mike

mike, 11 months ago

@grueproof Season 9 for me was a great example of how the "series finale" mentality really sucks in American TV. I say "American" because I haven't noticed this tendency in shows I watch from other countries, especially British as that's what I watch the most other than American. They just feel like they've got to wrap up all possible stories before the show ends. I prefer when each season is a story, and if there's another one, great! If not, disappointing, but no big deal.

mike, 1 year ago

@RL_Dane It is and it isn't. Right now, Mastodon doesn't include the character limit as a configurable option, so to increase it we have to make changes to the backend files. All those changes need to be reapplied manually after every single update. Because of that we've avoided it. IF, and I don't know if it's in their roadmap, the ability to increase that limit moves to the frontend, @kev and I would more than likely have a vote on what the majority would prefer. That's a big if at this point.

mike, 1 year ago

@RL_Dane No, not at this time. If something drastic were to happen like Eugen sells Mastodon to Google or something equally crazy, we would look into it, but as long as everything is sane, we're going to stick to as vanilla Mastodon as possible.

@kev

mike, 1 year ago

@pixelherodev This is a sticking point for me with AI. I don't mind AI. I like it actually, but I don't like it when a few select entities control it. Microsoft and Google fighting over the collective future of AI is disturbing. I like seeing versions of the latest GPT software that will run locally. I like seeing a version of Stable Diffusion running locally. I understand that not everybody is going to want to do that, and it would be wasteful if they did. Maye decentralization to the rescue?

mike, 1 year ago

@pixelherodev Energy consumption is an interesting conundrum. Using nonrenewable energy wastefully is unethical in my mind. I have less concerns about using renewables. IF (and that's a big if) the models for Stable Diffusion or GPT 4 (or similar) were created in a datacenter powered entirely by renewable energy, I'd have less problems with it.

mike, 1 year ago

@pixelherodev It seems like you're still more concerned with where the energy is coming from rather than its usage. If (hypothetically) we invented perpetual motion tomorrow and were able to supply every person in the world with as much clean, renewable energy as they could use, would the amount of energy being used still matter? I think the answer is no. The amount of energy we use is only unethical due to how it's produced and it's unequal distribution.

mike, 1 year ago

@pixelherodev It's only waste if something of value isn't gotten from its use, and "value" is a very subjective position. That's especially true when what's being "wasted" is in infinite supply.

I don't disagree with your assessment of our current energy market, but I do think that this step may be necessary to get us to a position where we no longer require nonrenewable energy sources.

mike, 1 year ago

@pixelherodev I disagree, first and foremost because we use a finite amount. We can cut back, but how far we can cut back without living in caves is limited by practicality. We need to increase supply in a clean and efficient manner. This isn't to say that cutting back usage isn't important, but it's only a short term solution. We can't treat it like it's going to solve our problems in the long term.

mike, 1 year ago

@pixelherodev I think we've been trying that method for as long as I've been alive with extremely mixed results. How many things that would also be good for the environment aren't being done because of high energy costs? Desalination of sea water to increase clean water supplies? AeroFarms for increased food production? Etc. Advancements that sit basically idle because they take too much energy to accomplish at scale?

mike, 1 year ago

@adamsdesk I'm not opposed to a "Copilot" on a purely abstract level. I can see where an OS based assistant would be a benefit for people who don't want to be computer people and just want to do specific tasks. The OS of a computer SHOULD be invisible in my opinion. I'm NOT a fan of Microsoft or Google being the ones in charge of that copilot though. If it doesn't work correctly air gapped, it's wrong IMHO.

mike, 1 year ago

@adamsdesk I think the legal stuff is going to be a constant question that never really has a good answer. These LLMs are just really big probability engines tacking words together that statistically make sense. We all do that same thing in our head every time we write a sentence. The question boils down to how much can the LLM tack together that matches what I tacked together before it violates my intellectual property. I've got no good answers.

I think the question of training the model 1/

mike, 1 year ago

@adamsdesk in the first place is a little bit more cut and dry. If I read your blog and I learn something from it or internalize a phrase that you've used in your post, I haven't "stolen" anything from you. I don't see where a language model reading your blog post and using that data would be different. Honestly, the data they get from it is even more abstract that what I would.

Of course, there's an interesting caveat to all of this too, and that's rarity. Rarity creates odd circumstances. 2/

mike, 1 year ago

@adamsdesk The MORE original what you've written is, the more likely it will be replicated specifically. Example, if I ask you to write Hello World in Python, the code you'd write wouldn't be significantly different than the code millions of other people have written when doing the same thing. The more complex and unique the request, the smaller the sampled data set the LLM has to work with, so the more likely it is it will replicate a specific thing. That's bad.

So, three posts in and all 3/

mike, 1 year ago

@adamsdesk can hope is that I've accurately conveyed just how confusing this whole subject is for me. There's a lot of gray area and literal philosophy going on in there (Ship of Theseus anybody?). I don't think we're ever going to get to a place where everybody agrees on all of it. 4/4

mike, 1 year ago

@adamsdesk I wouldn't go so far as to say useless. I think we have to treat AI like we do people. Just like I can't credit every source of inspiration I have for everything I write (even for something as short as this reply), we can't expect an AI to worry about attribution for every single word. License will have to work with a gradient approach. Entire code blocks of replicated code would be a license violation (just as it would be for a human). The question becomes where to draw the line, 1/

mike, 1 year ago

@adamsdesk and that's when things get REALLY stupid. When it comes to an automated system generating massive amounts of text/images/video/whatever, we're going to rely on internal checks. How do we do that? We either draw a dark black line SOMEWHERE in there where 2 lines of code matching is fine, but 3 is a copyright violation (as an example, not to be taken literally), or we're going to have to use some automated system to compare what the AI generates to existing work to see if TOO much 2/

mike, 1 year ago

@adamsdesk of that generated work matches prior work. What kind of automated system excels at analyzing massive quantities of data quickly? I bet you can guess. Neither solution sounds great. Any dark line we draw will be an arbitrary selection. It's hard to argue for 3 when 2 and 4 are both so close to the exact same thing. Equally, the same questions come up with a model to determine if something AI generated as came up with the AI model in the first place. Such a weird problem. 3/3

mike, 11 months ago

@benjaminhollon I guess the question becomes what is the practical difference between a ML model reading your content and a person? In either case, they're not explicitly copying it, and either could end up replacing an individual.

@adamsdesk

mike, 11 months ago

@pixelherodev I'm not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination. I haven't even pretended to be one for Halloween, but is the style (technique) we use when we combine words copyrighted? Obviously the end results are (or could be), but putting one word after another in a particular way?

@adamsdesk

mike, 1 year ago

@danarel Very cool! I planned on doing that this year but it's fallen by the wayside so far. It's great that you've been able to stick with it and succeed.

mike, 1 year ago

@RockyC Me too.

@fisch