AI technology thread

[Raphael]

I think the scrapers just don't care. I don't think small websites are really on their radar much and the effects are adequately explained by indifference and/or incompetence.

Obviously. If you mean by "on their radar" "they don't scrape them" that's wrong, if you mean "they don't give a rat's ass about them" you are very right. (A year ago, a small site I regularly visit, posted a message after some downtime: "LLM crawlers have been wreaking DDOS-like havoc around the world, causing site outages and huge headaches for sysadmins of small/independent websites around the world. The spate of recent gateway errors and other problems is because of these botnets.").


JAL

Yeah, there are way too many people who simply seem to assume as a matter of course that only big corporations and similarly big institutions have their own websites. Including politicians who write laws and regulations for the internet that are easy though somewhat annoying to comply with if you have an institutional or corporate budget, and impossible or near-impossible to comply with if you have a non-rich private individual's budget. But I'm getting off topic.

[alice]

I think that there is an important aspect that is hardly addressed in the current public debate about AIs, and that is how AI scrapers overrun website after website. I have a feeling that this adverse side effect of AI technology is intended by the techbros because they want to peddle their concept of a CompuServe-style Metaverse as an alternative to the failing Internet. (And the autocrats also want something that is easier to censor than the Internet.)

And, for a lot of not-necessarily autocrats, monetise¹.

¹ or monetize, if you must.

[Ares Land]

Yeah, there are way too many people who simply seem to assume as a matter of course that only big corporations and similarly big institutions have their own websites. Including politicians who write laws and regulations for the internet that are easy though somewhat annoying to comply with if you have an institutional or corporate budget, and impossible or near-impossible to comply with if you have a non-rich private individual's budget. But I'm getting off topic.

Agreed. It's difficult on many levels for smaller actors, from a regulatory standpoint.
And besides the regulatory issues and the AI scraping, there are still security issues (hard to maintain a Wordpress or Drupal instance yourself) or spam issues (setting up and maintaining an email server is a huge hassle and it's all too easy to get yourself blacklisted.)

[rotting bones]

My headache is too intense to argue like usual. I'll just leave this here:

[malloc]

With apologies to people who demand that I remain silent on this issue, what does everyone think about the fact that Trump and other reactionaries have thrown their support behind artificial intelligence? People here once called me a crypto-fascist Heideggerian for opposing AI, yet the real fascists have become its biggest fans.

[bradrn]

With apologies to people who demand that I remain silent on this issue, what does everyone think about the fact that Trump and other reactionaries have thrown their support behind artificial intelligence? People here once called me a crypto-fascist Heideggerian for opposing AI, yet the real fascists have become its biggest fans.

I think it’s only to be expected. I don’t like AI at all. In fact, as far as I can tell pretty much everyone here is in agreement with you that we hate it. Once again you are arguing against a strawman.

(Oh, and the ‘crypto-fascist’ bit was more because of how you were arguing, not merely because you hate AI. The only people who believe that ‘AI is unstoppable’ are Trump and co.)

[rotting bones]

With apologies to people who demand that I remain silent on this issue, what does everyone think about the fact that Trump and other reactionaries have thrown their support behind artificial intelligence? People here once called me a crypto-fascist Heideggerian for opposing AI, yet the real fascists have become its biggest fans.

I don't know if you can understand it:

Considering that:
1° Megaupload was shut down and Kim Dotcom was arrested in a raid because of copyright infringement.
2° Sam Altman has admitted that genAI would not exist without copyright infringement. https://www.salon.com/2024/01/09/imposs ... hted-work/
Why are ChatGPT, Grok etc not shut down and Altman and Musk etc arrested?

Institutional integration into the capitalist structure. The AI bubble is the only thing keeping the market afloat. Megaupload only helped us little people while doing nothing for corporations.

[rotting bones]

With apologies to people who demand that I remain silent on this issue, what does everyone think about the fact that Trump and other reactionaries have thrown their support behind artificial intelligence? People here once called me a crypto-fascist Heideggerian for opposing AI, yet the real fascists have become its biggest fans.

I think it’s only to be expected. I don’t like AI at all. In fact, as far as I can tell pretty much everyone here is in agreement with you that we hate it. Once again you are arguing against a strawman.

(Oh, and the ‘crypto-fascist’ bit was more because of how you were arguing, not merely because you hate AI. The only people who believe that ‘AI is unstoppable’ are Trump and co.)

I love AI FWIW.

[bradrn]

With apologies to people who demand that I remain silent on this issue, what does everyone think about the fact that Trump and other reactionaries have thrown their support behind artificial intelligence? People here once called me a crypto-fascist Heideggerian for opposing AI, yet the real fascists have become its biggest fans.

I think it’s only to be expected. I don’t like AI at all. In fact, as far as I can tell pretty much everyone here is in agreement with you that we hate it. Once again you are arguing against a strawman.

(Oh, and the ‘crypto-fascist’ bit was more because of how you were arguing, not merely because you hate AI. The only people who believe that ‘AI is unstoppable’ are Trump and co.)

I love AI FWIW.

I suppose I ought not to be surprised, given that we seem to disagree on just about every issue in existence.

[rotting bones]

I think it’s only to be expected. I don’t like AI at all. In fact, as far as I can tell pretty much everyone here is in agreement with you that we hate it. Once again you are arguing against a strawman.

(Oh, and the ‘crypto-fascist’ bit was more because of how you were arguing, not merely because you hate AI. The only people who believe that ‘AI is unstoppable’ are Trump and co.)

I love AI FWIW.

I suppose I ought not to be surprised, given that we seem to disagree on just about every issue in existence.

I do hate the AI industry.

[Ares Land]

With apologies to people who demand that I remain silent on this issue, what does everyone think about the fact that Trump and other reactionaries have thrown their support behind artificial intelligence? People here once called me a crypto-fascist Heideggerian for opposing AI, yet the real fascists have become its biggest fans.

It's an interesting fact. Basically:

• AI aesthetics are cheap and tacky; in fact the embodiment of what Milan Kundera called kitsch. Fascists love kitsch.
• Fascists were historically fascinated by technology.
• Tech companies are doing their best to ingratiate themselves with the Trump administration.
• Left-wingers usually object to AI so of course the far-right will take the extreme opposite position

I don't think your opposition to AI is really exceptional. It's more vocal than usual but other than that, it looks like a fairly common position.

My own position on AI is decidedly contrarian. I don't think it's an important issue one way or another.

[WeepingElf]

AI has legitimate and useful applications, such as predicting which way a protein folds. But creating artwork is not really one of them, and the scrapers are of course a source of trouble for web sites. I wouldn't say that AI has to be banned, but it requires to be tightly regulated - and that is, unfortunately, something the far-right cronies of the techbros won't do. I think most of us here agree on this.

Meanwhile...

[jal]

I love AI FWIW.

I do hate the AI industry.

Those are one and the same, you cannot separate them.

My own position on AI is decidedly contrarian. I don't think it's an important issue one way or another.

Ok Ed Sheeran.

AI has legitimate and useful applications, such as predicting which way a protein folds. But creating artwork is not really one of them.

Those are two quite different kinds of AI.

I think we need to separate the types of AI there are, the impact they have on society, the benefits they bring, and the downsides they have. When talking about "AI", most people mean LLMs + generative AI. Nobody is talking about the AI that scans medical images and detects early-stage carcinoma, or the type of AI that can predict protein folding. That type of AI existed before LLMs, and has quite different needs in terms of data centers etc.

So, LLMs. LLMs are amazing predictors of tokens, and, at least initially, passed the Turing test with flying colours (even though they're basically a Chinese Room). LLMs are useful, but unreliable, and rely on a vast database of knowledge that's scraped from the internet and paper books. There is genuine concern about copyright violations when gathering the data, but it's less obvious than with generative AI. Use of LLMs is ubiquitous. Companies use them for chatbots, auto replies, redaction of writing, drawing up contracts, and so on. People use them as a vast knowledgebase, replacing Google search, to ask medical questions, holiday destinations, partner choice, child rearing, scientific topics, and home work, and so on and so forth. It's the one-stop partner for any question you have, critical thinking not needed. Even the "anti-AI" kids use ChatGPT to do their home work and write their essays. Almost nobody says "AI slop" meaning LLM text output. The downside: data center need (see below) and the fact it makes people dumb. Critical thinking skills are out the window first, but thinking skills in general are affected badly. And don't tell me anyone likes talking to an AI "agent" when you have a customer complaint. Oh, and the elephant in the room: rogue agents. If we manage to destroy civilization, it's no doubt because some band of rogue agents destroys critical infrastructure.

A special type of LLM is the code generator. Copilot and Claude Code are the most used for general purpose coding, and then there are app generators like Lovable that craete full apps for you. "Vibe coding" is indispensible in the modern software industry. Yes the code is inefficient and bloated, full of bugs and security holes, and unmaintainable, but let's be honest - so is most code of the average software developer. The downside isn't the lousy software, but the sheer volume of code it can produce. Lousy developers can do only so much by themselves, given them a code generator and they easily produce 10-100 times the shit. There's less ethical concerns here, I think, as software can't be copyrighted, and most code generators are trained on publically available source code.

Generative AI is the type of AI most people (except some "prompt bros") hate. It produces bland, easily recognizable-as-AI pictures and videos, nobody except your grandma on Facebook likes to see. It's also the type of AI that has the most problems: it's trained on copyrighted material, but more importantly, it can recreate its training data almost flawlessly. It replaces graphics artists and designers, formerly working on company logos and art work, training material, website design and images, and so on. Why hire an expensive artist for your yoghurt cup if AI can create something passable? But the worst this type of AI has to offer is deepfakes. Famous people's heads have been added to porn actors bodies, deadly outrage has been created by fake videos showing people doing things they never did, and so on. And the other side of the medal: people don't believe proof of genocide anymore, because "it's AI-generated" (even if it isn't). Reality will never be the same. And of course, this type as well needs large data centers.

So, these types of AI have quite a bit of downside, and almost no upside. And there's another set of problems they all share. First, AI needs huge, huge data centers to be able to operate. For training, but also for regurgating their training data when people ask questions or ask for an image or video. Data centers are springing up everywhere, in a time when energy is scarce and we have a global warming crisis. They need clean water (and in practice hardly recycle it), huge amounts of power and produce a lot of heat. Also, they need computers, especially ones with expensive "graphics" cards and lots of memory, having caused a global shortage in supply, and making it impossible for consumers to buy computers with good graphics and enough memory. The economy behind it all is unmaintainable. The investments currently made exceed 2 trillion a year, which means to break even, every person in the world needs to spend about $250 a year on AI (including all third-world countries). NVidia is the richest company in the world, because it lends the money to buy their graphics cards to the corporate buyers of said cards. When the AI bubble bursts (and it has to burst sooner or later), we'll have an economic crash the likes we've never seen before. And of course, all of this stuffs the pockets of a small elite of billionaires that seem to have the end game of destroying the planet and living in a bunker till they die.

Oh, and before someone starts about Luddites, remember they didn't fight technology. They fought rich industrials that first took over their business, then forced them to work in the factories in extremely bad conditions for a measly pay.


JAL

[WeepingElf]

Thank you for the clarification, jal!

[Ares Land]

Ok Ed Sheeran.

This is meant to be insulting, I suppose, but I'm afraid I don't follow Ed Sheeran-related scandals, or indeed Ed Sheeran at all.

[jal]

This is meant to be insulting, I suppose, but I'm afraid I don't follow Ed Sheeran-related scandals, or indeed Ed Sheeran at all.

Lol, do you follow the news at all? Ed Sheeran was heavily criticized for not taking a stance when his support act was cancelled for supporting Palestine.


JAL

[Ares Land]

This is meant to be insulting, I suppose, but I'm afraid I don't follow Ed Sheeran-related scandals, or indeed Ed Sheeran at all.

Lol, do you follow the news at all? Ed Sheeran was heavily criticized for not taking a stance when his support act was cancelled for supporting Palestine.


JAL

Like I said, I don't follow Ed Sheeran related scandals -- and I don't even feel bad about it.

[WeepingElf]

There recently was a discussion of AI-generated album covers in a German music forum. My thought was: Ten years ago, people complained about album covers cheaply banged together with Photoshop, and even in the 'Golden Age' of album cover art in the 70s, only very few albums were wrapped in a Hipgnosis or Roger Dean masterpiece - most album covers were just a photo, usually of the act, with the artist name and the album title added in some fancy typeface. And now, those cheap artless album covers are just generated by AI. The tools changed, the way cheap album covers look changed, but everything else remained pretty much the same: most album covers suck. The same of course holds about book covers, ads, and other kinds of commercial artwork which has to be done cheaply and quickly.

[Ares Land]

There recently was a discussion of AI-generated album covers in a German music forum. My thought was: Ten years ago, people complained about album covers cheaply banged together with Photoshop, and even in the 'Golden Age' of album cover art in the 70s, only very few albums were wrapped in a Hipgnosis or Roger Dean masterpiece - most album covers were just a photo, usually of the act, with the artist name and the album title added in some fancy typeface. And now, those cheap artless album covers are just generated by AI. The tools changed, the way cheap album covers look changed, but everything else remained pretty much the same: most album covers suck. The same of course holds about book covers, ads, and other kinds of commercial artwork which has to be done cheaply and quickly.

For amateur bands? I haven't seen any AI album covers yet.

Lots of flyers and posters, and generally cheap commercial artwork. It makes me think of those 1990s docs filled with WordArt and clip art. I think that - like 1990s WordArt - people like to make these because I think it's easy and fun; I can't say it's as pleasant to look at them (for starters, they all look the same.)
An interesting bit is that many of these are pointless; you don't need AI art, or any art at all, to announce the dates for a garage sale; 'GARAGE SALE' followed by the location, followed by the date is more than enough.

[alice]

A useful question regarding any kind of "AI" might be: "What can AI help us do now that we couldn't do just as well before?" Thus:

- "Good" AI: difficult but important analytic things which up to now have needed a lot of time, effort, and re$ource$.
- "Bad" AI: Save money by not having to pay humans.