51–60 of 144 posts
AI policy with AI usage is always difficult to write/read. Lengthy, frontloaded with excuses, values, and big words, followed by more words to fill the gap between sliced up ugly truth. AI policy without AI usage is easy to read and write. > We don't use them. That's it.
AI is in danger of peeing in it's own water source. It's unbelievably useful at imitating and generating content, but it needs enough original content to be able to train and scrape. Google got one thing wrong and nearly destroyed the internet - people need to have an incentive to contribute content online, and that incentive should not be to game the system for advertising. This in particular dawned on me when askin…
I think most labs actively create synthetic data using existing model as part of the mix for the pretraining stage for their next model. Would love to know exactly what the latest process is to keep slop out of training data.
:)
AI is in danger of peeing in it's own water source. It's unbelievably useful at imitating and generating content, but it needs enough original content to be able to train and scrape. Google got one thing wrong and nearly destroyed the internet - people need to have an incentive to contribute content online, and that incentive should not be to game the system for advertising. This in particular dawned on me when askin…
So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam?
AI makes this problem worse in both directions. It makes it fantastically easy to produce ""content"". So if you're scraping content, or browsing content, you're going to run in to increasing amounts of AI. Micropayments makes this worse, because it's then a means of getting paid to produce spam. The problem comes when you want the ""content"" to be connected to real questions like "how does my dryer work" or "what is going to happen to oil availability six months from now".
AI trainers didn't pay book authors until forced to. $3,000 ended up being a pretty high value! But it was also a one-off. Everyone writing books from now on is going to have to deal with being free grist to the machine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many open source projects accept donations. There's also explicitly paid-for software. What exactly do you wish for that you can't do right now?
Specifically the part where engineers get paid the same way as artists on Spotify.
> Our approach comes from two convictions:
Uhuh.
> that AI cannot replace human insight, creativity, and ingenuity
Sure, agreed, no dispute.
> and that these tools, used well, can help professionals do better work.
[[citation needed]]
Prove it. I don't believe you.
Self-contradictory policy. > Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research, including navigating large volumes of material, summarizing background documents, and searching datasets. If this is their official policy, Ars Technica bears as much responsibility as the author they fired for the fabricated reporting. LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very r…
> LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very randomly latch on to certain keywords and construct a narrative from them, with the result being something that is plausibly correct but in which the details are incorrect, usually subtly so, or important information is omitted because it wasn't part of the random selection of attention. I don't know what you've been doing, but the summaries I get from…
It is nice to see, but I fear it will be the same as with papers and their news and internet. I could buy a paper and read it but why would I? The same will most likely happen with human written news and cheap AI slop news. Why would anyone pay more for higher quality when you can have low quality cheap product? Look at food for example. Price is most important factor in the choice of what you are going to buy. I wil…
If ai generated and human written content ended up like that you would have a pretty decent shot at a fully human authored blog or substack that people paid for specifically, or human written books specially curated.
> Anyone who uses AI tools in our editorial workflow is responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the resulting work. This responsibility cannot be transferred to colleagues, editors... This sounds a direct callout to the incident earlier this year where an apparently sick staff member relied on an AI to reproduce quotes, and it did not. Ars retracted the article and the staffmember was fired. I have felt very et…
>This sounds a direct abrogation of journalistic standards by the Ars editorial team. We depended on an ecosystem of news and journalism to keep our polities informed. However, if that ecosystem is starving it will increasingly fail to live up to its standards and we can expect these failures to impact us increasingly. I am not defending bad journalists, nor creating an excuse to tolerate such behavior in the future.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The next sentence after your quoted section: “Even then, AI output is never treated as an authoritative source. Everything must be verified.”
Any verification process thorough enough to catch all LLM fabrications would take more work than simply not using the LLM in the first place. If anything verifying what an LLM wrote is substantially more difficult than just reading the material it's "summarising", because you need to fully read and comprehend the material and then also keep in mind what the LLM generated to contrast and at that point what the fuck ar…
You still need to check the junk you dig up using the metal detector.