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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
That anti David Gerard Wikipedia nontroversy from awhile back has made it to Elon Muskās twitter feed: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1849862303614894223
I wish I was cool enough to have the worldās worst people get so mad at me that theyā¦make fan art and put it up on their website. Whatās Elon going for here?
If their aim is to make DG look bad ass, theyāre doing a good job.
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
no no, that one i totally did and iāll fuckin do it again
Is it possible to learn this power?
youāve got the abyss diving down pat
Anti David Gerard David Gerard Club
āI want to speak to the managerā energy.
oh boy itās gonna be funny/painful to see muskās biggest fans try to litigate this on Wikipedia with all the banal nothing and weird stalking that traceās article consists of
trace is on a quillette podcast about it too, prob where Musk got it
no new outbreak on Wikipedia itself
my condolences on the likely death threats. Iāve been there before and it sucks
so far itās two (2) idiots on X the everything app
lol
Itās all happening on X the death threats app
well so far itās the whiny little chuds app
though todayās was the Nigerian crypto guy who was angry Iād apparently deleted several of his articles
Only now? It is amazing how disconnected Musk is from that part of SV culture. Amazing, even sucks at the thing he should have a home field advantage at.
I had a mini identity crisis when i realized Iām more aware of techno-fascist writing than Elon Musk of all people.
If Elon had any self-awareness he wouldnāt be Elon
Maybe not super amazing, he probably avoids/firewalls out most of these people because theyād constantly be hitting him up for money
deleted by creator
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.
This tool solely exists so that you can ask it questions and get assistance, but also we disavow any responsibility for the answers to the questions we just told you to ask it. Has this kind of clause been held up in court anywhere? Like, Iām sure it has but it seems like the same logic would be ridiculous in any other context. Like, consider the fraught legal history of the anarchist cookbook.
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 āautomated AI detectionā 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 didnāt use and talking shit about it, miscounting our team members, etc)
Weāll be leaning on the Stochastic Parrot paper pretty hard, because itās a good entry into the field on the skeptical side and is just well constructed in general. Iām 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 āIt canāt be that stupidā trap. Any pointers in that direction are most welcome!
Wish us luck, heh!
good luck! it sounds like youāre coming in remarkably well-prepared, so unless theyāre gonna go fingers-in-ears (and it sounds like the PMās better than that), youāre at least likely to make an impact
Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose
between this and all the SEO on OpenAIās marketing horseshit and breathlessly parroted press releases, itās exhausting to find good sources for how any of this stuff actually works in reality. shit, Iāve had old primary sources on things like Sora get buried after OpenAIās promises didnāt pan out. Iām hoping you can find what you need ā our back archives might have a few links if you havenāt searched through here yet.
Kinda nervous about it, not gonna lie. Really appreciate the positive vibes!
Edit: And thanks so much for keeping this community alive!
hah of course!
Best of luck!
o7 much appreciated!
A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI āhostsā (non-English link).
Theyāre trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason theyāre firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be āan experiment to appeal to Gen Zā. Fortunately, most peopleās response seems to be āfuck off with this crapā.
I justā¦ canāt 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 āexperimentsā with AI media. Heads should roll for this.
I justā¦ canāt 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 āexperimentsā with AI media. Heads should roll for this.
i think it might be code for firing these people, but technically not, because they just terminated contracts with 15 single-person companies, so they never really hired them in the first place
Update on the character.ai lawsuit:
Gizmodo just reported on the story - in addition to the suicide that kicked this litigation off, theyāve also discovered an hour-long screen recording where a test account (self-reported as thirteen years old) gets sexted relentlessly by the siteās chatbots.
So, in addition to driving one specific teen to suicide, character.ai is also facing accusations that their bots are sexually harassing children.
I have something that I want to post to MoreWrite and this is very convenient for my story
Glad I could be of help.
has the era of active sabotage of the autoplag inputs begun? letās hope so
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 Elonās stealing your data for his autoplag no matter what, you might as well try to force-feed it as much poison as you can.
Itās almost completely ineffective, sorry. Itās certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.
On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasnāt yet been invalidated and thereās 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 āforce-feedingā is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that āforcedā input is destined to be discarded or retagged.
yeah this is the thing Iāve been thinking a lot about
fucking reCaptcha is literally mass-weaponising users for data filtration, and there is no good counter besides just not using reCaptcha (which is something one canāt easily pull off without things like regulatory action, massive reputational problems that make people gtfo, etc)
I have similar worries about cloudflare being such a massive chokepoint and using that position to enable āai bot filterā services. feels extremely monopolistic, but ianal and Iām not entirely sure what the case grounds/structure on that would be (if any)
the only other viable strategy at the moment is fully breaking contact with any potential bad traffic systems, and thatās extremely fucking dire because thatās yet another nail in the coffin of the increasingly less open internet
The whole Cloudflare bot detection is so weird and eerie. Iāve had issues where I canāt get past it presumably just because Iām using some in-application browser just to get a login cookie, but other times it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked.
it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked
Fucking what. Iāve heard of sites blocking curl and Iāve been able to get around it by copying user agent and sometimes cookies from the browser. Now Iām cursed with the knowledge that I could probably just scrape stuff from everywhere
I saw people say they would add 10% opaque layers of the musk with Epsteinās accomplice (whos name i forgot for a second and too lazy to look her up) photo. Would be nice if there was a tool to do so automatically. (Not that i post on twitter anymore).
tbh that sounds like a pretty easy script to write! Too bad I am not near a computer rn
I got nerd sniped into trying to resize
felons_musk_and_maxwell.webpto the same size as some base image before compositing it on top with a 10% dissolve in the samemagickinvocation but I need to sleep so Iām giving up for now.Wouldnāt really need a script, though. Just open up photoshop or GIMP and add a layer after everything is finished.
But that doesnāt scale properly, you want ideally some sort of browser extension that just automatically does it for you before the data gets send to twitter.
It would be funny if someone was literally beating up servers with a wooden shoe.
āpercussive maintenanceā
momty python style giant sabot descends on Microsoft data centre
They added sleeps to training jobs? Sounds like they deserve a raise for improving energy efficiency insteadā¦
we call it clogging, folks, we put a little clog in the machine
Iām sorry Mr. Musk, grokās a bit constipated today. Someone fed it too much cheese. Then it started hallucinating.
ooh I like that
I thought they were gonna do that themselves by feeding on their own outputs littered all over the www. Maybe they can use some help.
thatās also happening, but yeah itās going to have to be a team effort
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 āin imprint pages across our marketsā. The new wording states: āNo part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systemsā, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.
Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isnāt gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. itās time to give Big AI a wedgie.
Itās 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 itās fair use or otherwise not something copyright law is concerned with, the copyright holderās objection doesnāt matter.
For the record, I think AI models are derivative works and thus theyāre not only infringing on typical āall rights reservedā 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.
I thinkt itās 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 theyād get the lionās share of that revenue.
OpenAI and friends tried the same thing - scrape everything, build AGI, reap the rewards. Except it didnāt work, and theyāre in a much worse position morally. Even if they can get a judgement that what theyāre 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.
Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isnāt gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. itās 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.
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 arenāt doing so hot. I hope itās the discovery process for some of the inevitable lawsuits.
itās pretty publicly known
the VCs are gonna take one heckuva bath
this is peak AI. you might not like it, but itās 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 donāt exist, seems baffled people donāt like it starring three bots and deepfake of WisÅawa 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 arenāt probably bringing serious money either way now
homepage of that radio boasts about their āalmost entirely created by AIā content. it looks like they tried to convince zoomers to get an FM radio and listen to it somehow. itās gonna go great
apparently this radio is in liquidation since january however this might be related to dislodging previous govtās propagandists from public media
*original report used very handy word that does not appear in english that one could translate as āfewteenā and can mean any number from 11 to 19 inclusive
What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai donāt sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the sĆ©ance 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 Iāve come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPTās attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who itās trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.
you gotta admit one thing: this cures imposter syndrome
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 canāt tell if this is brilliant satire or not.
Fuck, I didnāt need to be reminded that they named the robot Optimus. Was āBenderā or āWall-Eā too much of a deep cut? Or is it just that Disneyās trademark lawyers are scarier than Hasbro and Nvidia combined?
My read: sounds like a teenager that knows the touted functionality of the scam tech they are referencing, but is not wise enough to the ways of the world to know they are scams.
KendrickZitron dropped - its mainly focusing on Prabhakar Raghavanās recent kicking upstairs, and Googleās 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, Googleās 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 Googleās gratuitous monopoly over search (and likely ads) is coming to an end. Itās more than likely that Google sees AI as fundamental to its future growth and relevance.
Man, itās 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, howās GE doing these days again?
Itās not that the money is unaware this kills the business. They know. They donāt 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, itās discarded for the next one.
But paying executives in stock options helps āalign incentivesā or whatever
Really enjoying watching Ed level up from week to week. The Zingularity is Near.
As the AI bubble weakens, he only gets stronger.
I think this is the second or third time that either Ed or somebody on his Discord reminded me about Shingy
If your Wikipedia page contains as many random arXiv preprints for references as the āprompt engineeringā article, consult your physician.
I was expecting a spicier Talk page :(
I just tagged the article and added a talk page note
āThey wish this technology didnāt existā: Perplexity responds to News Corpās lawsuit
āThere 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 didnāt exist,ā said the Perplexity team in the blog. āThey 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.ā
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 weāre gonna see some attempts at an outright ban on AI. How successful theyāre gonna be, I donāt know, but at the bare minimum itāll enjoy some popularity on the political fringe.
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 Perplexityās business model again?
idea landlords: making sure that no one is living rent free in someone elses head
On one hand, big ālet them fightā energy. On the other hand this is a bit more Alien v Predator than Godzilla v Kong. No matter who wins, we lose.
they wish this technology didnāt exist
this is supposed to be invalidating, but likeā¦ yes? whatās wrong with that?
Burglars telling homeowners to cope and seethe when questioned about their possession of crowbars at time of arrest.
You know youāre dealing with serious people when the dogwhistles come out.
Character.ai is getting sued thanks to one of their users killing himself, and The New York Times is talking about it (thereās also a piece by Gary Marcus talking about a previous incident if youāre 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 wonāt get DMCAād into oblivion, theyāre still gonna be wary of the potential for a Dasani-level PR nightmare.
Of course, thatās assuming that Section 230 protects you from being held liable for what your autoplag does - if Ms. Garcia, whose sonās suicide prompted this entire mess, succeeds in court, the legal precedent set means youāre likely gonna have to worry about being sued if/when someone ends up injured/killed/defamed/otherwise fucked up because of its outputā¦
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 itās actually impossible to understand which parts of society are causing kids to be depressed, so we must take it as a given that we canāt do anything about it. I regret having done this to myself.
This is nothing, The characterAi subreddit was in full meltdown earlier.
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
But your honor, weāre a crypto mining company; we donāt add any value!
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.
