When I imagine a future with AI ruining the world, I always thought it was going to be some Skynet/CABAL/HAL9000 type of thing
Not this sad, boring, depressing type shit
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
When I imagine a future with AI ruining the world, I always thought it was going to be some Skynet/CABAL/HAL9000 type of thing
Not this sad, boring, depressing type shit
These fucking companies.. downing a torrent of annas archive but crawling wikipedia scourge of mankind
Doesn't make any sense. Why would you crawl wikipedia when you can just download a dump as a torrent ?
There's a chance this isn't being done by someone who only wants Wikipedia's data. As the amount of websites you scrape increases, your desire to use the easy tools loses out to creating the most general tool that can look at most webpages.
Apparently the dump doesn't include media, though there's ongoing discussion within wikimedia about changing that. It also seems likely to me that AI scrapers don't care about externalizing costs onto others if it might mean a competitive advantage (e.g. most recent data, not having to spend time and resources developing dedicated ingestion systems for specific sites).
I want to stress this: it's not that "tech bros" are just stupid—even though a lot of them are revoltingly unappreciative of the giants whose sholders they stand on—it's that they don't care.
To have the most recent data?
To just have the most recent data within reasonable time frame is one thing. AI companies are like "I must have every single article within 5 minutes they get updated, or I'll throw my pacifier out of the pram". No regard for the considerations of the source sites.
AI bros aren't that smart.
Support Wikipedia! They're awesome and are our backbone.
Artificial intelligence is really just a Swiss army, knife, version of a search engine. It serves the interest of the ruling elite and is a way the uber wealthy can make America stupid again or even dumber than dumb. Like we move forward fast but we always miss the point and we're always putting out fires that once were easily manageable. The code base is growing we're all saying a lot of nothing. It's really just drowning out voices and good ideas just to centralize everything. It's about power. It's about control. It's about the man behind the curtain in the wizard of Oz. I like technology a lot and I would like it to be in the hands of working people and not the uber wealthy. So I am no techno optimist at all, not until we fix that issue.
wikipedia should install ai mazes on their servers
Not in this case, to be fair. The only concern is cost - since Wiki wouldn't be opposed to them getting their actual data - and AI mazes are designed to safeguard more sensitive data, not reducing cost
Nice analysis. Need more smart people like you in the world
I agree with that assessment!
Are there alternatives besides Cloudflare's solution?
This is an example of corporate terrorism sponsored by our own government. Elon Musk loves to see himself as the villain in Ready Player One. And this is not a joke you can look it up. Big tech is waging war against American citizens, and no longer do we have any control of our government, and the Democrats will not save us. The electoral processes will not save us. This is just hard for some people to accept, that's why things have to fall apart before they get a clue. Unfortunately, those that are wiser are going to feel the flames first.
Life is "simpler" when you realize governments (and hence the State) are just bullies that exercise their power through physical violence or economical violence.
Governments aren't fundamentally bad. Having a governing body along with laws and regulations is a good thing when done beneficently. For example, government is responsible for access to public education, libraries, banking, worker safety, and hospitals - all of which are objectively good things to have as a society. The problems usually occur when some individuals have more power/influence than others to choose what the government does, which is what's happening in much of the world right now.
We should stop using ai
I don't know about stopping entirely. I built a pretty cool RAG system for internal use in my company, it very much facilitates navigating very large amounts of text data.
even better stop joining major platforms like social media and then they won't be able to create data sets. Be a leach, especially when they give it away for free, but don't contribute to the project. Understand how it works, sure. But it seems like most of humanity says they don't want something, yet they do the contrary. It's like we choose to comply before we even ask to comply for the fear of missing out. But if you look at what is today, what are you really missing out on?
So, uh. What about Lemmy?
They can also crawl this publically-accessible social media source for their data sets.
I'm on board with abandoning mainstream social media, but my point is that your suggestion would not solve the problem just relocate it. A better solution to the AI conglomerates stealing everyone's data from the open Internet is legislation and regulations - ie tackling the whole 'stealing data' component, along with stronger privacy regulations for everyone to make it harder for them to do the same in the future. It's nice seeing the EU taking some positive steps, but we will not see the US take any steps in that direction anytime soon, due to corporate capture of their politicians and the AI companies all being in the top 10 most wealthy companies in the US.
They can also crawl this publically-accessible social media source for their data sets.
Crawling would be silly. They can simply setup a lemmy node and subscribe to every other server. Activitypub crawler would be much more efficient as they wouldn't accidentally crawl things that haven't changed, but instead can read the activitypub updates.
Sure but we're in the comments section of an article about wikipedia being crawled, which is silly because they could just download a snapshot of wikipedia
It's nice seeing the EU taking some positive steps
Yet they helped introducing the super cookies and are trying to end encryption on communications.
I still struggle with a use case for artificial intelligence in my own life. I play around with it all and I'm just like, it doesn't do a good job. Also, I think humanity is missing the plot, you know? Like, we don't need government. If government isn't going to do government. Government serves the people, not corporations. Or at least it should. I don't know, I think we're entering in times. At some point, I think people will pray for nuclear war, because life will be so miserable. That it would be better than just to end it all.
AI has niches but they're exactly that: Niches. Small duct tape tasks for fudging over "hard problems" where manual code would result in a worse outcome and take far more time. Little esoteric problem spaces, which notably don't actually require you to use several states worth of electrical power training on a 50PB dataset of anime titties.
An example: I have a name generator in my game that strings together several consonant+vowel phoneme pairs into a name. This means that the names are always pronounceable, but often the spelling looks really unintuitive. Eg Joosiffe, which the player would likely pronounce as Joseph. However, the leap we do in our head between those two spellings is a process of declassifying phonemes and then re-classifying phonemes, and is actually a "hard problem" from a coding perspective due to the unintituive, multifarious complexities of written, spoken, and conceptualized human language. Adding this step to my name generator in code would be a project of it's own, larger than the game itself, and wouldn't ever work nearly as well as it needed to. But relatively small (30MB) AI models that do this with something like 99.8% satisfaction already exist. They didn't require a data center's worth of resources to train, and since they're academic projects they have licenses that allow them to be used for free in a game.
Actual AI?
Imagine your phone knows that you have a business meeting downtown today. It's already reserved a parking space for you, set your car to warm up before you leave and looped your contact in on your ETA, along with automatically notifying you of any delays. Then, your kid wakes up this morning in with a horrible toothache, you ask your phone what to do and it rings up your family dentist, who has a full schedule today, but makes you a referral nearby. You agree to try that other dentist today, and your AI books an appointment, checks your meeting today, coordinates with their AIs and approves a 15 minute delay so you can get to the dentist. It also notifies your kid's school of their absence and has their teachers AI automatically queued up to send transcripts, notes and homework assignmenta from today's classes.
That's the kind of stuff actual AI can do. Overgrown autocorrect? It's basically a multi-billion dollar Magic Eightball.
At some point, I think people will pray for nuclear war, because life will be so miserable.
Reminds me of Roll out the Fallout by The Chalkeaters
I’m dyslexic and basically a terrible writer. It has helped my professional communication develop. It really helps me speed up my issues with my disability and feel confident in my communications.
This is a cool use case. Just make sure you retain your own voice! If you read an AI-generated sentence out loud and think "I'd have said it this way instead", IMO you should absolutely then change it to be that way.
Understood and I do. I try to tweak it a little to my own style. But it helps write the hundreds of cover letters I’m submitting a day. Looking for work. This usually took me hours for just one submission. Now I can fly through.
Like, we don't need government.
Welcome to the anarchist. Now you have to pick your flavor! Social Anarcho-syndicalism, Anarcho comunist, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho christianis, and the list goes on!
I found LLMs helpfuls to develop some scripts and answer some simple trivial questions (like how does house property work in China). I could have looked for that in a regular search engine though. But that's it, I am still happy looking for things myself and investigating since you can't really trust their answers.