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Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

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111–120 of 122 posts

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#111
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.

I avoid AI whenever I can, including machine-learning assisted noise reduction. But my argument against AI is not against specific technologies, but the conglomerate of technologies that represents an ideal that pushes efficiency beyond what I consider useful.

Contrary to your accusation of being rage-blind, I have studied this topic in detail and have carefully thought about it and read many articles in philosophy about it. I am still trying to articulate my ideas but my general feelings go way beyond emotions.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#112
post #37

I see where the author is coming from - like any new technology, AI is getting abused significantly: Better scams, stealing creator IP, developing thought crutches, emotional dependencies on artificial companions, vast energy usage, and the collapse of personality and knowledge across the societal mean. Some people say that LLMs make you more productive, but guess what? The value captured by your productivity will on…

> But at the same time, we could definitely envision a world where these models accelerate human creativity

I feel like the scarcity and difficulty of creating something is part of the charm of art, instead of it being a matter of mass production. And for what? To show more ads?

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#113
post #29

But all the other non-AI slop that Medium put up over the years were fine with him?

I agree with what your saying, and actually that is another strike against Medium for me, but I was willing to tolerate the platform because at least there was a small subset of writers trying to go beyond hype headlines.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#115

Why this writer ever thought Medium ever cared about specifically human-written stories is beyond me. Medium is a bad idea for many reasons but AI doesn’t make my list at all. Also the stanch anti-AI stance is incredibly off putting, saying things like they won’t even read an article with an AI-generated image or AI-assisted (as if they can actually tell with certainty). AI (LLMs) are a tool, nothing more, no differe…

> My money is on either this writer fading into obscurity or using AI tools in the future when they realize their stance was silly.

I will never use AI tools, never. And I am more than happy to fade into obscurity. I just want to make enough money (without AI) so I can take care of my family in peace, and also articulate my ideas against AI to whomever will listen. I am absolutely not concerned about becoming famous.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#117
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What I tried to express is how we will look back on this in the future. Demanding a ban of AI will look just as insane as it would be to demand a ban of the wheel, metal, electricity, machines, computers or the internet.

Or the nuclear bomb? Yet we do have a sort of "ban" on it. Some things are just too powerful, and not all technological inventions are good. What about nerve gas? The world has effectively banned that too.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#118
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?

If I had a choice, I would not allow the doctor to give me an AI assisted diagnosis in the first place.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#119
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?

Not sure if you mean me but I wasn't interested in clicks when writing this article. In fact, I was getting thousands of clicks and comments on Medium and now I get almost none because I deleted all my articles there. I wasn't making money either. So, not about clicks. I'm just genuinely concerned about the future of life on this planet.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#120
post #105
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…

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 cri…

> The article title is pretty unkind, but the test they used pretty clearly shows what was going on.

I believe this article is around the same misunderstanding - it doesn't appear to show any evidence of their crawler, or web scraping used for training, accessing pages prohibited by robots.txt.

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