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Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

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Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#101

Post by airspresso »

ethbr1 wrote: post #96
pxc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appe…

This seems misplaced in a discussion about generative AI. Automated systems for handling appels are already a thing and don't necessarily rely on generative AI like LLMs.

I agree that bans and appeal handling needs a human in the loop to work as intended, to have some way of handling the false positives. Without a human in the loop the appeal process can just as well be removed entirely, because it won't fulfill its purpose.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#102

Post by ziddoap »

nunez wrote: post #93
ziddoap wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

We're not talking about a doctor logging onto ChatGPT and asking it a question then blindly following what ChatGPT says.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#103

Post by consteval »

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.

If a human has written it I can be somewhat confident the code was at least compiled and tested a bit.

The same is not true for AI generated prose, in which the author often can't even be bothered to remove AI boilerplate. In such a case it's obvious the code has never been tested, and it might not even compile.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#104

Post by consteval »

poszlem wrote: post #12
happytoexplain wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why be so snide and dismissive regarding people's livelihoods?

We have been through this exact scenario hundreds of times with different technologies. As usual, someone's loss is another's gain. For example, people who have ideas to express but are not native English speakers, or those who struggle with expressing themselves in writing, will absolutely benefit from this technology.

> We have been through this exact scenario hundreds of times with different technologies

Yes, and we left people behind repeatedly. You'll notice people who may have intellectual or learning disabilities can no longer find a job with a decent wage in the US. Previously they could, because manual labor jobs were plenty. Now those are automated.

When we further automate and automate, we raise the barrier to entry, because robots or AI can perform the bottom most tasks. So, people who are not capable are left behind, and eventually there will be nobody to work jobs.

If the average job requires reading and writing, most people can do it. If the average job requires a high school diploma, less can do it. If the average job requires a degree, even less can do it, and so on and so on.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#105

Post by cjf101 »

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…

These policies are much clearer than they were when last I looked, which is good. On the other hand. Perplexity appeared to ignore robots.txt as part of a search-enhanced retrieval scheme, at least as recently as June of this year. The article title is pretty unkind, but the test they used pretty clearly shows what was going on.

https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-is-a-bullshit-machine...

It takes this sort of critical scrutiny, otherwise mechanisms like robots.txt do get ignored, whether willfully or mistakenly.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#106

Post by pxc »

airspresso wrote: post #101
ethbr1 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 appe…

This seems misplaced in a discussion about generative AI. Automated systems for handling appels are already a thing and don't necessarily rely on generative AI like LLMs. I agree that bans and appeal handling needs a human in the loop to work as intended, to have some way of handling the false positives. Without a human in the loop the appeal process can just as well be removed entirely, because it won't fulfill its…

Whether it's misplaced or not kinda depends on how big of a deal you think recent and upcoming generative AIs are. If they're really incredible, their recognition as something that makes moderation automation cheaper and/or better is likely to inject new energy into the preexisting drive to automate tasks like moderation and policy appeals. In the same way, if they make it possible to automate things that strictly required humans before (which seems to be the case for LLMs already), new classes of tasks will be automated that weren't before. Those things make things like a general right to appeals before competent, human reviewers more urgent, even if it's been a good idea for a long time.

On the other hand, if you don't see recent and upcoming generative AIs as that world-changing, they don't really change the picture as to whether or not the enshrinement of such a right into policy is warranted.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#107

Post by TekMol »

consteval wrote: post #104
poszlem wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been through this exact scenario hundreds of times with different technologies. As usual, someone's loss is another's gain. For example, people who have ideas to express but are not native English speakers, or those who struggle with expressing themselves in writing, will absolutely benefit from this technology.

> We have been through this exact scenario hundreds of times with different technologies Yes, and we left people behind repeatedly. You'll notice people who may have intellectual or learning disabilities can no longer find a job with a decent wage in the US. Previously they could, because manual labor jobs were plenty. Now those are automated. When we further automate and automate, we raise the barrier to entry, beca…

More and more work being done by technology and people having more and more leisure time is a bad thing?

Isn't the end result - all work being done by technology and all people having all of their time to spend on fun activities - a pretty nice situation?

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#108

Post by cudgy »

TekMol wrote: post #107
consteval wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have been through this exact scenario hundreds of times with different technologies Yes, and we left people behind repeatedly. You'll notice people who may have intellectual or learning disabilities can no longer find a job with a decent wage in the US. Previously they could, because manual labor jobs were plenty. Now those are automated. When we further automate and automate, we raise the barrier to entry, beca…

More and more work being done by technology and people having more and more leisure time is a bad thing? Isn't the end result - all work being done by technology and all people having all of their time to spend on fun activities - a pretty nice situation?

Leisure time? You mean “leisure time” digging for food in dumpsters and begging for scraps of change? Or is there some magical money machine that the main benefactors of AI will provide for the “fortunate” people removed from the economy and provided with so much “leisure” time?

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#109

Post by vouaobrasil »

andersco wrote: post #4

This seems like too much of an absolutist stance regarding AI. AI is a tool and as such has both good and bad uses. For example, maybe I have something I feel important to share with the world but I am not a very good writer. If AI can help me express my own ideas more clearly and clean up my grammar, that to me is a great use of AI. On the contrary, letting AI just churn out articles wholesale to me would be an abus…

I don't really think AI actually helps people express their ideas. I think it makes them less human and so it's not even them expressing ideas any more.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#110

Post by vouaobrasil »

delichon wrote: post #22

>> AI assistance empowers an author to level up — to make their ideas clearer, for example, or help them express themselves in a second language > And also, I vehemently disagree with this statement. Flaws express personality. So for the same reasons, does he wish to not read content that has been assisted by spelling or grammar checking? Or an editor, proof reader or fact checker? Or a thesaurus or dictionary? Or is…

Well, I think that a spell-checker is a lot different than AI because AI can change the entire tone of an article whereas a spell and grammar checker generally does not.
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