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Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

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Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#81

Post by rsynnott »

ziddoap wrote: post #61
sofixa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wastes your time because it's full of cruft. And you cannot assume to trust it will solve your problem, so you're risking losing even more time.

While I'm not about to defend AI blog spam, what you just said it completely applicable to human-generated blogs as well. You should not just assume something is trustworthy or will solve your problem just because it was written by a human. And I have read plenty of cruft-filled blogs/articles/etc. from humans.

> While I'm not about to defend AI blog spam, what you just said it completely applicable to human-generated blogs as well.

It kind of depends on the subject. If the blog is about politics, say, then you may assume that the human author is likely to be willing to lie. If it's about a non-contentious subject, though, then it is highly unlikely the human author will lie, and if they don't know, then, well, okay, _some_ people will write articles about stuff that they don't understand, but it's not common. Most non-psychopaths, if they don't know the answer, won't just make something up.

Whereas the magic robot will very happily spew nonsense on any subject.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#82

Post by rsynnott »

causal wrote: post #43

> I am absolutely against artificial intelligence. I'm curious where someone like him draws the line. AI is an ambiguous term. He's an author and photographer, so perhaps AI has just come to mean LLMs and image generators? I might even agree with the thrust of his concerns, but this kind of diatribe always come off a bit rage-blind, and maybe brings the strength of the discussion down a little.

The industry only has itself to blame for this, because, for a decade or so, anything 'AI-ish' has almost always been branded as ML (presumably due to the previous AI winter, where the term 'AI' became poisonous to VCs). If people equate AI with generative AI, it is only because, well, _so does the industry_.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#83

Post by jaredcwhite »

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'm 100% in agreement with the author, and to answer your question: if I found out my doctor had based their diagnosis on output from an AI, I'd find another doctor.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#84

Post by Ukv »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #76
Ukv wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The EU's AI act points to the DSM directive's text and data mining exemption, allowing for commercial data mining so long as machine-readable opt-outs are respected - robots.txt is typically taken as the established standard for this.

In the US it is a suggestion (so long as Fair Use holds up) but all I've seen suggests that the major players are respecting it, and minor players tend to just use CommonCrawl which also does. Definitely possible that some slip through the cracks, but I don't think it's as useless as is being suggested.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#85

Post by ziddoap »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #83
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'm 100% in agreement with the author, and to answer your question: if I found out my doctor had based their diagnosis on output from an AI, I'd find another doctor.

I find that wild, but to each their own!

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#86

Post by [deleted] »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #83
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'm 100% in agreement with the author, and to answer your question: if I found out my doctor had based their diagnosis on output from an AI, I'd find another doctor.

[deleted]

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#87

Post by AStonesThrow »

rsynnott wrote: post #82
causal wrote: post #43

> I am absolutely against artificial intelligence. I'm curious where someone like him draws the line. AI is an ambiguous term. He's an author and photographer, so perhaps AI has just come to mean LLMs and image generators? I might even agree with the thrust of his concerns, but this kind of diatribe always come off a bit rage-blind, and maybe brings the strength of the discussion down a little.

The industry only has itself to blame for this, because, for a decade or so, anything 'AI-ish' has almost always been branded as ML (presumably due to the previous AI winter, where the term 'AI' became poisonous to VCs). If people equate AI with generative AI, it is only because, well, _so does the industry_.

The neural nets of the industry have been retrained: https://xkcd.com/2173/

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#88

Post by Vecr »

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.

If you claim something is an "affront to humanity" it clearly induces doubt in your opponent that you would use it.

Not a good negotiating position where deterrence is concerned.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#89

Post by Vecr »

tempfile wrote: post #33
happytoexplain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm somewhere between the author and a true-neutral stance. Something can be "an affront to humanity [that] will ultimately cause our downfall" and also "help in some areas". Those aren't mutually exclusive, logically, despite sounding that way.

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.

Not really, many AI doomer types use AI for various tasks. Obviously they need to for research, but even outside that they say they get benefit.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#90

Post by ziddoap »

rsynnott wrote: post #79
ziddoap wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 be…

>Can you appoint to specific approved applications, or is this all hypothetical?

One of those links is a systemic literature review of a bunch of other existing literature.

If that is not enough for you, that is totally understandable! But if I'm honest here, I don't really care enough to go digging even further and trying to find additional studies or approved applications from your preferred country, with an ultimate goal of convincing you.

I would be fine if my current doctor used AI to assist in their diagnosis of me. You don't have to be, it's completely your right to choose that.

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