Quick update: The open letter on AI training (https://aitrainingstatement.org/) has reached 15k signatures:
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Crypto mining firms based in Sweden are accused of withholding around $100M in unpaid taxes.
Mostly VAT fraud.
News in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/norrbotten/kryptoforetagen-lurade-staten-pa-en-miljard
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‘They wish this technology didn’t exist’: Perplexity responds to News Corp’s lawsuit
“There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist,” said the Perplexity team in the blog. “They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”
I wish the AI bros at Perplexity and elsewhere a very cope and fucking seethe.
Okay, quick personal sidenote:
With how much misinformation, manipulation, outright theft and other horrific shit this AI bubble has caused, I suspect we're gonna see some attempts at an outright ban on AI. How successful they're gonna be, I don't know, but at the bare minimum it'll enjoy some popularity on the political fringe.
Burglars telling homeowners to cope and seethe when questioned about their possession of crowbars at time of arrest.
they wish this technology didn’t exist
this is supposed to be invalidating, but like... yes? what's wrong with that?
They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.
Yea, down with corporate IP trolls, information gatekeepers and idea landlords! Anyway, what was Perplexity's business model again?
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Not a sneer, but perhaps interesting even if less so as we are focusing a bit less here on the Rationalists. Twitter thread on race science bullshit popularized on the various Rationalism extended forums.
Look out, professional Nix crybaby Jon Ringer is back with his fork.
In other news, I have my own as well called Borkfan, absolutely not a ban fork due to my having threatened multiple people, but instead dedicated to the idea that a technology that lacks chud approval must necessarily not be in the true hacker spirit.
literally the exact crowd shitting on the mere rumor of a Lix NixOS fork are clapping for this like trained seals. and I don’t think this getting announced right after those rumors is an accident — it gets Jon the most attention for his low-effort bullshit and might even let him hurt another fork by way of community fragmentation
something I’m confused about is, is Ringer even effectively banned anymore? I stopped monitoring when someone with mod privileges unbanned him from a bunch of Nix community spaces. is he back to banned, or is this just a continuing tantrum from Jon having Release Manager stripped from him and given to someone who could do that incredibly thoroughly automated job without stirring up a fucking hate mob?
there is one silver lining: for once, I don’t have the cognitive load of another Nix fork to carefully consider switching to. there’s no way in fuck I’m using Ringer’s fork under any circumstances, and my brain already filed it away under “weird name, starts with an E, don’t remember the rest” seconds after I closed the tab
You're right, Borkfan is too easy to remember, my not-ban fork is now called Frabnok.
> FRABNOK LANTERN
Your lantern explodes into a rant about the wokes, killing you instantly.
*** You have died ***
Your score is 0 out of a possible 10 points, in 1 move. This gives you the rank of Release Manager.
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Update on the character.ai lawsuit:
Gizmodo just reported on the story - in addition to the suicide that kicked this litigation off, they've also discovered an hour-long screen recording where a test account (self-reported as thirteen years old) gets sexted relentlessly by the site's chatbots.
So, in addition to driving one specific teen to suicide, character.ai is also facing accusations that their bots are sexually harassing children.
I have something that I want to post to MoreWrite and this is very convenient for my story
Glad I could be of help.
More AI generated shite from Ireland: Transport for Ireland decided, for some reason, to use AI for its Hallowe'en themed ads. This was roundly complained about online. Then someone decided, for genius reasons, to ring Liveline and complain about it.
For those who are unfamiliar, Liveline is a national phone-in show presented by JOEEEE DUFFY, who could start a fight with a brick wall. Every episode is about either a petty grievance or a real horror story. It's like a national whinge-in. I am going to listen to the episode (available here) and see if there are any highlights.
The gist of Liveline
Joe is complaining about TFI putting up the taxi fares in Dublin.
The ad is for a TFI competition.
Ciarán works in advertising and thought that the TFI ad must be a scam first because of the use of AI.
Ciarán points out that TFI has plenty of money and could afford to pay a graphic designer or an illustrator.
Joe is furious that TFI won't say whether the ad was AI-generated or not. Ciarán points out that they didn't even mark the image as AI-generated.
Gerry O'Brien from Actors Equity is on the line. He's explaining the issues faced by background actors and voiceover actors who are being pressured into signing over their image/voice rights
Hannah Lockhead from Lucan is on the line. "I don't disagree with what anyone is saying, but personally I think the most offensive thing about this ad is just that it's ugly".
Gerry O'Brien is talking about fair compensation and clear consent for actors whose images are being used.
Hannah says that "Frankenstein's Wife is Margot Robbie"
Ciarán says that the AI art is "quite tacky" and compares poorly with the iconic London Underground logo.
Joe Duffy has seized the opportunity of having Gerry O'Brien on the line to complain that the Abbey Theatre has been closed for a year.
Joe Duffy has asked Hannah Lockhead (who is an actress) "are you working Hannah or are you resting". She's just finished filming a horror film in Wales called Esoteric.
That's pretty much it.
TFI have now apologised.
The age of book shovelware has arrived: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2024/10/ai-audiobook-narrators-in-overdrive-and-the-issue-of-library-ai-circulation-policy/
Edit: TIL about the US copyright office website’s ai generation info on works. That’s a thing we will be making a bunch of use of, I imagine.
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Bad feelings today. Google announced that an artist I like, Jacob Collier, has been working with them to develop an LLM based tool for music autoplag.
A little context: Collier has like 5 grammies, and is an incredibly creative artist that is able to take ideas and influence from disparate sources and synthesise something interesting (it’s not always good though…). Likely the greatest musician of his generation!
I don’t want to catastrophise too much here but I’m not looking forward to this being used as a cudgel from the promptfondlers.
The only open question I think is: to what extent is the music generation autoplag? (My guess, 100%)
Jacob Collier to me is the archetype of the rich kid with enormous talent and not an ounce of taste or integrity, so I can't say I'm very surprised by this.
See also this nonsense, though now it looks rather innocent compared to the google news.
He's such a waste of musical ability it makes me angry and his face is annoying!
I have seen that, and in terms of the cringy stuff he does, it's definitely up there.
Here are my primarily unfiltered feelings about his music and persona:
I think at his worst, he's cringe, overly-self-indulgent, and pretentious. He needs a stylist because his hair sucks, his clothes are stupid, and he wears this fucking bear hat all the time that I hate. I hate hate hate people when people wear hats and it doesn't seem to serve a purpose beyond looking quirky. Take the fucking hat off, Jacob! He's the type that uses obscure words that you suspect he doesn't know the meaning of.
He also tends to be inappropriately maximalist—I'd point to his cover of Here Comes the Sun, Blackbird, Moon River (for which he won a Grammy!), and actually pretty much all of DJesse, a series of four (four!) albums. I don't really like the timbre of his voice; it's weird. I suspect he has like a perfect vocal technique or something, but as a result, it sounds completely removed from anything natural.
Unlike every other failed rich kid, he is legitimately talented, which you've acknowledged. I like some of his songs but wouldn't recommend them to anyone. His music feels like a technical demo in that many interesting, complex, and impressive things happen, which I like! But at my lowest points, I feel stupid when I listen to his stuff, even though he is musically speaking in a made-up language, and it's not my fault I don't understand it.
At his best, he seems genuinely open-hearted, with room to accept anything that comes his way. I do find some of his stuff inspiring! I like that a person like him exists and that many people look to him for inspiration and influence.
his face is annoying!
Specific to this point: I saw him live in concert for his Djesse Vol 1. tour and managed to meet him after the show. He seemed chill and it was a good chat. I took a picture with him, which I later put on my dating profile. Not seeing much success, I showed the profile to my friend to solicit feedback, and she said: "You should take that picture off because your friend is more attractive than you." I told her who he was but deleted the picture anyway.
He's not a monster (or not as much of one) like the rest of the people we look at over here. He's sheltered, and either there's someone in his camp pushing this kind of stuff, or there's no one to tell him that this tech is awful. Again, bad feelings!
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There’s been a moderate tsunami of “AI EVERYTHING” in a bunch of production tools lately too. Most I’ve seen have looked like just rebranding the further development of previously existing algorithmic tools, but there have also been a couple principally from the “we trained on everything possible!” camp
unsurprising that someone’s fallen over themselves to integrate the llm-style synthesis into the pipeline too, although it’s still extremely exhausting
the cultural fallout of this is going to suuuuuck. it’s going to be so much worse than receiving the dancing baby from your weird relatives in 2008
If your Wikipedia page contains as many random arXiv preprints for references as the "prompt engineering" article, consult your physician.
I was expecting a spicier Talk page :(
I just tagged the article and added a talk page note
Character.ai is getting sued thanks to one of their users killing himself, and The New York Times is talking about it (there's also a piece by Gary Marcus talking about a previous incident if you're interested).
Like the copyright situation I previously mentioned, I suspect this is also gonna make potential investors wary of investing in AI post-bubble. Even if you manage to convince investors that you won't get DMCA'd into oblivion, they're still gonna be wary of the potential for a Dasani-level PR nightmare.
Of course, that's assuming that Section 230 protects you from being held liable for what your autoplag does - if Ms. Garcia, whose son's suicide prompted this entire mess, succeeds in court, the legal precedent set means you're likely gonna have to worry about being sued if/when someone ends up injured/killed/defamed/otherwise fucked up because of its output..
Skimming the reddit thread in search of general public sentiment about this, but unfortunately mostly just found a greatest hits compilation of very gross comments.
According to these very smart people, parents should expect your teenager to die as an outcome of not being perfect people 24/7, technology can never be at fault even when it literally tells you to commit suicide in coded language, and it's actually impossible to understand which parts of society are causing kids to be depressed, so we must take it as a given that we can't do anything about it. I regret having done this to myself.
This is nothing, The characterAi subreddit was in full meltdown earlier.
HEARTWARMING: Baldy McDickface to step back from podcasting now the Russian money has dried up
Pretty good sneer there:
BREAKING: Tim Pool announces he will be stepping back from full time content production to look after his family. He states he's tired of being made fun of for not having a wife and kids so he will also be using the extra time to pursue acquiring that family
what fascinating timing, what’s it been, a month or so since he got outed as a Russian agent?
US forest service cuts thousands of jobs. Not to worry, the bright hackernews are on it! just install an AI data center in the forest!. Seriously though, I can't tell if this is brilliant satire or not.
Fuck, I didn't need to be reminded that they named the robot Optimus. Was "Bender" or "Wall-E" too much of a deep cut? Or is it just that Disney's trademark lawyers are scarier than Hasbro and Nvidia combined?
My read: sounds like a teenager that knows the touted functionality of the scam tech they are referencing, but is not wise enough to the ways of the world to know they are scams.
this is peak AI. you might not like it, but it's how top of the bubble looks like
Radio station uses AI to interview the ghost of a dead Nobel-winner with 3 quirky zoomers who don't exist, seems baffled people don't like it starring three bots and deepfake of Wisława Szymborska
related notesfrompoland and onet article they probably referenced (in polish) and another. would you guess that they fired around 12 people just before? (and somehow had money for whatever horseshit they were sold) small radio stations aren't probably bringing serious money either way now
homepage of that radio boasts about their "almost entirely created by AI" content. it looks like they tried to convince zoomers to get an FM radio and listen to it somehow. it's gonna go great
apparently this radio is in liquidation since january however this might be related to dislodging previous govt's propagandists from public media
What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don't sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I've come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT's attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it's trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.
you gotta admit one thing: this cures imposter syndrome
A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI "hosts" (non-English link).
They're trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason they're firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be "an experiment to appeal to Gen Z". Fortunately, most people's response seems to be "fuck off with this crap".
I just... can't with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run "experiments" with AI media. Heads should roll for this.
I just… can’t with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run “experiments” with AI media. Heads should roll for this.
i think it might be code for firing these people, but technically not, because they just terminated contracts with 15 single-person companies, so they never really hired them in the first place
Vivaldi Browser has an important teaser AI announcement: https://social.vivaldi.net/@Vivaldi/113351393167122198
spoiler
"It's not AI"
That's kinda funny. If I'm ever in the market for a proprietary chromium-based web browser, they have my interest.