wtf is going on with Microsoft and OpenAI of late?! LIke Microsoft bought into OpenAI for some shocking $10bn USD, then Sam Altman gor fired, now he’s been hired by Microsoft to run up a new “AI” division. wtf/! seriously?! 🤔 #Microsoft #OpenAI #Scandal

Game-playing DeepMind AI can beat top humans at chess, Go and poker
An artificial intelligence capable of beating humans at a variety of games is an important step towards a more general intelligence, says Google DeepMind ⌘ Read more

@xuu@txt.sour.is Right now they’re laying the groundwork for uncritical belief in the power of #AI, so the next step will be accepting the magical incantations as if they were real.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci predicting weather is literally a step up from the 3 body problem into n-body chaos. AI is just statistics pushed up into chaos. The future of computing is indistinguishable from magical incantations

The AI bubble is now upon us!

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How AI avatars of the deceased could transform the way we grieve
Companies are now offering chatbots that appear to come from beyond the veil. But psychologists say this “grief tech” may interfere with the patterns of brain activity through which we adapt to loss ⌘ Read more

DeepMind AI can beat the best weather forecasts - but there is a catch
By using artificial intelligence to spot patterns in weather data, Google DeepMind says it can beat existing weather forecasts up to 99.7 per cent of the time, but data issues mean the approach is limited for now ⌘ Read more

Hop, j’ai modifié mon script qui me permet de publier sur mon #twtxt et sur mastodon pour qu’il ajoute un lien vers une pièce jointe au besoin. Merci arpinux pour l’image listant les biais cognitifs https://0x0.st/HtaP.jpg

Avec la tempête, j’ai éteint mon serveur lorsqu’il y a eu une coupure de courant. L’électricité n’était pas de retour ce matin lorsque je suis parti aux #utopiales2023. Je l’ai désormais rallumé ;)

Je cherche un site qui me permette de calculer la distance parcourue en cliquant juste sur un plan. Pour l’instant, je n’ai rien de très pratique, ou alors j’ai mal cherché. #help

Et voilà, je me suis décidé à publier mes marques pages après un peu de tri. Il y en aura d’autres à l’avenir, petit à petit, car il y a certainement encore des trucs à découvrir (sous gopher par exemple) et d’autres que j’ai oublié : https://si3t.ch/pub/public_bookmarks.txt

Elle: Chéri, j’ai un problème, je ne sais plus où j’ai mis un fichier ni comment il s’appelle. Par contre, je sais que dedans j’ai écrit ‘cahier du soir’. Comment je peux faire? Moi > T’inquiète poulette, un petit script find+odt2txt+grep et c’est la fête. Elle > Ooooh merci tu es si fort et si beau ! (non)

Trop content: j’ai réussi à changer la lampe du clignotant arrière de ma voiture tout seul. Fallait démonter le phare. C’est tout bête, mais j’en suis fier :). (je déteste les voitures, ça coûte cher et c’est tout le temps en panne/vidange/CT

GPT-4 wins chatbot lawyer contest – but is still not as good as humans
Several AI chatbots were tested to see how well they could perform legal reasoning and tasks used by human lawyers in everyday practice – GPT-4 performed the best, but still wasn’t great ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Horseshit hype:

• AI that we have today cannot think–there is no cognitive capacity
  
• AI that we have today cannot be interviewed–“inter” “viewing” is two minds interacting, but AI of today has no mind, which means this is a puppet show
  
• AI today is not free–it’s a tool, a machine, hardly different from a hammer. It does what a human directs it to do and has no drives, desires, or autonomy. What you’re seeing here is a fancy Mechnical Turk
  

This shit is probably paid for by AI companies who desperately want us to think of the AI as far more capable than it actually is, because that juices sales and gives them a way to argue they aren’t responsible for any harms it causes.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net No, Google does not predict this. “Google AI” has been self-promoting like this for decades. Remember when they used to brag that they could predict the onset of flu season weeks before it started? That silently went away because they got it badly wrong many times and people caught on to how bad their “predictions” actually were.

They can’t stop themselves. Anything about AI coming out of big tech companies these days is marketing, not real, and certainly not science.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net because of course they have.

Emily Bender, a computational linguistic and excellent critic of this generative AI nonsense, uses an analogy of an oil spill to characterize what is happening as a result of generative AI. It’s polluting the world with false information, false images, false “academic” articles, false books. The companies that create this stuff are not cleaning up their misinformation spill; they’re letting the mess spread all over. It’s being used to commit crimes, and that’ll only get worse. Just like an out of control oil spill will destroy entire ecosystems.

Tricks for making AI chatbots break rules are freely available online
Certain prompts can encourage chatbots such as ChatGPT to ignore the rules that prevent illicit use, and they have been widely shared on social platforms ⌘ Read more

Google AI predicts floods four days early in South America and Africa
An artificial intelligence from Google can predict floods even in regions with little data on water flow, and its predictions four days in advance are as accurate as conventional systems manage for the same day ⌘ Read more

So in the wave of all things AI and this roller coaster we’re all on, apparently actors, writers and so on are all on strike. I don’t recall seeing anything in my feeds about this, so I had to ask a few folk in real life wtf was going on there…

Turns out they’re all on strike because they fear that AI/ML models will take over their jobs. There are numerous cases where “tech” has already replaced an actor, now it will just get much easier to do.

why am I not surprised?… https://uk.pcmag.com/ai/147757/elon-musk-will-train-his-ai-project-using-your-tweets

So given’s Google™’s recent policy changes where they now outright and blatantly just admit they’ll crawl, index and feed your (yes your fuckind) writings, thoughts, conversations, etc into their AI models; Should we as a small niche community (still growing) think about perhaps finally building Yarn.social v2 where we have encrypted feeds? 😅

@marado@twtxt.net It’s very different. Language models are part if traditional search engines and translation engines. The new policy mentions Cloud AI abd Bard specifically. This is a weird change and probably a good preemptive move as I said previously. I’m not sure why you’re downplaying it

@marado@twtxt.net It can’t possibly be defensible, which to me always signals an attempt at a power grab. They never explicitly said “we will use anything we scrape from the web to train our AI” before–that’s new. There is growing pushback against that practice, with numerous legal cases winding through the legal system right now. Some day those cases will be heard and decided on by judges. So they’re trying to get out ahead of that, in my opinion, and cement their claims to this data before there’s a precedent set.

Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools.

Google can eat shit.

@prologic@twtxt.net The hackathon project that I did recently used openai and embedded the response info into the prompt. So basically i would search for the top 3 most relevant search results to feed into the prompt and the AI would summarize to answer their question.

Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI – Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

Someone on here gave me a hard time when I suggested that the crypto grifters were pivoting to AI after crypto collapsed. But, they were and they still are.

Seems to me you could write a script that:

• Parses a StackOverflow question
  
• Runs it through an AI text generator
  
• Posts the output as a post on StackOverflow
  

and basically pollute the entire information ecosystem there in a matter of a few months? How long before some malicious actor does this? Maybe it’s being done already 🤷

What an asinine, short-sighted decision. An astonishing number of companies are actively reducing headcount because their executives believe they can use this newfangled AI stuff to replace people. But, like the dot com boom and subsequent bust, many of the companies going this direction are going to face serious problems when the hypefest dies down and the reality of what this tech can and can’t do sinks in.

We really, really need to stop trusting important stuff to corporations. They are not tooled to last.

Dear Stack Overflow, Inc.

Stack Overflow is being inundated with AI-generated garbage. A group of 480+ human moderators is going on strike, because:

Specifically, moderators are no longer allowed to remove AI-generated answers on the basis of being AI-generated, outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances. This results in effectively permitting nearly all AI-generated answers to be freely posted, regardless of established community consensus on such content.

In turn, this allows incorrect information (colloquially referred to as “hallucinations”) and plagiarism to proliferate unchecked on the platform. This destroys trust in the platform, as Stack Overflow, Inc. has previously noted.

It looks like StackOverflow Inc. is saying one thing to the public, and a very different thing to its moderators.

“Sam Altman’s AI Hype Roadshow”

“The project of Altman and his merry band of doomsayers appears to be to capture power and create obfuscation by making new myths and legends”

“It assumes that no one will pull back the curtain and expose it as a market-expansion strategy”

Yes.

On Understanding Power and Technology

Debt Collectors Want To Use AI Chatbots To Hustle People For Money

Starting to get ugly already.

@obsidian-roundup@feeds.twtxt.net how many damn AI plugins does obsidian need? This shit is so annoying; it’s sucking the oxygen out of every other development effort.

🌠 PDF improvements & More AI Options
Check out some great guides on how to create folder and tag systems, and how to use the Strange New Worlds & bookmarks plugin! ⌘ Read more

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club interesting, because some people are writing articles declaring the metaverse dead: https://www.businessinsider.com/metaverse-dead-obituary-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-tech-fad-ai-chatgpt-2023-5

I have no interest in doing anything about it, even if I had the time (which I don’t), but these kind of thing happen all day every day to countless people. My silly blog post isn’t worth getting up in arms about, but there are artists and other creators who pour countless hours, heart and soul into their work, only to have it taken in exactly this way. That’s one of the reasons I’m so extremely negative about the spate of “AI” tools that have popped up recently. They are powered by theft.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

There is (I assure you there will be, don’t know what it is yet…) a price to be paid for this convenience.

Exactly prologic, and that’s why I’m negative about these sorts of things. I’m almost 50, I’ve been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they don’t trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. It’s a societal cancer.

All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. They’ll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They won’t stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.

That’s a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for decades. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesn’t make sense. It’s insane.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net

I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing

So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don’t mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?

I’d really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don’t send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

(1) You go to the store and buy a microwave pizza. You go home, put it in the microwave, heat it up. Maybe it’s not quite the way you like it, so you put some red pepper on it, maybe some oregano.

Are you a pizza chef? No. Do we know what your cooking is like? Also no.

(2) You create a prompt for StableDiffusion to make a picture of an elephant. What pops out isn’t quite to your liking. You adjust the prompt, tweak it a bunch, till the elephant looks pretty cool.

Are you an artist? No. Do we know what your art is like? Also no.

The elephant is “fake art” in a similar sense to how a microwave pizza is “fake pizza”. That’s what I meant by that word. The microwave pizza is a sort of “simulation of pizza”, in this sense. The generated elephant picture is a simulation of art, in a similar sense, though it’s even worse than that and is probably more of a simulacrum of art since you can’t “consume” an AI-generated image the way you “consume” art.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I also think it is best called fake. Art is created by human beings, for human beings. It mediates a relationship between two people, and is a means of expression.

A computer has no inner life, no feelings, no experience of the world. It is not sentient. It has no life. There’s nothing “in” there for it to express. It’s just generating pixels in patterns we’ve learned to recognize. These AI technologies are carefully crafted to fool people into experiencing the things they experience when they look at human-made art, but it is an empty experience.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net yeesh, it’s a for-pay company I wouldn’t give them the output of your mind for free and train their AI for them.

On LinkedIn I see a lot of posts aimed at software developers along the lines of “If you’re not using these AI tools (X,Y,Z) you’re going to be left behind.”

Two things about that:

1. No you’re not. If you have good soft skills (good communication, show up on time, general time management) then you’re already in excellent shape. No AI can do that stuff, and for that alone no AI can replace people
   
2. This rhetoric is coming directly from the billionaires who are laying off tech people by the 100s of thousands as part of the class war they’ve been conducting against all working people since the 1940s. They want you to believe that you have to scramble and claw over one another to learn the “AI” that they’re forcing onto the world, so that you stop honing the skills that matter (see #1) and are easier to obsolete later. Don’t fall for it. It’s far from clear how this will shake out once governments get off their asses and start regulating this stuff, by the way–most of these “AI” tools are blatantly breaking copyright and other IP laws, and some day that’ll catch up with them.
   

That said, it is helpful to know thy enemy.

Rotation
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Superintelligent AIs
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Have you heard about the guy who worked on the Google AI chat bot? It is more than a chat bot and the conversation he published (got put on paid leave for doing that) is pretty scary : https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917

where’s the DAO that puts money in my pocket? i rack up debt daily taking care of my shit. i bet you think insurance can cover my needs! sure i got treated (by racking up thousands in fees). i wrote a paper about this in 2016. i imagined a world where my friends wouldn’t bleed. like that even matters.. the world’s a cruel joke. either you pay and you win or you’re in debt till you croak. https://infinite.ai/

Jake explains how to correctly encode data for POST requests as no AI can.