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Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

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Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#71

Post by ziddoap »

JohnFen wrote: post #66
ziddoap wrote: post #10

> Unlike many, I don’t sit on the fence. I hate it with a passion. I think it’s an affront to humanity and will ultimately cause our downfall. If an article uses AI, even just for header images, I don’t read it. This seems just as silly of a take as the fervent supporters of sticking AI everywhere. AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) and is shitty in others (e.g. spam content). I wonder if the a…

> I wonder if the author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted? I can't speak for the author, obviously, but personally my answer would be "it depends". If the diagnosis came from a doctor who happened to use AI as one of their tools, I'm OK with that (as long as it was a locally-hosted AI, but that's a different issue). If the diagnosis came from AI without a substantial…

That sounds like a completely reasonable approach!

What the author has written, in my opinion, is unreasonable because it is absolute in its hatred for AI.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#72

Post by tempfile »

pxc wrote: post #57
tempfile wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's coherent (just) for something to be an affront to humanity and helpful for some tasks. It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it.

> It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it. A lot of people (particularly Americans) seem to think of nuclear bombs in exactly this way. They typically see the 'some task' to be of extremely outsized necessity and importance, and I think they'd say that makes the two ideas cohere.

Then those people do not seriously think nuclear weapons are an affront to humanity. It doesn't just mean "very bad". It's against human dignity. You shouldn't do it, ever. Killing isn't an affront to humanity, but torture is, for example.

If you think using nuclear weapons can be justified, then you don't think they're evil, you just think they're dangerous.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#74

Post by ziddoap »

yugffred wrote: post #59
ziddoap wrote: post #10

> Unlike many, I don’t sit on the fence. I hate it with a passion. I think it’s an affront to humanity and will ultimately cause our downfall. If an article uses AI, even just for header images, I don’t read it. This seems just as silly of a take as the fervent supporters of sticking AI everywhere. AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) and is shitty in others (e.g. spam content). I wonder if the a…

Someone has to stop giving these sloppyjoes the clicks, because then they’ll stop making slop. They are uninterested in the content they just want the clicks. If a doctor just slops a diagnosis that results in malpractice via “hallucination” then people will stop going to them. Will you continue to use that dangerous doctor just for the sake of your misguided principle?

>Will you continue to use that dangerous doctor just for the sake of your misguided principle?

What a weird interpretation of what I said.

Obviously I mean a competent doctor that uses AI-assistance in a responsible manner, not a dangerous doctor that commits malpractice.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#75

Post by pxc »

tempfile wrote: post #72
pxc wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it. A lot of people (particularly Americans) seem to think of nuclear bombs in exactly this way. They typically see the 'some task' to be of extremely outsized necessity and importance, and I think they'd say that makes the two ideas cohere.

Then those people do not seriously think nuclear weapons are an affront to humanity. It doesn't just mean "very bad". It's against human dignity. You shouldn't do it, ever. Killing isn't an affront to humanity, but torture is, for example. If you think using nuclear weapons can be justified, then you don't think they're evil, you just think they're dangerous.

I absolutely agree about nukes. The US' use of nukes was barbaric imperialism and when USians' say it was justified I think that's a transparent post-hoc rationalization. And I agree totally that the position I outlined is deeply hypocritical.

I'm less sure that it's an outright logical contradiction, but I'm inclined to agree with you there as well.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#76

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Ukv wrote: post #60
cjf101 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a bunch of reporting on how AI companies and researchers were using tools that ignored robots.txt. It's a "polite request" that these companies had a strong incentive to ignore, so they did. That incentive is still there, so it is likely that some of them will continue to do so.

CommonCrawl[0] and the companies training models I'm aware of[1][2][3] all respect robots.txt for their crawling. If we're thinking of the same reporting, it was based on a claim by TollBit (a content licensing startup) which was in turn based the fact that "Perplexity had a feature where a user could prompt a specific URL within the answer engine to summarize it". Actions performed by tools acting as a user agent (l…

Robots.txt is a suggestions. As is reporting on using it.

The companies that are ignoring robots.txt, are also probably the companies not advertising that they are ignoring robots.txt.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#77

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

packetlost wrote: post #63
ziddoap wrote: post #10

> Unlike many, I don’t sit on the fence. I hate it with a passion. I think it’s an affront to humanity and will ultimately cause our downfall. If an article uses AI, even just for header images, I don’t read it. This seems just as silly of a take as the fervent supporters of sticking AI everywhere. AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) and is shitty in others (e.g. spam content). I wonder if the a…

> AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) Uhhh, I don't know about that one. Have we seen studies that show real predictive capabilities? Anecdotal evidence is not helpful, and it seems rather risky to depend on something that has not been thoroughly vetted when it comes to people's lives.

In diagnosis there is no prediction. The AI can find a pattern somewhere and that’s it. It’s actually very efficient in some fields (like recognizing stuff in a scanned body) but doctors always have the final say. It’s like a hint, and it should stay like that.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#78

Post by rsynnott »

ziddoap wrote: post #10

> Unlike many, I don’t sit on the fence. I hate it with a passion. I think it’s an affront to humanity and will ultimately cause our downfall. If an article uses AI, even just for header images, I don’t read it. This seems just as silly of a take as the fervent supporters of sticking AI everywhere. AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) and is shitty in others (e.g. spam content). I wonder if the a…

> AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses)

Increasingly (and I think certainly in the above case) AI is used as shorthand for genAI (which is unsurprising, as up until recently most AI-ish things got called ML anyway). I certainly hope no-one's using LLMs for medical diagnoses...

> I wonder if the author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted?

It really depends on what you mean by 'AI-assisted', IMO. If you mean that the doctor had asked a chatbot, I'd very much be looking for a second opinion. What sort of AI assistance did you have in mind.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#79

Post by rsynnott »

ziddoap wrote: post #70
packetlost wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) Uhhh, I don't know about that one. Have we seen studies that show real predictive capabilities? Anecdotal evidence is not helpful, and it seems rather risky to depend on something that has not been thoroughly vetted when it comes to people's lives.

> In 2020, Zhang’s team developed an AI imaging-assisted diagnosis system for COVID-19 pneumonia and published in Cell. Based on the 500,000 copies of CT images that the team studied, the system was able to distinguish COVID-19 from other viral pneumonias within 20 seconds, with an accuracy rate of more than 90%. https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-022-00035-y?error=coo... > AI improves the lives of patients, phys…

I mean if I was given a COVID diagnosis or non-diagnosis based on the above, I'd be reporting the doctor, because it's far worse accuracy than generally available methods (even antigen methods)... Even if visual methods were the only means of diagnosing COVID (as was the case for the first few weeks after the virus emerged), sorry, but I'd be asking for an actual radiologist. Radiologists were able to do this with better accuracy.

Really, the only way this could possibly be useful were in a hypothetical case where only visual methods were available and there weren't enough radiologists, and even then it wouldn't be _very_ useful, given the high failure rate.

> Not only that, AI assists physicians in detecting diseases by utilizing complicated algorithms, hundreds of biomarkers, imaging findings from millions of patients, aggregated published clinical studies, and thousands of physicians’ notes to improve the accuracy of diagnosis.

This sounds very fuzzy. Can you appoint to specific approved applications, or is this all hypothetical?

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#80

Post by yugffred »

ziddoap wrote: post #74
yugffred wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone has to stop giving these sloppyjoes the clicks, because then they’ll stop making slop. They are uninterested in the content they just want the clicks. If a doctor just slops a diagnosis that results in malpractice via “hallucination” then people will stop going to them. Will you continue to use that dangerous doctor just for the sake of your misguided principle?

> Will you continue to use that dangerous doctor just for the sake of your misguided principle? What a weird interpretation of what I said. Obviously I mean a competent doctor that uses AI-assistance in a responsible manner, not a dangerous doctor that commits malpractice.

It’s helpful to examine extremes to see where your logic breaks down.

You are assuming a “competent” blogger even in the face of a slop banner.

How will you know the doctor is competent? All you know is they give sloppy diagnoses.

How will the op know the blog writer is competent?

Their metric is “if they use slop at the top of their blog it’s a waste of their time to investigate further”.

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