Fuck AI

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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"

A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.

founded 11 months ago
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I want to apologize for changing the description without telling people first. After reading arguments about how AI has been so overhyped, I'm not that frightened by it. It's awful that it hallucinates, and that it just spews garbage onto YouTube and Facebook, but it won't completely upend society. I'll have articles abound on AI hype, because they're quite funny, and gives me a sense of ease knowing that, despite blatant lies being easy to tell, it's way harder to fake actual evidence.

I also want to factor in people who think that there's nothing anyone can do. I've come to realize that there might not be a way to attack OpenAI, MidJourney, or Stable Diffusion. These people, which I will call Doomers from an AIHWOS article, are perfectly welcome here. You can certainly come along and read the AI Hype Wall Of Shame, or the diminishing returns of Deep Learning. Maybe one can even become a Mod!

Boosters, or people who heavily use AI and see it as a source of good, ARE NOT ALLOWED HERE! I've seen Boosters dox, threaten, and harass artists over on Reddit and Twitter, and they constantly champion artists losing their jobs. They go against the very purpose of this community. If I hear a comment on here saying that AI is "making things good" or cheering on putting anyone out of a job, and the commenter does not retract their statement, said commenter will be permanently banned. FA&FO.

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Alright, I just want to clarify that I've never modded a Lemmy community before. I just have the mantra of "if nobody's doing the right thing, do it yourself". I was also motivated by the decision from u/spez to let an unknown AI company use Reddit's imagery. If you know how to moderate well, please let me know. Also, feel free to discuss ways to attack AI development, and if you have evidence of AIBros being cruel and remorseless, make sure to save the evidence for people "on the fence". Remember, we don't know if AI is unstoppable. AI uses up loads of energy to be powered, and tons of circuitry. There may very well be an end to this cruelty, and it's up to us to begin that end.

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cross-posted from: https://ponder.cat/post/1675150

I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters. OpenAI and Anthropic are not innovators, and are antithetical to the spirit of Silicon Valley. They are management consultants dressed as founders, cynical con artists raising money for products that will never exist while peddling software that destroys our planet and diverts attention and capital away from things that might solve real problems.

I'm tired of the delusion. I'm tired of being forced to take these men seriously. I'm tired of being told by the media and investors that these men are building the future when the only things they build are mediocre and expensive. There is no joy here, no mystery, no magic, no problems solved, no lives saved, and very few lives changed other than new people added to Forbes' Midas list.

None of this is powerful, or impressive, other than in how big a con it’s become. Look at the products and the actual outputs and tell me — does any of this actually feel like the future? Isn’t it kind of weird that the big, scary threats they’ve made about how AI will take our jobs never seem to translate to an actual product? Isn’t it strange that despite all of their money and power they’re yet to make anything truly useful?

My heart darkens, albeit briefly, when I think of how cynical all of this is. Corporations building products that don't really do much that are being sold on the idea that one day they might, peddled by reporters that want to believe their narratives — and in some cases actively champion them. The damage will be tens of thousands of people fired, long-term environmental and infrastructural chaos, and a profound depression in Silicon Valley that I believe will dwarf the dot-com bust.

And when this all falls apart — and I believe it will — there will be a very public reckoning for the tech industry.

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cross-posted from: https://ponder.cat/post/1659264

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If AI is going to scrape content I post or emails I send to people who use gmail, etc. I would like to include a few sentences in each item that will fuck with any AI training they get used by.

(I especially want to stick it in any emails that google will have access to because certain people I want to communicate with refuse to use anything but gmail, even for conversations just with me, after I've specifically asked them to. 😠 )

So I've searched and found many online "nonsense generators" but they use AI to generate silly sentences for you. That's not what I want.

What I want is something that generates grammatically incorrect entences, sentences with words that would never follow each other, and whatever kinds of sentences would cause AI training methods to learn wrong and meaningless patterns of language, so that when it generates stuff based on that it will be obvious crap that is useless for any purpose.

I figure someone has created this by now. Does anyone know where to find something I can use for this?

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Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison said governments should consolidate all national data for consumption by AI models, calling this step the "missing link" for them to take full advantage of the technology. From a report:

Fragmented sets of data about a population's health, agriculture, infrastructure, procurement and borders should be unified into a single, secure database that can be accessed by AI models, Ellison said in an on-stage interview with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the World Government Summit in Dubai.

Countries with rich population data sets, such as the UK and United Arab Emirates, could cut costs and improve public services, particularly health care, with this approach, Ellison said. Upgrading government digital infrastructure could also help identify wastage and fraud, Ellison said. IT systems used by the US government are so primitive that it makes it difficult to identify "vast amounts of fraud," he added, pointing to efforts by Elon Musk's team at the Department of Government Efficiency to weed it out.

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A new paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.”

The researchers recruited 319 knowledge workers for the study, who self reported 936 first-hand examples of using generative AI in their job, and asked them to complete a survey about how they use generative AI (including what tools and prompts), how confident they are the generative AI tools’ ability to do the specific work task, how confident they are in evaluating the AI’s output, and how confident they are in their abilities in completing the same work task without the AI tool. Some tasks cited in the paper include a teacher using the AI image generator DALL-E to create images for a presentation about hand washing at school, a commodities trader using ChatGPT to “generate recommendations for new resources and strategies to explore to hone my trading skills,” and a nurse who “verified a ChatGPT-generated educational pamphlet for newly diagnosed diabetic patients.”

Overall, these workers self-reported that the more confidence they had in AI doing the task, the more they observed “their perceived enaction of critical thinking.” When users had less confidence in the AI’s output, they used more critical thinking and had more confidence in their ability to evaluate and improve the quality of the AI’s output and mitigate the consequences of AI responses.


So this means they're gonna stop shoving CoPilot down everyone's throats, right??

This is literally my main gripe with AI being shoved into everything (I have many gripes, but this is the main one lol). Reading comprehension skills are already in the shitter, and this is only making them worse.

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It was already known that “users with access to GenAI tools produce a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task.”

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