11–20 of 145 posts
Sidenote, but I love that in a GitHub issue discussing banning the use of LLMs, the GitHub interface asks if there's anything I'd like to fix with CoPilot.
I think everything has a growing problem with LLM/AI generated content. Emails, blog posts, news articles, research papers, grant applications, business proposals, music, art, pretty much everything you can think of. There’s already more human produced content in the world than anyone could ever hope to consume, we don’t need more from AI.
But in general I think most people still remain excessively gullible and naive. Social media image crafting is one of the best examples of this. People create completely fake and idealized lives that naive individuals think are real. Now with AI enabling one to create compelling 'proof' of whatever lie you want, I think more people are becoming more suspicious of things that were, in fact, fake all along.
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Going back to ancient times many don't know that Socrates literally wrote nothing down. Basically everything we know of him is thanks to other people, his student Plato in particular, instead writing down what he said. The reason for this was not a lack of literacy - rather he felt that writing was harmful because words cannot defend themselves, and can be spun into misrepresentations or falsehoods. Basically - the argumentative fallacies that indeed make up most 'internet debates', for instance. Yet now few people are not aware of this issue, and quotes themselves are rarely taken at face value, unless they confirm ones biases. People became less naive as writing became ubiquitous, and I think this is probably a recurring theme in technologies that transform our abilities to transfer information in some format or another.
I make a lot of drive-by contributions, and I use AI coding tools. I submitted my first PR that is a cross between those two recently. It's somewhere between "vibe-coded" and "vibe-engineered", where I definitely read the resulting code, had the agent make multiple revisions, and deployed the result on my own infrastructure before submitting a PR. In the PR I clearly stated that it was done by a coding agent. I can't…
Honestly, this is kind of where I see LLM generated content going where you'll have to pay for ChatGPT 9 to get information because all the other bots have vandalized all the primary sources.
What's really fascinating is you need GPUs for LLMs. And most LLM output is, well, garbage. What did you previously need GPUs for? Mining crypto and that is, at least in the case of Bitcoin, pointless work for the sake of pointless work ie garbage.
I can see a future in our lifetimes where a significant amount of our capital expenditure and energy consumption is used, quite simply, to produce garbage.
I do not use Copilot, Claude, etc, although I partially agree with one of the comments there, that using LLM for minor auto-completion is probably OK, as long as you can actually see that the completion is not incorrect (although that should apply to other uses of auto-completion too, even if LLM is not used; but it is even more important to check more carefully if LLM is used). I think it would be better to not accept any LLM generated stuff otherwise (although the author might use LLM to assist before submitting it if desired (I don't, but it might help some programmers), e.g. in case the LLM finds problems with it, that they will then have to review themself to check if it is correct, before correcting and submitting it; i.e. don't trust the results of the LLM).
It links to https://github.com/lxc/incus/commit/54c3f05ee438b962e8ac4592... (add .patch on the end of the URL if it is not displayed), and I think the policy described there is good. (However, for my own projects, nobody else can directly modify it anyways; they will have to make their own copy and modify that instead, and then I will review it by myself and can include the changes (possibly with differences from how they did it) or not.)
Curious to know if others are seeing a similar uptick in AI slop in issues or PRs for projects they are maintaining. If yes, how are you dealing with this? Some of the software that I maintain is critical to container ecosystem and I'm an extremely paranoid developer who starts investigating any github issue within a few minutes of it opening. Now, some of these AI slop github issues have a way to "gaslight" me into…
I think everything has a growing problem with LLM/AI generated content. Emails, blog posts, news articles, research papers, grant applications, business proposals, music, art, pretty much everything you can think of. There’s already more human produced content in the world than anyone could ever hope to consume, we don’t need more from AI.
In some ways I'm starting to enjoy this. Do you remember the 419 scams? 'Hi, I'm a Nigerian prince named Michael Jordan. Give me $50 so I can buy some chemicals to clean a bunch of money I secretly stowed away and I'll send you $5000.' People actually used to fall for that. Of course some people probably still would (and a lot more certainly gets blocked by spam blockers) but I think overall society grew less substan…
It is still a serious problem just want that to be abundantly clear. Several thousand people (in the US alone) fall for it every year. I used to browse 419 eater regularly and up until a few years ago (when I last really followed this issue) these scams were raking in billions a year. Could be more or less now but doubt it’s shifted a ton.
I think everything has a growing problem with LLM/AI generated content. Emails, blog posts, news articles, research papers, grant applications, business proposals, music, art, pretty much everything you can think of. There’s already more human produced content in the world than anyone could ever hope to consume, we don’t need more from AI.
In some ways I'm starting to enjoy this. Do you remember the 419 scams? 'Hi, I'm a Nigerian prince named Michael Jordan. Give me $50 so I can buy some chemicals to clean a bunch of money I secretly stowed away and I'll send you $5000.' People actually used to fall for that. Of course some people probably still would (and a lot more certainly gets blocked by spam blockers) but I think overall society grew less substan…
There is the hope that in dumping so much slop so rapidly that it will break the bottom of the bucket. But there is the alternative that the bottom of the bucket will never break, it will just get bigger.
I make a lot of drive-by contributions, and I use AI coding tools. I submitted my first PR that is a cross between those two recently. It's somewhere between "vibe-coded" and "vibe-engineered", where I definitely read the resulting code, had the agent make multiple revisions, and deployed the result on my own infrastructure before submitting a PR. In the PR I clearly stated that it was done by a coding agent. I can't…