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Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

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111–120 of 152 posts

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#111
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use microsoft outlook most of the spam never makes it into the spam folder because it goes to the inbox. Do you have a source for your somewhat unbelievable claim?

Mail server op here: mail exchangers (mine included) absolutely silently drop insane amounts of email submissions without any indication to the sender or the envelope recipient. At most there's a log the operator can look at somewhere that notes the rejection and whatever rules it was based on.

With no access to logs the claim is just handwaving.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#112
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when the corporations and the state decide to be nasty, that's OK?

I've been getting a real "well, they deserved it" vibe off this site tonight. Thanks for not being that way.

The user base for this site is incredibly privileged. Not meant as a judgement just a stated observation.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#113
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge amount of spam never makes it into spam folders; it’s discarded silently.

If you use microsoft outlook most of the spam never makes it into the spam folder because it goes to the inbox. Do you have a source for your somewhat unbelievable claim?

Tell me you've never run a mail server without telling me you've never run a mail server.

It's pretty standard practice for there to be a gradient of anti-spam enforcement. The messages the scoring engine thinks are certainly spam don't reach end users. If the scoring engine thinks it's not spam, it gets through. The middle range is what ends up in spam folders.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#114
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mail server op here: mail exchangers (mine included) absolutely silently drop insane amounts of email submissions without any indication to the sender or the envelope recipient. At most there's a log the operator can look at somewhere that notes the rejection and whatever rules it was based on.

With no access to logs the claim is just handwaving.

But I have access to logs, which is why I can describe to you how minimal the logging of email rejections is

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#115
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fear is that by delegating to an ai, there's no recourse if the outcome for the person is undesirable (correctly or not). What is needed from the AI is a trace/line-of-reasoning to which a decision is derived. Like a court judgement, which has explanations attached. This should be available (or be made as part of the decision documentation).

The EU has already addressed this in the GDPR. Using AI is fine, but individuals have a right to demand a manual review. Companies and government agencies can delegate work to AI, but they can't delegate responsibility. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

A manual review then it’ll be rejected as well. Some HR person who doesn’t know the difference between Java and JavaScript isn’t going to result in better decisions. The problem is and has always been top of funnel screening.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked in this field for 20+ years and as far as I can tell the only consistent colloquial definition of AI is “things lay people are surprised a computer can do right now”

AI has always been a marketing term for computer science research -- right from the inception. It's a sin of academia, not the public.

As if anyone in the public cared about marketing for CS research. Hardly anyone is even exposed to it.

AI in the public mind comes from science fiction, and it means the same thing it meant for the past 5+ decades: a machine that presents recognizable characteristics of a thinking person - some story-specific combination of being as smart (or much smarter) than people in a broad (if limited) set of domains and activities, and having the ability (or at least giving impression of it) to autonomously set goals based on its own value system.

That is the "AI" general population experiences - a sci-fi trope, not tech industry marketing.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#117
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge amount of spam never makes it into spam folders; it’s discarded silently.

If you use microsoft outlook most of the spam never makes it into the spam folder because it goes to the inbox. Do you have a source for your somewhat unbelievable claim?

The spam folder (or the inbox, in what you consider outlook) isn't for messages known to be spam; it's for messages that the filter thinks might have a chance of not being spam.

Most spam is so low-effort that the spam rules route it directly to /dev/null. I want to say the numbers are like 90% of spam doesn't even make it past that point, but I'm mostly culling this from recollections of various threads where email admins talk about spam filtering.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#118
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Quite a lot of people try(ied) to buy it with blood and still fail(ed) : https://samzdat.com/2017/06/01/the-meridian-of-her-greatness... (Note how depending how one (mis)reads what you wrote, this is human nature, and there no escaping it, and you would likely be miserable if you tried.)

[dead]

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the line is actually much blurrier than it might seem. Realistically everything is a remix of things people have done before; almost nothing is truly brand new. So why specifically are people allowed to build on humanity's past achievements, but not AI?

> why specifically are people allowed to build on humanity's past achievements, but not AI? Let’s untangle this. 1. Humanity’s achievements are achievements by individuals, who are motivated by desires like recognition, wealth, personal security, altruism, self-actualisation. 2. “AI” does not build on that body of work. A chatbot has no free will or agency; there is no concept of “allowing” it to do something—there i…

That's a long-winded way of spelling out a a Dog in the Manger approach to society, coupled with huge entitlement issues:

There is something valuable to others, that I neither built nor designed, but because I might have touched it once and left a paw print, I feel hurt no one wants to pay me rent for the valuable thing, and because of that, I want to destroy it so no one can have it.

Point 2) operates on a spectrum, there's plenty of cases where human work has no agency or free will behind it - in fact, it's very common in industrialized societies.

RE 3), "engineers" and "operators" are distinct; "engineers" make money because they provide something of immense value - something that exists only because of collective result of 1), but any individual contribution to it is of no importance. The value comes from the amount and diversity and how it all is processed. "Operators" usually pay "engineers" for access, and then they may or may not use it to provide some value to others, or themselves.

In the most basic case, "engineers" are OpenAI, and "operators" are everyone using ChatGPT app (both free and paid tiers).

RE 4) That's the sense of entitlement right there. Motivations from point 1. have already been satisfied; the value delivered by GenAI is a new thing, a form of reprocessing to access a new kind of value that was not possible to extract before, and that is not accessible to any individual creator, because (again) it comes from sheer bulk and diversity of works, not from any individual one.

IMO, individual creators have a point about AI competing with them for their jobs. But that's an argument against deployment and about what the "operators" do with it; it's not an argument against training.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has always been a marketing term for computer science research -- right from the inception. It's a sin of academia, not the public.

As if anyone in the public cared about marketing for CS research. Hardly anyone is even exposed to it. AI in the public mind comes from science fiction, and it means the same thing it meant for the past 5+ decades: a machine that presents recognizable characteristics of a thinking person - some story-specific combination of being as smart (or much smarter) than people in a broad (if limited) set of domains and activi…

The scifi AI boom in the 60s follows the AI research boom. This was the original academia hype cycle and one which still scars the public mind via this scifi.
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