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 1 year 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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Hello Guys. From time to time I stumble on websites which are obviously created only using LLM. The don't offer any valuable informations, are very generic and you can easily tell its created with the help of LLM or completely with a LLM. Often decorated with some AI generated images.

So I created this Blocklist on Codeberg. Unfortunately it doesn't contain a lot of websites so far, because I only add a website if I spotted one. Manually.

For the help of others and yourself I thought that everyone should contribute to this list. If you spot a website which was created with a lot of LLM, add them! If you don't have an account on Codeberg, put the Link in the comments and I'll add it.

Link to the Blocklist.

Thank you very much!

P.S: Does Fuck AI has a Matrix Space?

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Before the mayor of San Jose, California, arrives at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new business, his aides ask ChatGPT to help draft some talking points.

“Elected officials do a tremendous amount of public speaking,” said Mayor Matt Mahan, whose recent itinerary has taken him from new restaurant and semiconductor startup openings to a festival of lowriding car culture.

Other politicians might be skittish admitting a chatbot co-wrote their speech or that it helped draft a $5.6 billion budget for the new fiscal year, but Mahan is trying to lead by example, pushing a growing number of the nearly 7,000 government workers running Silicon Valley’s biggest city to embrace artificial intelligence technology.

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This story was originally published by The Revelator.

by John R. Platt

Three simple keystrokes will deliver search results that consume less energy and water — and probably contain better information.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an editorial discouraging environmentalists from using generative AI programs like ChatGPT due to their extraordinary energy and water consumption. If you care about the planet, I argued, you shouldn’t use such climate-damaging systems.

Most people responded to the editorial positively, but one follow-up question kept coming up: “How do I get AI completely out of my life?”

That’s a broad question, and it’s a tough one to answer because artificial intelligence has been wrapped into so many aspects of our daily lives, from cell phones, use of Microsoft Word, customer-service inquiries and, of course, search engines.

That last one bothered a lot of you, who complained about Google presenting AI answers to every search, well before any websites that might contain the same (or better) answers.

Now, search results that present AI-generated answers don’t carry quite the same environmental cost as full-fledged generative AI queries — like asking ChatGPT to “write” a full essay — but some research suggests AI search results will use four to five times as much energy as the old non-AI searches we used to enjoy. That’s not nothing, and in the battle against climate change, every watt counts.

Luckily, it turns out there’s an easy way to get AI out of your Google search results. Simply type these three keys after your search term: -AI

(That’s the minus sign immediately followed by the letters AI, with no space between them.)

Here’s an example: I Googled the phrase “why are tigers endangered” and got this result, leading with an AI-generated overview:

I tried it again with “-AI” at the end of the search phrase and got these results, which start with an authoritative source. Google still includes an overview pulled from the pages, but it doesn’t appear to have been generated by AI:

A second example: I searched for information on data centers and noise pollution (another problem of AI) and got this AI-generated search result:

But I added “-AI” to the search and got a reputable source first. Google still included a few lines from that source, but that’s the point: It was sourced in the first place. A lot of AI-generated texts don’t present their sources, so you can’t judge their veracity.

Google is obviously the king of search, but it’s not the only game in town. I tried this on a variety of other search engines and got similar — but imperfect — results.

A normal search on Bing delivered a detailed AI answer from its Copilot AI system.

Using “-AI” on Bing delivered a search result with a space for Copilot, but that space didn’t populate.

A normal search on Yahoo delivered an AI summary.

Using “-AI” on Yahoo still generated an AI answer, although it appeared after an authoritative source. (This earns Yahoo a failing grade, in my book.)

DuckDuckGo presented an AI “assist” on my first search (which, quite interestingly, included a warning about its possible lack of accuracy).

Adding “-AI” to the search on that platform delivered AI-free results. This made DuckDuckGo today’s winner. (It’s worth noting that DuckDuckGo also receives high marks from security specialists because it doesn’t track your search results.)

None of these results are perfect, and these search engines are likely to modify their systems at any time. But as of this writing using “-AI” seems like a simple and efficient way to reduce the carbon footprint of your online searches — which, as a journalist who searches for stuff dozens of times a day, is something I appreciate.

Credit where credit is due: I got this tip about Google from a video posted by ABC News chief meteorologist Ginger Zee. Watch her video below, and her Climate A to Zee series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQOa26lW-uI9vE04ltQcr8Kz2QRVcYpx5

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Vibe-physics sounds like something you do just before you flunk out of a STEM program.

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Personally seen this behavior a few times in real life, often with worrying implications. Generously I'd like to believe these people use extruded text as a place to start thinking from, but in practice is seems to me that they tend to use extruded text as a thought-terminating behavior.

IRL, I find it kind of insulting, especially if I'm talking to people who should know better or if they hand me extruded stuff instead of work they were supposed to do.

Online it's just sort of harmless reply-guy stuff usually.

Many people simply straight-up believe LLMs to be genie like figures as they are advertised and written about in the "tech" rags. That bums me out sort of in the same way really uncritical religiosity bums me out.

HBU?

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OC donut steel (but repost wherever lol)

Dude says: "I'm not worried about the AI apocalypse, I always say "thank you" to them!"
Robots later catch him and state: "Throw that one in the grinder, his "thank you" used 748kw/h every day"

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cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/31694909

Remember the "I want a white one" video? That's the first video I clearly remember having a text-to-speech voice-over. It was really bad TTS, and it was awesome. Lately, though, I find myself wishing video hosting services like Youtube and Peertube (to a lesser degree) had a filter so that I could filter out any videos with TTS voice overs. Does this bother anyone else?

I'm a little torn about it. There are legitimate reasons for people to use them; I've seen commentary from posters about social anxiety that makes even recording audio difficult, and TTS must be fantastic for mute folks. Non-native English speakers may be more comfortable with it. I'm sure the platform doesn't help... how many videos do you have to post where the peanut gallery mocks your verbal mistakes before you give up and just have an engine read your written text? I've also noticed that the use of TTS is far, far worse on Youtube -- I have yet to come across a single video on any Peertub site that uses it, although it must exist.

Like a lot of technology, generated speech is getting abused, and since TTS has valid uses, I put it in the "enshittification" category. It's used on every bulk, low-effort "N greatest/funniest/random-adjective" videos; I hear it in increasingly in those suspiciously AI-smelling, ad-ish "reviews" that just read specs and make an odd comment about how cool it is; and there's so much more low-quality, low-information content that feels AI generated uses it -- or maybe it feels AI generated because it uses it. It's almost always on just awful content.

TTS on video content is a perfect example of "this is why we can't have nice things." I am starting to hate it so much, I abort whatever I'm starting to watch as soon as I hear the absurd cadence and mispronunciations -- I'd rather hear an honest non-native speaker making mistakes than that terrible TTS crap.

Whatever the reason, the use of TTS is a trend I'm putting firmly in the "enshittification" category, but am I overreacting here? Do you have a way of dodging or identifying content that uses TTS, in advance?

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The curl developers are still drowning in thousands of AI generated vulnerability reports because there is the tiniest chance of a payout.

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Elon Musk’s xAI has signed an important new customer: the U.S. government.

The two-year old AI company—most recently in the news when its chatbot praised Hitler—said in a blog post Monday that it has launched a new division, called “Grok with Government” and signed a contract worth up to $200 million with the Department of Defense. xAI also announced that it had been added to the General Services Administration schedule, meaning that xAI products will now be available for purchase across every government office and agency.

xAI’s new DoD contract is part of a new effort to develop AI agent workflows across a “variety of mission areas,” the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office said in a press release, without giving many more specifics. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic were also awarded up to $200 million contracts as part of the new effort, according to the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. A number of tech companies, including Meta, Amazon, and Google, have either started working with or upped their work with the U.S. government in the last year as the taboo in Silicon Valley of working with the Defense Department has fallen away.

In the end, AI is just a tool for the rich, not for peasants

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Before performing the study, the developers in question expected the AI tools would lead to a 24 percent reduction in the time needed for their assigned tasks. Even after completing those tasks, the developers believed that the AI tools had made them 20 percent faster, on average. In reality, though, the AI-aided tasks ended up being completed 19 percent slower than those completed without AI tools.

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The Biggest Insult (whatwelost.substack.com)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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