated AI detection" is also bullshit).
  • show a few examples of plausible-at-first-glance gen-ai slop (the nonexistant turkish fortress, mouse dck, etc)
  • Highlight how our weird reviews (both good and bad) fit exactly into this bin (absolutely mis-interpreting a table, inventing a bacterial species we didn't use and talking shit about it, miscounting our team members, etc)

We'll be leaning on the Stochastic Parrot paper pretty hard, because it's a good entry into the field on the skeptical side and is just well constructed in general. I'm also on the hunt simplified diagram for how LLMs convert tokens to arrays to tokens from the original transformer literature. Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose, and I want to avoid falling into the "It can't be that stupid" trap. Any pointers in that direction are most welcome!

Wish us luck, heh!

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

Update on the character.ai lawsuit:

Gizmodo just reported on the story - in addition to the suicide that kicked this litigation off, they've also discovered an hour-long screen recording where a test account (self-reported as thirteen years old) gets sexted relentlessly by the site's chatbots.

So, in addition to driving one specific teen to suicide, character.ai is also facing accusations that their bots are sexually harassing children.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 weeks ago (10 children)

has the era of active sabotage of the autoplag inputs begun? let's hope so

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

Considering Glaze and Nightshade have been around for a while, and I talked about sabotaging scrapers back in July, arguably, it already has.

Hell, I ran across a much smaller scale case of this a couple days ago:

Not sure how effective it is, but if Elon's stealing your data for his autoplag no matter what, you might as well try to force-feed it as much poison as you can.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

It's almost completely ineffective, sorry. It's certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.

On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasn't yet been invalidated and there's no upcoming mathematics which tilt the scales in favor of anti-training techniques. In general, scrapers for training sets are now augmented with alignment models, which test inputs to see how well the tags line up; your example might be rejected as insufficiently normal-cat-like.

I think that "force-feeding" is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that "forced" input is destined to be discarded or retagged.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Actual message I got while renewing my insurance plan last night. Thank you for adding a shitty chat bot which will give me false information about my life and death decisions, bravo.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

The Bookseller: Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff

Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear “in imprint pages across our markets”. The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.

Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn't gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it's time to give Big AI a wedgie.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It's weird how rarely I see people point this, but in theory this kind of boilerplate should be technically meaningless. If copyright protections include the privilege to use the work for training a machine learning algorithm, you need explicit permission anyway. OTOH if it's fair use or otherwise not something copyright law is concerned with, the copyright holder's objection doesn't matter.

For the record, I think AI models are derivative works and thus they're not only infringing on typical "all rights reserved" works, but also things such as Free software whose license terms require attribution if used in derivative work, and especially share-alike copyleft licensed work.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

I thinkt it's pretty well-lknown that Spotify got all its initial music from Oink. They moved fast, got dominant, and were able to present the record labels with a big audience prepared to pay for streaming music. The labels quickly ensured they'd get the lion's share of that revenue.

OpenAI and friends tried the same thing - scrape everything, build AGI, reap the rewards. Except it didn't work, and they're in a much worse position morally. Even if they can get a judgement that what they're doing is legal, it will cost them a lot in litigation fees, coupled with the public perception that these culture vampires are ripping off the poor honest author. Not a good place to be in.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn’t gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it’s time to give Big AI a wedgie.

Considering the massive(ly inflated) valuations running around Big AI and the massive amounts of stolen work that powers the likes of CrAIyon, ChatGPT, DALL-E and others, I suspect the content mafia is likely gonna try and squeeze every last red cent they can out of the AI industry.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

At some point, something is going to reveal that all the money in AI has gone into power costs for datacenters and NVidia chips and that the AI companies themselves aren't doing so hot. I hope it's the discovery process for some of the inevitable lawsuits.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI "hosts" (non-English link).

They're trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason they're firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be "an experiment to appeal to Gen Z". Fortunately, most people's response seems to be "fuck off with this crap".

I just... can't with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run "experiments" with AI media. Heads should roll for this.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

this is peak AI. you might not like it, but it's how top of the bubble looks like

Radio station uses AI to interview the ghost of a dead Nobel-winner with 3 quirky zoomers who don't exist, seems baffled people don't like it starring three bots and deepfake of Wisława Szymborska

related notesfrompoland and onet article they probably referenced (in polish) and another. would you guess that they fired a dozen or so* people just before? (and somehow had money for whatever horseshit they were sold) small radio stations aren't probably bringing serious money either way now

homepage of that radio boasts about their "almost entirely created by AI" content. it looks like they tried to convince zoomers to get an FM radio and listen to it somehow. it's gonna go great

apparently this radio is in liquidation since january however this might be related to dislodging previous govt's propagandists from public media

*original report used very handy word that does not appear in english that one could translate as "fewteen" and can mean any number from 11 to 19 inclusive

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don't sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I've come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT's attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it's trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.

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

you gotta admit one thing: this cures imposter syndrome

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

US forest service cuts thousands of jobs. Not to worry, the bright hackernews are on it! just install an AI data center in the forest!. Seriously though, I can't tell if this is brilliant satire or not.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

‘They wish this technology didn’t exist’: Perplexity responds to News Corp’s lawsuit

“There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist,” said the Perplexity team in the blog. “They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”

I wish the AI bros at Perplexity and elsewhere a very cope and fucking seethe.

Okay, quick personal sidenote:

With how much misinformation, manipulation, outright theft and other horrific shit this AI bubble has caused, I suspect we're gonna see some attempts at an outright ban on AI. How successful they're gonna be, I don't know, but at the bare minimum it'll enjoy some popularity on the political fringe.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.

Yea, down with corporate IP trolls, information gatekeepers and idea landlords! Anyway, what was Perplexity's business model again?

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

they wish this technology didn’t exist

this is supposed to be invalidating, but like... yes? what's wrong with that?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Character.ai is getting sued thanks to one of their users killing himself, and The New York Times is talking about it (there's also a piece by Gary Marcus talking about a previous incident if you're interested).

Like the copyright situation I previously mentioned, I suspect this is also gonna make potential investors wary of investing in AI post-bubble. Even if you manage to convince investors that you won't get DMCA'd into oblivion, they're still gonna be wary of the potential for a Dasani-level PR nightmare.

Of course, that's assuming that Section 230 protects you from being held liable for what your autoplag does - if Ms. Garcia, whose son's suicide prompted this entire mess, succeeds in court, the legal precedent set means you're likely gonna have to worry about being sued if/when someone ends up injured/killed/defamed/otherwise fucked up because of its output..

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Skimming the reddit thread in search of general public sentiment about this, but unfortunately mostly just found a greatest hits compilation of very gross comments.

According to these very smart people, parents should expect your teenager to die as an outcome of not being perfect people 24/7, technology can never be at fault even when it literally tells you to commit suicide in coded language, and it's actually impossible to understand which parts of society are causing kids to be depressed, so we must take it as a given that we can't do anything about it. I regret having done this to myself.

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

If your Wikipedia page contains as many random arXiv preprints for references as the "prompt engineering" article, consult your physician.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

~~Kendrick~~ Zitron dropped - its mainly focusing on Prabhakar Raghavan's recent kicking upstairs, and Google's bleak future.

Main highlight was this snippet:

I am hypothesizing here, but I think that Google is desperate, and that its earnings on October 30th are likely to make the street a little worried. The medium-to-long-term prognosis is likely even worse. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Google's ad business is expected to dip below 50% market share in the US in the next year for the first time in more than a decade, and Google's gratuitous monopoly over search (and likely ads) is coming to an end. It’s more than likely that Google sees AI as fundamental to its future growth and relevance.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Man, it's almost like hollowing out the core value centers of a company in search of short-term growth will leave an empty dying husk that can neither serve in new markets nor continue to exist in their previous niche.

If only there had been some kind of warning about the consequences of this management style. Hey, how's GE doing these days again?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It's not that the money is unaware this kills the business. They know. They don't care because their process is business-agnostic. By design and intent they extract value from the business like it was a capri sun pouch and when line no longer goes up, it's discarded for the next one.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Crypto mining firms based in Sweden are accused of withholding around $100M in unpaid taxes.

Mostly VAT fraud.

News in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/norrbotten/kryptoforetagen-lurade-staten-pa-en-miljard

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

But your honor, we're a crypto mining company; we don't add any value!

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

HEARTWARMING: Baldy McDickface to step back from podcasting now the Russian money has dried up

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

Pretty good sneer there:

BREAKING: Tim Pool announces he will be stepping back from full time content production to look after his family. He states he's tired of being made fun of for not having a wife and kids so he will also be using the extra time to pursue acquiring that family

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Forget Gladwell

All nonfiction writers can end up writing incorrect or controversial things, but why does every Gladwell book push half-formed and inaccurate theories? For years, my loose feeling about Gladwell was that he writes like someone who doesn’t care about being correct, which is not a way I would describe any other author I've encountered. There is something uniquely odd about his work.

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

In other news, Disney's apparently planning some kind of "major AI initiative".

Whatever it is, I'm expecting large-scale boycotts/strikes to kick off as a result of it, alongside AI's lack of copyright protection getting exploited to troll the shit out of Disney.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Look out, professional Nix crybaby Jon Ringer is back with his fork.

In other news, I have my own as well called Borkfan, absolutely not a ban fork due to my having threatened multiple people, but instead dedicated to the idea that a technology that lacks chud approval must necessarily not be in the true hacker spirit.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

Update on the state of AI drug discovery companies: AI Does Not Make It Easy by Derek Lowe

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

Parents Sue School That Gave Bad Grade to Student Who Used AI to Complete Assignment

An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.

The tabloids are gonna be going nuts over this.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

This is both old news and kinda… not that surprising when you think about it, but I searched and didn’t see any commentary on this here.

Meta has hired a former Project 2025 staffer and Ron DeSantis chief of staff as its director of public policy in the South.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

More AI generated shite from Ireland: Transport for Ireland decided, for some reason, to use AI for its Hallowe'en themed ads. This was roundly complained about online. Then someone decided, for genius reasons, to ring Liveline and complain about it.

For those who are unfamiliar, Liveline is a national phone-in show presented by JOEEEE DUFFY, who could start a fight with a brick wall. Every episode is about either a petty grievance or a real horror story. It's like a national whinge-in. I am going to listen to the episode (available here) and see if there are any highlights.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The gist of LivelineJoe is complaining about TFI putting up the taxi fares in Dublin.

The ad is for a TFI competition.

Ciarán works in advertising and thought that the TFI ad must be a scam first because of the use of AI.

Ciarán points out that TFI has plenty of money and could afford to pay a graphic designer or an illustrator.

Joe is furious that TFI won't say whether the ad was AI-generated or not. Ciarán points out that they didn't even mark the image as AI-generated.

Gerry O'Brien from Actors Equity is on the line. He's explaining the issues faced by background actors and voiceover actors who are being pressured into signing over their image/voice rights

Hannah Lockhead from Lucan is on the line. "I don't disagree with what anyone is saying, but personally I think the most offensive thing about this ad is just that it's ugly".

Gerry O'Brien is talking about fair compensation and clear consent for actors whose images are being used.

Hannah says that "Frankenstein's Wife is Margot Robbie"

Ciarán says that the AI art is "quite tacky" and compares poorly with the iconic London Underground logo.

Joe Duffy has seized the opportunity of having Gerry O'Brien on the line to complain that the Abbey Theatre has been closed for a year.

Joe Duffy has asked Hannah Lockhead (who is an actress) "are you working Hannah or are you resting". She's just finished filming a horror film in Wales called Esoteric.

That's pretty much it.

TFI have now apologised.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Bad feelings today. Google announced that an artist I like, Jacob Collier, has been working with them to develop an LLM based tool for music autoplag.

A little context: Collier has like 5 grammies, and is an incredibly creative artist that is able to take ideas and influence from disparate sources and synthesise something interesting (it’s not always good though…). Likely the greatest musician of his generation!

I don’t want to catastrophise too much here but I’m not looking forward to this being used as a cudgel from the promptfondlers.

The only open question I think is: to what extent is the music generation autoplag? (My guess, 100%)

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