When we warn the real threat of AI is how it’s used against people in the present, not the fantasies that some day computers might think for themselves, this is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about: health insurers using AI to deny care.
People are getting paid for #publishing#AI-written #books, in an #author's name, when in fact the author did not, and knew nothing about this happening.
Then, when the author tries to do something about it to stop this obvious #abuse, they are told no.
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Mozilla fires 60 people to “focus on bringing ‘trustworthy AI into Firefox.’”
Fuck you, Mozilla. No one is asking for AI in Firefox. Sadly, you’re the best we can hope for under capitalism. So if we want something better, we should look into alternative models.
#Zoom just changed their terms and conditions to include using anyone's video and audio for training #AI with no option for opting out. You too can help train #deepfake s!
Living with a disabled spouse, I used Zoom a lot to get through the ongoing global pandemic.
What alternatives are out there for remote teaching/meetings? #BoycottZoom
One of my former (and very long-term) freelance gigs, How Stuff Works, has replaced writers with ChatGPT-generated content and also laid off its excellent editorial staff.
It seems that going forward, when articles I wrote are updated by ChatGPT, my byline will still appear at the top of the article with a note at the bottom of the article saying that AI was used. So it will look as if I wrote the article using AI.
To be clear: I did not write articles using ChatGPT.
Whenever you see the words “ads”, “cryptocurrency”, “blockchain”, “web 3”, or “AI”, just replace them with “farts” and you’ll know whether you want them or not.
“Can the fediverse survive without farts?”
Yes, perfectly well.
“Will farts replace people?”
I hope not.
“The European Commission embraces farts.”
That’s unfortunate.
“This new startup wants to improve your life with farts.”
This picture is hilarious because the words “Meat ball” were transliterated into Arabic. The resulting Arabic words (ميت بول) were then interpreted (incorrectly) as Arabic, THEN translated into English. The first word “Meat” can be misread as the Arabic word for “is dead”. The second word “ball” is how an Arabic speaker would pronounce the name “Paul.” Therefore, the English description of this dish is “Paul is dead.”
The "effective altruism" and "effective accelerationism" ideologies that have been cropping up in AI debates are just a thin veneer over the typical blend of Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, inflated egos, and greed. Let's try something else.
Once again Ted Chiang has it exactly right. The immediate danger from #AI is not that it will become sentient and do whatever it wants. The danger is that it will do what it’s being designed to do: help rich corporations destroy the working class in pursuit of ever-greater profits and thus concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
A lot of people have responded to my Duolingo post with things like "Never work for free," and "I would never donate my time to a corporation.” Which I completely agree with.
But here's the thing about Duolingo and all of the other companies like it. You already work for them. You just don’t know it.
On Duo, I thought I was learning a language. Participating in the community by helping other learners and building resources seemed like part of the process.
Luis Von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, was one of the creators of CAPTCHA, which was originally supposed to stop bot spam by getting a human to do a task a machine couldn’t do. In 2009 Google bought CAPTCHA and used it to get humans to proofread the books they were digitising (without permission from the authors of those books btw). So in order to access much of the web, people had to work for Google. Most of them didn’t know they were working for Google - they thought they were visiting websites.
This is how they get you. They make it seem like they’re giving you something valuable (access to a website, tools to learn a language), while they’re actually taking something from you (your skills, your time, your knowledge, your labour). They make you think they’re helping you, but really you're helping them (and they’re serving you ads while you do it).
Maybe if people had known what CAPTCHA was really for they would’ve done it anyway. Maybe I still would’ve done all that work for Duo if I’d known it would one day disappear from the web and become training data for an LLM ...
... Or maybe I would’ve proofread books for Project Gutenberg, or donated my time to citizen science projects, or worked on an accessibility app, or a million other things which genuinely improve people’s lives and the quality of the web. I didn’t get an informed choice. I got lured into helping a tech company become profitable, while they made the internet a shittier place to be.
How many things are you doing on the web every day which are actually hidden work for tech companies? Probably dozens, or hundreds. We all are. That’s why this is so insidious. It’s everywhere. The tech industry is built on free labour. (And not just free – we often end up paying for the end results of our own work, delivered back to us in garbled, enshittified form).
And it’s a problem that’s only getting worse with AI. Is that thoughtful answer you gave someone on reddit or Mastodon something that will stay on the web for years, helping people in future with the same problem? Or is it just grist for the LLMs?
Regarding that last boost, I'm starting to conceive of LLMs and image generators as a phenomenon of (American) society eating its seed corn. If you're not familiar with the phrase, "seed corn" is the corn you set aside to plant next year, as opposed to the corn you eat this year. If you eat your seed corn this year, you have no seeds to plant next year, and thus create a crisis for all future years, a crisis that could have been avoided with better management.
LLMs and image generators mass ingest human-created texts and images. Since the human creators of the ingested texts and images are not compensated and not even credited, this ingestion puts negative pressure on the sharing of such things. Creative acts functioning as seed for future creative acts becomes depressed. Creative people will have little choice but to lock down, charge for, or hide their works. Otherwise, they'll be ingested by innumerable computer programs and replicated ad infinitum without so much as a credit attached. Seed corn that had been freely given forward will become difficult to get. Eaten.
Eating your seed corn is meant to be a last ditch act you take out of desperation after exhausting all other options. It's not meant to be standard operating procedure. What a bleak society that does this, consuming itself in essence.
We call it AI because no one would take us seriously if we called it matrix multiplication seeded with a bunch of initial values we pulled out of our asses and run on as much shitty data as we can get our grubby little paws on.
So, Twitter :twitter: decided to pull a DeviantArt move and change its Terms Of Services to include anything you post there on their AI dataset, to re-publish your art and benefit from it without your consent or compensation.
:twitter: TIME TO DELETE YOUR ART PORTFOLIO ON TWITTER :twitter:
I will only leave my contact information there, nothing else.
“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”
A team at the University of Chicago just released a tool called Nightshade that makes invisible changes to digital images. The selling point is that these changes “poison” AI models that try to use the images as training data.
OC (Mildly NSFW) Welp, I guess that's it. The single photo that got my ~10-year-old, 60k+ karma Reddit account "permanently suspended."