61–70 of 124 posts
Advertising is not your friend. Use ad blockers.
"Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots." Obtaining ad-supported service while blocking ads is theft of service. Do not expect such theft to go unpunished.
> Not to worry. If you’re fairly well educated, reasonably sensible, not prone to addictions, and in good mental health, you’re probably ok, for now. AI will learn to target you when you are at your most vulnerable. It will learn what hours you're usually feeling tired. Which nights you tend to get less sleep. It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsivel…
If you can collect data, you can apply intelligence to it. Patterns and statistical associations are everywhere, and at various levels of scope and complexity. The situation you're describing is very possible with future AI technology, and a baby form of it is already manipulating us wherever we go on social media.
> Not to worry. If you’re fairly well educated, reasonably sensible, not prone to addictions, and in good mental health, you’re probably ok, for now. AI will learn to target you when you are at your most vulnerable. It will learn what hours you're usually feeling tired. Which nights you tend to get less sleep. It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsivel…
> that's when AI will hit you Hit me and do what though? That's the bit that loses me on these hypotheticals. I can't think of any time I've bought something that wasn't researched or didn't sit in a checkout basket for at least a week. And this is maybe only a few times a year, most months I don't buy anything except groceries. I don't trust AI but I'm unconvinced about how successful it could be at manipulation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capitalism is to blame, not tech. The system would pervert anything, tech just happens to be profitable.
Capitalism is also tech.
> Not to worry. If you’re fairly well educated, reasonably sensible, not prone to addictions, and in good mental health, you’re probably ok, for now. AI will learn to target you when you are at your most vulnerable. It will learn what hours you're usually feeling tired. Which nights you tend to get less sleep. It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsivel…
The premise here is that the AI is operating at the behest of someone else. Now suppose that it's open source and runs on your own device. "It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsively" and then avoid presenting you with purchasing decisions at those times etc. It will digest both ad-laden blogspam and human psych research papers so it can present the i…
I swear that the displaced artist writer mafia is pulling all the stops to try and write low grade hit pieces and AI doomer narratives.
No one has been displaced. There's melodramatic doomers lamenting some ostensible future where AI displaces them, and there's tech-novice salt farmers collecting vials of these doomers' tears, but no serious displacement is happening.
This is a false statement. Any single example is enough to disprove the statement.
Consider this: "There are 36,659 people employed in the Coal Mining industry in the US as of 2023." [1]
Coal mining is in effect a displaced industry, that is hardly anyone actually still doing coal mining. The machinery does the work of 1000s of people. Same thing for farming. The displacements can happen.
Which comes to: "but no serious displacement is happening."
Citation needed. The entirety of the screen-writers guild would seemingly disagree with you based on the longest strike in their history. Given that evidence, I do think it is more plausible that you lack empathy and data for your comments compared to that entire group striking for no reason. Otherwise, can you clarify how you are correct and the entire union representing screen-writers wrong? Why are you are right and 200k other people wrong, about their own industry?
[1] https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/employment/coa...:
> Not to worry. If you’re fairly well educated, reasonably sensible, not prone to addictions, and in good mental health, you’re probably ok, for now. AI will learn to target you when you are at your most vulnerable. It will learn what hours you're usually feeling tired. Which nights you tend to get less sleep. It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsivel…
I've thought about trying to write a short story about an apocalypse in which Facebook or Youtube creates an AI that's so effective it traps the entire human race (including the creators) into doing nothing but engaging with the app, and doing the bare minimum to survive (and keep the servers running) since that's what it's told to optimise. But I'm not a great writer, and other stuff always comes up (those shorts ar…
Some of the asides are also hilariously/terrifyingly prescient. The passages on the evolution of video calling are some of my favourites.
> Not to worry. If you’re fairly well educated, reasonably sensible, not prone to addictions, and in good mental health, you’re probably ok, for now. AI will learn to target you when you are at your most vulnerable. It will learn what hours you're usually feeling tired. Which nights you tend to get less sleep. It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsivel…
> that's when AI will hit you Hit me and do what though? That's the bit that loses me on these hypotheticals. I can't think of any time I've bought something that wasn't researched or didn't sit in a checkout basket for at least a week. And this is maybe only a few times a year, most months I don't buy anything except groceries. I don't trust AI but I'm unconvinced about how successful it could be at manipulation.
How did this argument work when talking about locally run LLMs?
He would probably argue that future LLMs are less likely to have their weights released. It is remarkable and strange that we have so many open-weights models right now, considering how much they cost to make.
It's slightly weird that some of the companies doing this are VC-backed startups with no obvious business model, but that's hardly the only way to create them. Companies like Facebook could continue to release them purely for the PR. The cost is within the range of what could be done from donations by a non-profit organization. It's the sort of thing you might build a business model around in the same way that IBM or Intel does with Linux -- an obvious candidate here would be models released by Nvidia/AMD/Intel/Apple/etc. You might also build a business model out of consulting services rather than hardware sales, e.g. here's a free LLM and now you can pay us to integrate it with your company's systems.
This is also assuming that nobody ever figures out how to train a model using distributed computing. The second that happens there will be arbitrarily many free models because there are a zillion people willing to contribute a day's worth of consumer GPU time to a free model project.
I swear that the displaced artist writer mafia is pulling all the stops to try and write low grade hit pieces and AI doomer narratives.
Is it? Or is tech folks finding out that they're the baddies and not happy with their reality hitting that of the rest of society? I think it's the latter, but only history will tell. "Tech Is Not Your Friend" would've been more apropos, hype cycles and all that (adtech, crypto, gen AI, etc). Just cut the "changing the world" facade (not wrong! just not for the better in a lot of cases) and come right out with "we're…
Tech leaders the baddies for abusing tech? Maybe.
Government leaders the baddies for allowing the above free reign in all instances and allowing the sheer monetisation of the tech+data siphon? Yes.