Zompist Bboard Again

Ares Land wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 9:30 am I imagine there are some; are there really that many?

Enough that this guy has made doing videos debunking them his fulltime job.

TikTok has exactly the same problem with boosting "contrarian" voices which are actually just peddling thinly veiled racism in the form of conspiracy theories that Twitter and Facebook (and, indeed, Youtube) have struggled with in the past because, like all of those, they started with the promise of a "better algorithm" which consisted of semi-randomly picking someone and deeming them worthy of being internet-famous, and then had to enshittify in order to pivot to making money rather than spending it.

Ketsuban wrote: ↑Thu Mar 02, 2023 6:08 pm TikTok has exactly the same problem with boosting "contrarian" voices which are actually just peddling thinly veiled racism in the form of conspiracy theories

These guys are worse than cockroaches.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Mar 03, 2023 4:16 am

Ketsuban wrote: ↑Thu Mar 02, 2023 6:08 pm TikTok has exactly the same problem with boosting "contrarian" voices which are actually just peddling thinly veiled racism in the form of conspiracy theories

These guys are worse than cockroaches.

Cockroaches literally make the world better. They're like tiny roombas. These people are the opposite of cockroaches.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Fri Mar 03, 2023 5:02 am

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Mar 03, 2023 4:16 am

Ketsuban wrote: ↑Thu Mar 02, 2023 6:08 pm TikTok has exactly the same problem with boosting "contrarian" voices which are actually just peddling thinly veiled racism in the form of conspiracy theories

These guys are worse than cockroaches.

Cockroaches literally make the world better. They're like tiny roombas. These people are the opposite of cockroaches.

Except that cockroach crap causes people to develop asthma.

Wow, I did not expect this to be posted on the actual website of the actual US Federal Trade Commission:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/b ... aims-check

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Mar 05, 2023 9:09 am Wow, I did not expect this to be posted on the actual website of the actual US Federal Trade Commission:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/b ... aims-check

It's a very sensible view, though!

I just realized something today.

As linguists (I say this more in the academic sense, for instance I have a degree in the field), we have no standing to oppose data scraping for AI. Most linguistic data is scraped from somewhere or other—corpus linguistics is the obvious offender here but even acquiring languages by immersion is arguably scraping the data from the conversations going on around you in real space, and even going as far back as Panini when he drew up his description of Sanskrit—he didn’t just have Sanskrit magically installed into his brain via some sort of SmartCard. Google has a corpus of data (it’s called “Ngrams” I think?) it has scraped from all over the place and you can search it. Data scraping is kind of what we do.

it's not so much as a specialist in this or that field that we need to oppose ia, it's as a human being...
reality is far more complex than the simplifying thinking of the man who thinks it can substitute it to the point of replacing his fellow human beings...
whatever the specialists may say, the human being cannot be reduced to a tool, and the tool cannot replace the human being...
the most beautiful demonstration a machine can make will always be more vain than the simple smile from one human to another...

Man in Space wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 3:30 pm As linguists (I say this more in the academic sense, for instance I have a degree in the field), we have no standing to oppose data scraping for AI. Most linguistic data is scraped from somewhere or other—corpus linguistics is the obvious offender here but even acquiring languages by immersion is arguably scraping the data from the conversations going on around you in real space[....] Data scraping is kind of what we do.

I've heard this argument a lot— AI techbros can do what they want because hey, artists just reprocess other art. But it's a flawed argument.

One, it simply does not follow from "humans learn languages" or "artists study other artists" to "techbros can make their billions by putting artists out of work." The pro-AI side always wants to move the argument from the real-world enshittification that they're doing, to the wonders or dangers of AI itself. What AI can or can't do is not that important; it's what the techbros intend to do with it.

Two, it's both reductive and disingenuous to reduce everything to "data scraping." I'll grant you that human cognition is something like an LLM, but not that it is an LLM. LLMs are pretty amazing, but it's been amply demonstrated that they are not AIs, and pretending that they are is not helping anyone but said techbros. Even AI research is weakened by acting as if the problem of AI is already solved. It's nice, from a research point of view, when a new milestone is reached, but actual AI people shouldn't swallow the marketing hype.

Three, there are notions like copyright and free use and public domain and plagiarism and misrepresentation for a reason. Erasing distinctions by calling everything "data scraping" is like saying that gifts, sales, and robbery at gunpoint are all perfectly valid forms of "property transfer."

Finally, linguists (and others) should take the opportunity to make sure that their use of corpora is in fact ethical. Many speakers of minority languages believe quite strongly that researchers do not have the right to freely use their language, to say nothing of their artistic productions like songs and myths. Already some websites are declaring that their content is not authorized for use in LLMs. Is it linguists' right to use that data for their own purposes?

I'd also add that LLMs have the potential to harm corpus linguistics, precisely because uncounted numbers of unscrupulous people are going to flood the Web with bogus LLM-generated text. LLMs have an uncanny ability to produce plausible text; they do not generate correct text. You cannot trust LLM-generated text in the details, and that goes for trying to deduce linguistic facts from it.

you don't even need to break property laws, ia's are based on the web where everyone publishes by assigning their rights to the social networks they use...
an ia that would pay the rights of use to the social network holding the rights would be perfectly entitled to use everything you've published there...

the materialistic world we've become mired in forgets that objects are nothing without the people behind them...

art is not the painting you buy, but the action of the artist who struggles against matter to express himself, and leaves behind the result of this struggle...
what moves us is trying to get closer to the creative act by internalizing the feeling it provokes...

we can assign a virtual artist to the production of a machine and try to find in it a part of virtual humanity, but we're lying to ourselves...
whoever has tried to talk to a chatbot, even the best, realizes the uselessness of this conversation...

life feeds on life, you can suck stones trying to find a taste for them, but you'll surely die of hunger...

xxx wrote: ↑Wed Jul 19, 2023 2:38 am you don't even need to break property laws, ia's are based on the web where everyone publishes by assigning their rights to the social networks they use...
an ia that would pay the rights of use to the social network holding the rights would be perfectly entitled to use everything you've published there...

Just so you know, this is not how the web works. E.g. this website is not owned by "a social network"; neither is zompist.com-- they're owned by me. However, I don't own your posts; the only contract here is that if you post here, other members can see it.

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Jul 19, 2023 4:47 am

xxx wrote: ↑Wed Jul 19, 2023 2:38 am you don't even need to break property laws, ia's are based on the web where everyone publishes by assigning their rights to the social networks they use...
an ia that would pay the rights of use to the social network holding the rights would be perfectly entitled to use everything you've published there...

Just so you know, this is not how the web works. E.g. this website is not owned by "a social network"; neither is zompist.com-- they're owned by me. However, I don't own your posts; the only contract here is that if you post here, other members can see it.

Then again, both forums and personally owned private websites might be the exception rather than the norm on the web these days.

I may have been a little hasty, but the number of cases involving the reuse of posts on established networks, and the legal wrangling to assert one's rights in the face of network behemoths that make users blindly sign their general terms and conditions of use, which protect them more than they protect us, are legion...
and here we're talking about the opaque use of ia algorithms that don't reproduce this or that publication, but use them all...
the aim being more money less human...
and just as this has led to an environmental impasse, it could lead to an intellectual impasse (if the former doesn't intersect with the latter)...

Quite honestly, I never understood why we need AI in the first place. It seems difficult to imagine any use for AGI apart from displacing humans from the economy or even control of civilization in general. We have quite a good thing going as relative masters of our own existence and it really baffles me that so many people are rushing to end that. How do these techbros even intend to keep the superintelligent AGIs obedient to them?

Honestly, while I don't think AIs will go away, the tech bros will stop trying to push them into everything once the new money making technology of the future comes along. And then the rest of us can make sure there are proper limits on AIs and their uses. Assuming people even care enough at that point to do that.

malloc wrote: ↑Wed Jul 19, 2023 9:59 am Quite honestly, I never understood why we need AI in the first place. It seems difficult to imagine any use for AGI apart from displacing humans from the economy or even control of civilization in general. We have quite a good thing going as relative masters of our own existence and it really baffles me that so many people are rushing to end that. How do these techbros even intend to keep the superintelligent AGIs obedient to them?

well, you're right! and if we lived under actual democracies this would be a question put to us by our politicians years ago. but you see, *we* are the relative masters of our existence as a species, but we-as-people aren't: additionally, because we don't have very much democracy, the decisionmakers for the species don't care if *you* are chill without AI; *they* are going to be even more rich and powerful with it, so it gets made. the risks, whatever they are, are borne by the rest of us.

that being said, AI is technology: *they* need AI in order to get things done without having to pay people to do those things, or to just pay like six MLops engineers and seventy tensorflow monkeys or whatever to do the kinds of things hundreds of people are currently required to get done. but honestly we'll probably get some downstream benefits too. cars will be better and cheaper, 3D printing might not require faffy and tiresome blender modeling but rather careful definition of the desired properties of the thing, you know, that kind of thing.

I can hardly overstate how much the future terrifies me these days. Things were terrible enough before all this broke and now we have an entirely new slate of problems. Is there anything we can possibly try to solve or resist this crisis?

malloc wrote: ↑Mon Jul 24, 2023 8:46 pm I can hardly overstate how much the future terrifies me these days. Things were terrible enough before all this broke and now we have an entirely new slate of problems. Is there anything we can possibly try to solve or resist this crisis?

yes! abolish capitalism, establish democratic control over the economy, and build strong and free institutions that foster discussion and research about what to do about these problems.

other than... i don't know, fam... prepping? starting self-sufficient permaculture villages? building a foundation a la hari seldon? but also, what alice said.