BlueMonday1984

joined 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Just an off-the-cuff prediction: I fully anticipate AI bros are gonna put their full focus on local models post-bubble, for two main reasons:

  1. Power efficiency - whilst local models are hardly power-sippers, they don't require the planet-killing money-burning server farms that the likes of ChatGPT require (and which have helped define AI's public image, now that I think about it). As such, they won't need VC billions to keep them going - just some dipshit with cash to spare and a GPU to abuse (and there's plenty of those out in the wild).

  2. Freedom/Control - Compared to ChatGPT, DALL-E, et al, which are pretty locked down in an attempt to keep users from embarrassing their parent corps or inviting public scrutiny, any local model will answer whatever dumbshit question you ask for make whatever godawful slop you want, no questions asked, no prompt injection/jailbreaking needed. For the kind of weird TESCREAL nerd which AI attracts, the benefits are somewhat obvious.

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

One answer perhaps would be that anyone who thinks AI art is good probably lacks the taste to appreciate anything beyond the generic, and the discernment to tell that it is submerged in the depths of uncanny valley.

Very true - arguably truer today than it was earlier, if DALL-E's declining quality is any indication.

DALL-E 2 had some degree of artistic talent (in the loosest sense), but because DALL-E was made and run by creatively sterile techbros without a shred of art skill, that talent was drowned very fucking quickly.

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

How about honeypotting? What’s the chance the crawlers are written smart enough to avoid a neverending HTTP stream?

Given the security record I mentioned earlier, their generally indiscriminate scraping and that one time John Levine tripped up OpenAI's crawler, I suspect its pretty high.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (3 children)

An invaluable repository of programming knowledge ground into dust as the last tokens of good will are cashed in for stinky money. It was a unique place, where self-moderation by the community actually worked to a large extent.

That's the worst part about this situation - Joel's burning the coder's Library of Alexandria in pursuit of that cash. Whatever comes to replace StackOverflow is gonna be a pale imitation of what came before, and I suspect the entire field of programming's gonna be feeling the setbacks for a long, long time.

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

Mumsnet becomes the latest company to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement.

Why AI bros are scraping TERF Island's Finest I'm not sure, but it'll be fun to watch the two of them slapfight each other.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah. There probably was a fair bit of stealth-crawling up to this point, but the perps knew they needed to keep it on the down-low.

The AI bubble, on the other hand, lacks the ability to keep it subtle, making it plainly obvious people's shit was getting stolen and showcasing AI bros/techbros' utter disregard for anyone but themselves (e.g. by ignoring robots.txt).

Personally, I expect this will lead to much stronger scraping protections being developed to combat shit like this - Cloudflare's already offering to block AI scrapers for its users and Kudurru's offering a similar service, I can easily see a new market opening up here.

(Off-the-cuff prediction: anti-AI scraping measures will likely start feeding false info to AI scrapers they detect - beyond simply throwing a wrench into those models, it'd also make it less likely AI scrapers will realise "hey, our shit's getting blocked")

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

I wonder how long it will be until there are companies actively promoting their lack of AI.

Its already happening, to some extent, but not mainly among the big corps. Grabbing some random examples I could find:

I'm probably missing some examples, but I think my point's made.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The good news is I barely use Protonmail (or email at all, for that matter).

The bad news is I have a fucking Proton account. Fuck.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Quickly added that bit, thanks for catching that.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Not a sneer, but an observation on the tech industry from Baldur Bjarnason, plus some of my own thoughts:

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before this big of a sentiment gap between tech – web tech especially – and the public sentiment I hear from the people I know and the media I experience.

Most of the time I hear “AI” mentioned on Icelandic mainstream media or from people I know outside of tech, it’s being used as to describe something as a specific kind of bad. “It’s very AI-like” (“mjög gervigreindarlegt” in Icelandic) has become the talk radio short hand for uninventive, clichéd, and formulaic.

Baldur has pointed that part out before, and noted how its kneecapping the consumer side of the entire bubble, but I suspect the phrase "AI" will retain that meaning well past the bubble's bursting. "AI slop", or just "slop", will likely also stick around, for those who wish to differentiate gen-AI garbage from more genuine uses of machine learning.

To many, “AI” seems to have become a tech asshole signifier: the “tech asshole” is a person who works in tech, only cares about bullshit tech trends, and doesn’t care about the larger consequences of their work or their industry. Or, even worse, aspires to become a person who gets rich from working in a harmful industry.

For example, my sister helps manage a book store as a day job. They hire a lot of teenagers as summer employees and at least those teens use “he’s a big fan of AI” as a red flag. (Obviously a book store is a biased sample. The ones that seek out a book store summer job are generally going to be good kids.)

I don’t think I’ve experienced a sentiment disconnect this massive in tech before, even during the dot-com bubble.

Part of me suspects that the AI bubble's spread that "tech asshole" stench to the rest of the industry, with some help from the widely-mocked NFT craze and Elon Musk becoming a punching bag par excellence for his public breaking-down of Twitter.

(Fuck, now I'm tempted to try and cook up something for MoreWrite discussing how I expect the bubble to play out...)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

ChatGPT to Orphan Crushing Machine?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Update - Ended up jumping ship to Librewolf, since I just didn't like the feel of Chromium.

I was contemplating going back to Firefox, but then I accidentally wiped my entire profile whilst trying to transfer over my browser history and went "fuck it, I'm sticking with Libre".

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