You guys always come crawling out from whatever rock you’re hiding under for these posts as if someone saying LLMs aren’t smart makes your spider senses tingle.
It would be almost impressive if it weren’t so stupid.
mii
joined 8 months ago
This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.
As a programmer who likes to see himself more adjacent to artists (and not only because I only draw stuff — badly — and write stuff — terribly — as a hobby, but also because I hold the belief that creating something with code can be seen as artistic too) this whole attitude which has been plaguing the tech industry for — let's be real here — the last 15 years at least but probably much longer makes me irrationally angry. Even the parts of the industry where creativity and artistry should play a larger role, like game dev, have been completely fucked over by this idea that everything is about efficiency and productivity. You wanna be successful? You need to be productive all the time, 24/7, and now there's tools that help you with that, and these tools are now fucking AI-powered! Because everything is a tool for out lord and savior productivity.
(I really should get to this toxic productivity write-up I've been meaning to do for a year now,)
If you mention SpaceBattles we also need to add Sufficient Velocity for completeness’s sake.
There’s another one that focuses mostly on erotic fiction but since that’s not really my bag I’ve forgotten what it’s called. And I think it’s not as big as SB and SV anyway since that user base is mostly on AO3 these days.
Earlier today, the Internet Archive suffered a DDoS attack, which has now been claimed by the BlackMeta hacktivist group, who says they will be conducting additional attacks.
Hacktivist group? The fuck can you claim to be an activist for if your target is the Internet Archive?
This is brilliant and I’m saving it and will post a link to it the next time someone at work asks why we can’t “just use AI to do it” when a ticket gets rejected for being stupid and/or unreasonable.
However:
The first is that we have some sort of intelligence explosion, where AI recursively self-improves itself, and we're all harvested for our constituent atoms […]. It may surprise some readers that I am open to the possibility of this happening, but I have always found the arguments reasonably sound.
Yeah, I gotta admit, I am surprised. Because I have not found a single reasonable argument for this horseshit and the rest of the article (as well as the others I read from their blog) does not read like it’s been written by someone who’d buy into AI foom.
It’s already too late for a lot of places, imo. DeviantArt for example is overrun by LLM-generated sludge and no amount of cleanup will undo that; and that site has been a staple of amateur and upcoming artists for decades. The same seems to be happening to Pixiv (which is big in Japan), too. Search engines are also full of generated SEO spam and it’s getting worse, with image search being close to useless unless you do implement some sort of blocklist. Which, for that use case, luckily already exist and aren’t bad (shameless self-plug), but it’s still a manual step you have to take and won’t help my grandma who’s looking for cookie recipes.
The silver lining might be that a growing number of people are willing to try decentralized solutions. I’ve seen more non-techies come over to Lemmy, Mastodon and Misskey as a result, but it’s still sad to see, especially because this will ultimately lead to tons of older content becoming either lost or needles in a shitstack you can’t ever hope to recover.
I really wonder what the meeting looked like where they decided on that change, because I’m struggling coming up with a single argument for it that doesn’t boil down to giving abusive asshats more playtime.