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15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

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Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#181
post #3

"continvoucly morged" is such a perfect phrase to describe what happened, it's poetic

Decades upon decades of hard work by public contributors -- open source code, careful tech blogging, painstaking diagrams -- all of it will be assimilated without credit or accuracy into the morg.

Resistance is futile.

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was reading the word morged thinking it was some new slang I hadn't heard of. Incredible.

I propose: Morge: when an AI agent is attempting to merge slop into your repo.

Or something more general, like when a concept or diagram gets pulled into the AI's rough knowledge base, but it completely misses the point and mangles it.

Or, alex_suzuki's colorful definition.

But really, whoever goes to Urban Dictionary first gets to decide what the word means. None of the prior definitions of "morg" has anything to do with tech.

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#183
post #26
post #3

"continvoucly morged" is such a perfect phrase to describe what happened, it's poetic

"Babe, wake up. New verb for slop just dropped." It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Quiet! MSFT's damage control team does not want us to embiggen the incident.

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#184
I wonder how far the balance will have to tip before the general public realizes the danger. Humanity's combined culture, for better or worse, up to 2021 or so was captured in a very large but still ultimately finite stream of bits. And now we're diluting those bits at an ever greater speed. The tipping point where there are more generated than handcrafted bits is rapidly approaching and obviously it won't stop there. A few more years and the genuine article is going to be a rarity.

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#186
post #93

A somewhat contrarian perspective is that this diagram is so simple and widely used and has been reproduced (ie redrawn) so many times that is very easy to assume this does not have a single origin and that its public domain.

it's not public domain, it's copyrighted what's the bet that the intention here was explicitly to attempt to strip the copyright so it could be shoved on the corporate website without paying anyone (the only actual real use of LLMs)

That's what's so disgusting here: it wasn't even about payment, it was about not having to attribute it to who created it. That's too much of a payment for MS, so they just take your stuff, run it through their white washing machine and call it a day.

See also: Copilot.

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#187

It seems to me rather less likely that someone at Microsoft knowingly and deliberately took his specific diagram and "ran it through an AI image generator" than that someone asked an AI image generator to produce a diagram with a similar concept, and it responded with a chunk of mostly-memorized data, which the operator believed to be a novel creation. How many such diagrams were there likely to have been, in the tra…

How you commit plagiarism is less important than the fact that you commit plagiarism.

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're missing the reference to the Morbius movie joke, which sounds surprisingly fitting. It's not like older HNers never made funny references. Edit: Apparently you didn't.

HN is a Serious Place. We're here to make money. Please leave your jokes at home.

Slight correction, to pretend to make money.

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#189
post #10

LinkedIn is also a great example of this stuff at the moment. Every day I see posts where someone clearly took a slide or a diagram from somewhere, then had ChatGPT "make it better" and write text for them to post along with it. Words get mangled, charts no longer make sense, but these people clearly aren't reading anything they're posting. It's not like LinkedIn was great before, but the business-influencer incentiv…

Yep! Quit LinkedIn when it went downhill. Has only gotten worse since then. Most social media is filled with AI slop. For someone who grew up in the 90s-2000s BBS/IRC era this sucks!

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#190
> Is there even a goal here beyond "generating content"?

This is the part that hurts. It's all so pointless, so perfunctory. A web of incentives run amok. Systems too slick to stop moving. Is this what living inside the paperclip maximizer feels like?

Words we didn't write, thoughts we didn't have, for engagement, for a media presence, for an audience you can peddle yourself to when your bullshit job gets automated. All of that technology, all those resources, and we use it to drown humanity in noise.

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