Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

kaveland.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 346 posts

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#301

Post by BrenBarn »

slfnflctd wrote: post #154
BrenBarn wrote: post #51

This is another article that, for me, sort of walks right by the answers without realizing it. As I was reading, I was thinking "does this person really not think AI is going to be flooded with ads soon enough?" Then they asked the LLM that, and it basically said yes, and then the response. . . to go "Hmmm, I wonder if that will happen"? Yes, of course it's going to happen. Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering…

> Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are ads masquerading as actual content Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how many big players actively participated in speeding up the process. I guess it's similar to how a lot of white folks thought racism…

> Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how many big players actively participated in speeding up the process.

Sure, maybe so. But now with hindsight we can see what happened and we should realize that it's going to happen again unless we do something.

> The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this.

I think both bad and good are part of humanity. In a sense this "toxic" part is not that different from the part that leads us to, say, descend into drug addiction, steal when we think no one is looking, leave a mess for other people to clean up, etc. We can do these negative things on various scales, but when we do them on a large scale we can screw one another over quite egregiously. The unique thing about humans is our ability to intentionally leverage the good aspects of our nature to hold the bad aspects in check. We've had various ways of doing this throughout history. We just need to accept that setting rules and expectations and enforcing them to prevent bad outcomes is no less "natural" for humans than giving free rein to our more harmful urges.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#302

Post by yencabulator »

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…

> AI is a transformative use.

Reproducing a movie still well enough that I honestly wouldn't know which one is the original is transformative?

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#303

Post by Exoristos »

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…

Doesn't it seem suspect that a product with such massive investment is made available for little or no cost? Either it's garbage (you don't get AutoCAD for free: you get meme generators), and investors are getting soaked; or it's digital gold, and consumers are being lured in for unobvious exploitation.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#304

Post by yencabulator »

kulahan wrote: post #298
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 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.

At a time when solar & batteries were just getting great, nah.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#305

Post by yencabulator »

coryrc wrote: post #269
svnt wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is one: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-coal-fired-power-plant-... Here is another: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/trump-coal-executive-order-...

trump stooge activities cannot be blamed on data centers. The relevant technical authorities did not want this.

Oh yes environmentalism is clearly why the data center owners themselves are running generators 24/7.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#306

Post by eps »

arn3n wrote: post #116
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…

God, I’d love to work for something like this. The closest equivalent thing we have today is (in my mind) places like the Apache Foundation or LetsEncrypt, places that run huge chunks of open source software or critical internet structure. An “Apache for search” would be great.

I have a friend who worked for the Apache Foundation. From what he described, it was a burecracy nightmare and advanced office politics in equal measures. He left because of that.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#307

Post by skywhopper »

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…

Yes, there are ethical differences to an individual doing things by hand, and a corporation funded by billions of investor dollars doing an automated version of that thing at many orders of magnitude in scale.

Also, LLMs don’t just imitate style, they can be made to reproduce certain content near-verbatim in a way that would be a copyright violation if done by a human being.

You can excuse it away if you want with reduction ad absurdum arguments, but the impact is distinctly different, and calls for different parameters.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#308

Post by Mistletoe »

k__ wrote: post #99
lipowitz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google thinks it is going to charge a monthly fee for Gemini so they are basically correcting their model to be user paid in the switch from search to LLM. They are also trying to reduce workers in search, etc, somewhat through the trained LLMs so the other idea is that they have lower costs per user. I don't think many people will pay monthly fees or will want to pay them for each platform they use which is why they…

This. Gemini Pro requires a monthly subscription. Seems like a pretty straightforward business model.

How many would really pay though? I certainly wouldn't. Would you pay for Google search?

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#309

Post by svnt »

coryrc wrote: post #290
svnt wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? This is literally the only mechanism to allow coal-fired plants to avoid sunsetting on schedule. Who are the “relevant technical authorities”?

"DOE issued the emergency order without a request from the plant owner, transmission provider or grid operator"

Without getting in to the fact that none of those people operate datacenters, what does that mean to you? You think Trump and Co are doing this as a purely political move to irritate environmentalists?

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#310

Post by snickell »

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…

What scares me is that the obvious pool of money to fund the deficit in the cost of operating of LLMs comes from the most subtle native advertising imaginable. Can you resist ads where, say, AirBnB pays OpenAI privately to “dope” the o3 hyperspace such that AirBnB is moved imperceptibly closer to tokens like value and authentic??

How much would AirBnB pay for the intelligence everyone gets all their info from having a subtle bias like this? Sliiightly more likely to assume folks will stay in airbnbs vs a hotel when they travel, sliiightly more likely to describe the world in these terms.

How much would companies pay to directly, methodically and indetectably bias “everyone’s most frequent conversant” toward them?

Post reply on HN