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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

kaveland.no

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Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#291

Post by spaceguillotine »

karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

this is a perfect example of the VC churn, they hope to get unattainable and unsustainable results and don't care what happens to anyone that was doing it sustainably before they came around.

The internet has become total garbage now all because a few men wanted to make a bunch of money by making silicon do the thinking for them.

AI is the quickest route to ruin and ending up with humans like in Idiocracy devoid of critical thinking, and the output of LLMs is so bad to read, students are just turning in the worst papers using LLMs and learning nothing.

At first my school banned use of them but then Microsoft tipped their hand because they donate a lot of money and now everyone is allowed to use AI and they got rid of the requirement to use MLA Citations so everything turned into slop.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#292

Post by robocat »

kijin wrote: post #39
zerocrates wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The providers can sell inclusion in the system prompt to advertisers. Run some ad-tech on the first message before it goes to the LLM to see whose gets included.

For most advertisers, sure, there's no need to go all the way back to the training data. Advertisers want immediate results. Training takes too long and has uncertain results. Much easier to target the prompt instead. If you're someone like Marlboro or Coca-Cola, on the other hand, it might be worth your while to pollute the training data and wait for subtle allusions to your product to show up all over the place. Ma…

> Marlboro or Coca-Cola

Your product placement is appropriately ironic.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#293

Post by mike_ivanov »

J_McQuade wrote: post #6
boothby wrote: post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

"here is how to to translate this query from T-SQL to PL-SQL... ..." "... but if you used our VC's latest beau, BozoDB, it could be written like THIS! ... ..." 9 months, max. I give it 9 months.

"T-SQL to PL-SQL" -> (implies an > 40 age, most likely being an Ask TOM citizen, a consultant with >> 100K annual income, most likely conservative, maybe family with kids, prone to anxiety/depression, etc) -> This WORRY FREE PEACE OF MIND magic pill takes America by storm, grab yours before it's too late!

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#294

Post by chasd00 »

troyvit wrote: post #213
marcosdumay wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the question everybody awake is asking is how long until all the LLM corporate initiatives die? Because as useful as those things can be, they just can't do enough to justify that cost. But there are free (to copy) ones, and smaller ones. And while those were built from the large, expensive models, it's not clear if people won't find a way to keep them sustainable. We have at minimum gained a huge body of knowle…

> We have at minimum gained a huge body of knowledge on "how to talk like people" that will stay there forever for researchers to use. This is spot on. I think we'll be able to capitalize on other talents of "AI" once we recognize the big shift is done happening. It's like five years after the Louisiana Purchase: we have a bunch of new resources but we've barely catalogued them, let alone begun to exploit them. > how…

> This is spot on. I think we'll be able to capitalize on other talents of "AI" once we recognize the big shift is done happening. It's like five years after the Louisiana Purchase: we have a bunch of new resources but we've barely catalogued them, let alone begun to exploit them.

one thing about LLMs used as a replacement for search is they have to be continually retrained or else they become stale. Lets say a hard recession hits and all the AI companies go out of business but we're left with all these models on huggingface that can still be used. Then, a new programming language hits the scene and it's a massive hit, how will LLMs be able to autocomplete and add dependencies for a language they've never seen before? Maybe an analogy could be asking an LLM to translate a written language you make up on the spot to English/other language.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#295

Post by renewiltord »

willvarfar wrote: post #59

My dream solution: The EU creates an institution for public knowledge, a kind of library+tech solution. It probably funds classic libraries in member countries, but it also invests in tech. It dovetails nicely into a big push to get science to thrive in the EU etc. The tech part makes a in-the-public-interest search engine and AI. The techies are incentivised to try and whack-a-mole the classic SEO. E.g. they might s…

I have to say the best part about this fanfic is the choice of hero. It's like having Karl Marx be the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged. Highly entertaining.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#296

Post by strangattractor »

karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

> As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all!

I remember when search was a free ride. The articles that I found in searches where relevant and there was no wordy boiler plate AI content specifically designed to get me to see all the advertising on the page. There is no free ride - AI will accelerate the enshittification of the Web by orders of magnitude. Barriers to garbage content generation are rapidly approaching 0.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#297

Post by kod »

astrange wrote: post #283
autoexec wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has been trained on pirated material and that would be very different from someone buying books and reading them and learning from them. Right now it's still up to the courts what counts as infringing but at this point even Disney is accusing AI of violating their copyrights https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/business/media/disney-uni... AI outputs copyrighted material: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/…

> at this point even Disney is accusing AI of violating their copyrights "even" is odd there, of course Disney is accusing them of violating copyright, that's what Disney does. > AI is getting better at data laundering and hiding evidence of infringement, but ultimately it's collecting and regurgitating copyrighted content. That's not the standard for copyright infringement; AI is a transformative use. Similarly, if…

Facts aren't copyrightable. Expression is. LLMs reproduce expression from the works they were trained on. The way they are being trained involves making an unlicensed reproduction of works. Both of those are pretty straightforwardly infringement of an exclusive right.

Establishing an affirmative defense that it's transformative fair use would hopefully be an uphill battle, given that it's commercial, using the whole work, and has a detrimental effect on the market for the work.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#298

Post by kulahan »

autoexec wrote: post #239
karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

> As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all! if you consider the massive environmental harm AI has and continues to cause, the people whose work has been stolen to create it, the impacts on workers and salaries, and the abuses AI enables that free lunch starts looking more expensive.

The silver lining on this very dark cloud is that it seems to have renewed interest in nuclear power, though that was inevitable with the coming climate crisis I suppose.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#299

Post by strangattractor »

umvi wrote: post #270
autoexec wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all! if you consider the massive environmental harm AI has and continues to cause, the people whose work has been stolen to create it, the impacts on workers and salaries, and the abuses AI enables that free lunch starts looking more expensive.

> the people whose work has been stolen to create it "Stolen" is kind of a loaded word. It implies the content was for sale and was taken without payment. I don't think anyone would accuse a person of stealing if they purchased GRRM's books, studied the prose and then used the knowledge they gained from studying to write a fanfic in the style of GRRM (or better yet, the final 2 books). What was stolen? "the prose sty…

I think there is case to be made that AI companies are taking the content - providing people with a modified version of that content and not necessarily providing references to the original material.

Much of the content that is created by people is done so to generate revenue. They are denied that revenue when people don't go to their site. One might interpret that as theft. In the case of GRRM's books - I would assumed they were purchased and the author received the revenue from the sale.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#300

Post by _9ptr »

cgriswald wrote: post #237
karaterobot wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree they'd love to do that in theory, and it seems technically feasible. What gives me hope on that front is that marketers and advertisers (let alone the companies that pay them) have never shown the slightest capacity for that level of subtlety. The most sophisticated adtech today, produced by networks of massive data collection and analysis, ultimately just tries to shove as many loud, disruptive ads in your f…

I've noticed this even with product placement in film and television. It's not enough that Super Agent X drives a Palmora Targon, they just have to pan, zoom, tilt the camera to include a shot of the Palmora logo perfectly centered in frame for a few seconds as the car careens off a cliff. I'm only surprised the protagonist isn't also talking about how well the car has served him with its as he laments its loss while…

Community made me buy a honda.
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