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Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

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Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#91

Post by ziddoap »

rsynnott wrote: post #78
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 dep…

>What sort of AI assistance did you have in mind.

The designed-for-medicine kind, not the ChatGPT kind.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#92

Post by nunez »

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 think it's an incredibly valid take.

People are already using AI to write emails, essays, publications, and more. SWEs are using it to literally do their job.

This stuff brings us even closer to the last act of the movie "Up." It's insane to me that people _don't_ see this.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#93

Post by nunez »

ziddoap wrote: post #85
jaredcwhite wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

i find it wild that you would trust technology that has no problem with giving you wildly wrong information!

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#94

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Ukv wrote: post #84
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 als…

Technically, robot.txt isn't enforcing anything, so it is just trust.

""OpenAI CTO doesn't know what data was used to train the company's video generating platform, Sora""

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AYbZG3h14w

Funny. If I can browse to it, it is public right? That is how some people's logic goes. And how OpenAI argued 2 years ago when GPT3.5/ChatGPT first started getting traction.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#95

Post by andrewinardeer »

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.

How do you reconcile that you interact with AI when you may not even realise? This could be in the form of a recommendation feed, a newsreader delivering a story on the 6 o'clock news or using software that was built by it?

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#96

Post by ethbr1 »

pxc wrote: post #47
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.

Indeed the latter is kind of a precursor to the former: AI has to be helpful enough for key use cases in order to become used in whatever critical ways cause it to serve as humanity's downfall. Setting aside the apocalyptic prediction in particular, this sort of thing is already the case with many things that have become irritating or pernicious at scale, like automated phone systems and SEO. The latter of those exam…

> AI has to be helpful enough for key use cases in order to become used in whatever critical ways cause it to serve as humanity's downfall.

I'm sure the strong proponents of AI in all the places have never griped about false positive account permabans from cloud services or app stores.

What could possible go wrong with turning a function over to an automated system that's PS: What we need are mandatory rights to appeal to a human, when automated decision systems are used, with legally defined response time SLAs and arbitration options.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#97

Post by ethbr1 »

happytoexplain wrote: post #52
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.

I disagree. Generically speaking that's true, but specifically speaking, AI has a wide variety of use cases, and they do not all, from the perspective of a normal user, appear to help spread what they perceive to be the bad parts. Obviously if we could somehow separate the good from the bad, we should, but it seems like an intractable problem. This dichotomy (polychotomy?) is also aggravated by the fact that when peo…

> they are probably 99% referring to generation of prose, art, and code

That was what I took TFA to be speaking about. It's ambiguous, probably because author didn't expect an audience of HN readers, but most of the enumerated concerns and uses cases are specific to "AI as replacement for human creativity, in artistic endeavors."

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#98

Post by ethbr1 »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #95
jaredcwhite wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you reconcile that you interact with AI when you may not even realise? This could be in the form of a recommendation feed, a newsreader delivering a story on the 6 o'clock news or using software that was built by it?

There are two different meta-uses of AI that we're talking about here.

   #1 AI as final step

   #2 AI as upstream step, with subsequent human review/adjustment
In the case of medical AI, we're almost always talking about the latter: models preclassify or review results, which are then subsequently reviewed by a human.

The cases people seem to have problems with are where no human eyes/hands provide oversight to probabilistically-correct model output*.

It's an important enough distinction that I'd be in favor of mandating companies declare which they're using (for a specific use case).

* As distinct from previous deterministically-correct expert systems / rules-engines

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#99

Post by Ukv »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #94
Ukv wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 als…

Technically, robot.txt isn't enforcing anything, so it is just trust. ""OpenAI CTO doesn't know what data was used to train the company's video generating platform, Sora"" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AYbZG3h14w Funny. If I can browse to it, it is public right? That is how some people's logic goes. And how OpenAI argued 2 years ago when GPT3.5/ChatGPT first started getting traction.

> Technically, robot.txt isn't enforcing anything, so it is just trust.

There's legal backing to it in the EU, as mentioned. With CommonCrawl you can just download it yourself to check. In other cases it wouldn't necessarily be as immediately obvious, but through monitoring IPs/behavior in access logs (or even prompting the LLM to see what information it has) it would be possible to catch them out if they were lying - like Perplexity were "caught out" in the mentioned case.

> Funny. If I can browse to it, it is public right? That is how some people's logic goes. And how OpenAI argued 2 years ago when GPT3.5/ChatGPT first started getting traction.

If you mean public as in the opposite of private, I think that's pretty much true by definition. Information's no longer private when you're putting it on the public Internet.

If you mean public as in public domain, I don't think that has been argued to be the case. The argument is that it's fair use (that is, the content is still under copyright, but fitting statistical models is substantially transformative/etc.)

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#100

Post by thankyoufriend »

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…

GenAI will just be a way to reduce labor costs and capture/monetize customer data even further. IMO, everyone should be against non-local GenAI in any product and they should be against even local GenAI when its downstream effects clash with human interests.

Does GenAI monetarily disincentivize the self-expression of humanity through art and other creative endeavors, such endeavors that were already difficult to make a living on pre-GenAI? I think it does.

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