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I don't want anything your AI generates

coryd.dev

181–190 of 345 posts

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. Why should you be free of accountability for the effects of your actions?

Because the effects of my actions in this case have yet to be demonstrated, let alone shown to cause harm. The author claims there is expoititive harm to labor, the environment, and maybe others. That is not at all obvious or provably true yet. As I said, I'm open to the discussion, but I can't defend myself in good faith when people claim some slam dunk moral certitude. Again, don't use generative AI if it makes you…

>The author claims there is expoititive harm to labor [...]. That is not at all obvious or provably true yet.

Not at all obvious? These models are trained on vast amounts of content, much of it copyrighted, and basically none of it licensed.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#182
post #63

Author’s point about environmental cost is a frustration I share. Most people in the tech industry are at least somewhat concerned about the environment but their use and endorsements of technologies don’t follow at all: cloud technologies running in massive over-provisioned datacenters, LLMs consuming more energy than some countries, etc. It’s totally cool to strip mine the Earth, clear cut forests, and burn a bunch…

What consumes more energy in AI, training or inference? It seems to me that training ought to be a super shift-able workload, a great fit for intermittent green energy sources.

The expensive bit is not the electricity, it's the cost of the GPUs, so they will train flat out.

There is also a massive amount of competition between the various players, and nobody taking part cares about the energy use (otherwise they wouldn't be doing it), so i don't see this happening.

(rough numbers: a H100 is 700W, which is $613/year at $0.1/kWh, and the estimated cost is $25000-40000)

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#183
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're underestimating the benefits of having social community online, I've found and made extremely close friends and even partners online and they have been utterly life-changing for me. I'm making/have made (I'm different cases) herculean efforts to be able to be with them in person permanently because obviously in person interaction is better, but being able to discover people that are so good for me and…

I've been thinking about this a lot the last two years as someone who also grew up with social community online. It was life-changing for me too, but sometimes I catch myself wishing I could have had these experiences offline instead. I read this a few months ago and I still think about it all the time. Curious about your thoughts. https://maya.land/monologues/2023/08/12/social-media-chalk-m...

That was actually an amazing read, thank you so much. It reflects my thoughts on the matter pretty well — to use the analogy of the article, there are certainly some versions of social media that are poison, and online interaction may be less "socially nutritious" than in person interaction ceterus paribus, but things are rarely eever ceterus paribus! You have to take into account the relative barrier to entry of online interaction versus in person interaction, because the alternatives may well be online or nothing because the barriers of anything else are far too high for an individual, and you have to take into account the possibility that the available in person interaction for someome may in fact be non nutritious or poison itself. Likewise, depending on the way you use the internet to socialize, it may be more or less socially nutritious: interacting on something like Instagram is basically poison, Twitter Facebook and Tumblr offer almost no nutrition at all, and forums and medium to large IRC chats (or Discord servers) maybe significantly more over time or none at all depending on how they work, while conversely a small IRC chat or Discord or group chat of close friends that you met online in other places and consciously gathered over time into an intentional community of people who all intimately know each other and share every day's victories and defeats, hopes and fears, traumas and healing, art and jokes, means a whole lot more, even if being with them in person would be better. That last option, where you use niche interest online communities to find people, but then graduate them to something "online" but far more intimate, with maybe even the goal of living near each other one day, is rarely pointed out, but it's something I started to intentionally do four years ago and I've found it's by far the healthiest option.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bold claim. In order for that to be true there would have to be some fundamental limitation preventing AI from ever thinking on the level of a human.

It’s a bold claim the other way too, that we can create something human from binary logic.

Nowhere close to the same magnitude. You’re saying with 100 years, 1000 years, 10,000 years, etc of technological progress we will never be able to simulate, or emulate what is between your ears.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#186
post #63

Author’s point about environmental cost is a frustration I share. Most people in the tech industry are at least somewhat concerned about the environment but their use and endorsements of technologies don’t follow at all: cloud technologies running in massive over-provisioned datacenters, LLMs consuming more energy than some countries, etc. It’s totally cool to strip mine the Earth, clear cut forests, and burn a bunch…

I'd rather shoot for a world where clean energy is abundant than abandon the benefits of ever increasing computational power. Thankfully, this is the world we are trending towards, and not the world of 'humans are a virus' self loathing, even if the toxic mindset is having a moment.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#187
Might sound like an ass but would it be possible to tell something was made with the help of AI in the future?

Sure, most things AI generated can seem obvious that it's... well AI generated. But if it was generated and afterwards fine-tuned by people, the content would be indistinguishable.

Just to put it out there, Although I'm biased towards AI as i believe it can benefit people, I understand well enough the people it can benefit could be saints or assholes.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#188

I'm not a fan of this hyper aggressive line-in-the-sand argumentation about AI that pushes it all precariously close to culture war shenanigans. If you don't like a new technology that is perfectly cool and your right to an opinion. Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. That is NOT at all clear, settled, or even correct m…

The idea that machine learning like large language models and image generating systems exploit labor might be up for debate, but the fact that they are disproportionately damaging to the environment compared to the alternatives is certainly true in the same way that it's true for Bitcoin mining. And there's more than just those two aspects to consider, it's also very much worth considering how the widespread use of s…

how's it more damaging to the environment of you can replace 1k people, that's 1k people staying at home instead of commuting, sure that causes pain if we can't figure out ubi or a way to house and feed the masses, also many of the biggest ai users are working to get their energy 100 percent from solar, wind, and geothermal. AI is something we've been heading towards since the dawn of man.

Hell, ancient Rome had automatons. There's no way to stop it. Ideally we merge with the ai to become something else than give it super powers and it decides to destroy us. I'm not sure the benevolent care giver of humanity is something we can hope for.

It's a scary but interesting future, but I mean we've also got major problems like cancer, global warming, etc, and ai is a killer researcher, that did 300k years worth of human research hours in a month to find tons of materials that can possibly be used by industry.

They're doing similar with medicine, etc... there's many pros and negatives, I'm a bit of an accelerationist, rip the band-aid off kind of guy, everyone dies someday I guess, not everyone can say they were killed by a Terminator, well at least not yet lol, tongue in cheek.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#189

My boss “writes” policies etc using ChatGPT. They’re generic, overly wordy and say nothing of original thought. I don’t read them and don’t care. When he sends me a link to them in MS Teams I always click the first auto suggested response Teams like “Looks great!” Machine v machine.

do you read policies normally that weren't ai generated? I mean how many people never read the TOS or user policy?

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#190

My boss “writes” policies etc using ChatGPT. They’re generic, overly wordy and say nothing of original thought. I don’t read them and don’t care. When he sends me a link to them in MS Teams I always click the first auto suggested response Teams like “Looks great!” Machine v machine.

There's a part of me that thinks that this is actually what's great about tools like ChatGPT. Such a huge percentage of typical intra-office communication is neither worth writing nor worth reading. It only happens because someone who will neither write nor read it has mandated that it must happen, and it's easier not to argue. Farming that work out to GPT, though, is excellent damage control. It minimizes the cost t…

yeah, I like the concept of bullet points in, lengthy email out, just to be translated back to bullet points at the other end, maybe eventually we just skip all the filler shit and bullet points become the norm, of course we can have ai help us brainstorm those too.
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