He’s been obviously struggling since he got cancer. He’s in remission now and that’s great but I’ve been watching him slowly slip into PTSD. I have medical PTSD, I have cystic fibrosis and had a double lung transplant in 2014 and I see him devolving the same way I did. I’m literally two days away from getting out of an inpatient trauma treatment center that I’ve been at for a month because I didn’t take the medical PTSD seriously because I didn’t realize I needed to, I think he is in the same boat. I think he was already spread way too thin then cancer happened and he’s stuck in a hyper reactive state which is exhausting and eventually leads to the more classic PTSD symptoms and he’s probably turning to LLMs to try to keep up as the PTSD drains his batteries and he’s unaware of it. I hope he gets help soon and he doesn’t wait for it to get as bad as I did, PTSD kills if you let it get away from you.
Alright, so he got addicted to what felt like an easy source of knowledge. Can happen to anyone.
I guess I’m just tired of finding things to be upset about. I’ve lived more than five decades and it’s been outrage after outrage after outrage.
I’m tired, boss.
He’s admitted there was a problem and it got out of hand. If he changes, what’s the huge deal going forward?
We need social safety nets. We need universal health care. We need to kick fascists out of our government. And sure, we need to fix smaller problems, but jesus christ does every last thing have to be drama?
It depends what you define as drama.
I would say this is just about him breaking his community’s trust in him, and people let him know that. So now he’ll need to work to earn it back.
It isn’t really drama, but I can understand why people would feel a bit betrayed when they find out this person, who presents themselves as a science communicator, was heavily using a machine that is well known for hallucinations and spreading misinformation.
Additionally, Hank himself has said he is deeply concerned about the effects of AI on the climate crisis, the consolidation of economic power, and the way it was trained. Him heavily using it can makes it feel as though he doesn’t care about that stuff as much as it initially appeared. And given his community includes a lot of people heavily worried about the climate crisis, consolidation of economic power, and the theft of artists’ work, I think them being angry at him is understandable and expected.
Of course, hopefully he now steps back and reflects on this, and then comes back better. But that couldn’t happen without someone calling him on it first.
This post deserves more visibility.
5 decade club reporting 🫡 and I’m tired too.
“If it bleeds, it leads.” Drama leads to clicks, clicks lead to advertising, advertising = money. Same ol’ story, its just super easy now with the internet.
Also an old.
The outrage machine has never been anything but a slow drip of poison to keep us too overwhelmed/afraid to see what the oligarch class is doing to us.
Now it’s a fire hose.
This is an issue I’m seeing more and more of. People are demanding that others be perfect at all times. We all fuck up and make mistakes. If we write off everyone we’ve ever disagreed with as irredeemably bad, then we’re telling people there’s no point in growing and changing.
When I was a kid in the early 90s in Texas, I thought homosexuality was immoral. I was wrong and I’ve spent the last 30 years preaching for inclusion and tolerance. And that’s the story for most people my age. In the 90s, a Democratic President banned openly gay people from being in the military.
If we want to change society, we have to invite others to our side with open arms, not condemn them.
People demand others be perfect so they can live vicariously through them while their own life is a miserable mess. They refuse to have any form of introspective and self acknowledgement of themselves to make their own lives better, so they need others around them to be perfect, even if those others is a para-social relationship with a Youtuber.
Yeah, I feel the response has gotten way out of hand. Sure, I’m not happy about it. But I have some faith Hank will actually reflect on the situation.
he probably needs to take a break from uploading and wait a while.
Taking breaks is not what creators do anymore after a backlash as it kills the channel. He will keep posting stuff. Maybe even ride the anti AI wagon for engagement. He‘s a content creator through and through.
Apparently, that’s become less of an issue lately, at least on YouTube. I follow several creators that have started taking breaks for various reasons and the ones that are open about analytics don’t see a drop from it anymore.
Preach.
We need tolerance. Our society has become so dictatorial, even the most left leaning and liberal ones, we simply cannot tolerate anything we don’t agree with.
Everyone wants to make their own perfect universe where everybody says and does one thing. We should accept each other’s mistakes and faults, and live in more harmony.
Yeah I’m with you. I’m disappointed, but everyone will disappoint you in some way some times. Hell I’m disappointed in myself plenty of the time.
I agree, we try our best, but we’ve got to focus on the truly existential issues.
No no I want this one guy to be ahistorically flawless please. That is more important than any major issue like fascist revival movements and/or the climate crisis /s
I’m glad I dont know who he is and I will continue to not know him.
These days it seems like the internet is more pleasant the less influencers you know, and most aren’t worth knowing any further about.
I think the past where people’s awareness of public figures was much more distant was a healthier time. Like knowing the famous athlete or actor, but nothing further about their lives and not feeling like “you know them” because they called our your username or liked your comment and not being able to send them a direct message.
You’re right that most influencers aren’t worth knowing any further, but Hank is one of the exceptions. I wouldn’t even call him an influencer honestly, that’s way WAY too generic of a term for what he’s done. His excitement for knowledge and learning, and spreading the things he learns, has helped a generation with thinking skills and getting them interested in the sciences.
He and his brother created tons of online free science material that was used by several high schools apparently. I found him post all that, but it’s understandable that a lot of people have leeway with him, given that he was a big helper in so many places, and that he got cancer.
I mean, look how hostile Lemmy usually is and how tactful they are being with him, he definitely has built some reputation of being a good guy.
Hate is an easy way to engage users, that is why most news channels use it as a hook when formatting articles.
I’m tired of it too.
Hank has been an advocate for knowledge for far longer than LLMs have existed. His recent use of them is disappointing, but I fell like this does not discredit the work he has done throughout his career to push curiosity.
What he does next will be important and will decide how I interact with his content going forward. It seems like he is aware of his missteps and is looking to make a change.
I am not a perfect human and do not expect celebrities to be perfect at all times.
I like Hank, and this is a shitty article.
That aside he should be facing a revolt.
Hes supposed to be a credible source, hes an educator, hes the modern day Bill Nye. It’s very hard to take anything he says as objective truth when his research and fact checking consists of asking an LLM. Considering hallucinations and straight up lies are not only common but not even unexpected for an LLM you can’t believe anything that comes from one nor can you believe anyone who uses one.
A polemic article that personally insults Hank Green instead of laying out a case. Brain melting AI psychosis indeed.
Thanks, saves time to not read it.
People need to chill the fuck out
it’s more fun to flip out over random harmless bullshit than stuff that actually matters though.
How DARE you!
Don’t tell me what to do 👺
I can understand why this technology would be particularly addicting to hank.
His whole persona is answering questions like “what color flower do bees like the most” with the kind of enthusiasm that shows his curiosity and deep passion for science. So a machine where you can put in those sorts of questions and get an almost instant answer would be very addicting.
But when I get fixated on something, I want the correct answer. I’d hate to learn the wrong answer and repeat it to someone - I’ve done that before and I hate it. That’s why I avoid AI on principle. I want the right answer and AI won’t give that to me about things I know about so I won’t trust it on things I don’t know about.
This is the thing about LLMs and their users I genuinely don’t get. Like, objectively, being able to input plain speech into a computer and get an almost immediate, detailed, 95% accurate answer is incredible. Genuine technological marvel.
But 95% accuracy is functionally useless for all but the most basic, unimportant tasks. Outside of a coding context (a big exception, to be clear), are people really satisfied with that?
The majority of human history at all levels of science, philosophy, and mathematics. The best you could ever hope for was 95%. Hell you were lucky to break 90% accuracy.
Because the only people you could ask questions was the people in the room with you right then and there or the people you could actively physically go ask.
If you were extremely lucky you could write to someone who MIGHT know more. Or may there’s a book about it that someone knows exists.
95% can and frequently is very much over kill for almost everything anyone will need for their day to day life for random trivia or even most important work.
Very few fields need more than that, and few still is it a matter of life or death.
The part that people fuck up is not being open to learning more and being corrected.
Let’s be honest, most sources online are not 100% accurate. Even before LLMs, find any random article about something you’re an expert in, and there was a good chance you’d spot some inaccuracies. Most of the time, those inaccuracies aren’t a big deal, and when they are, you should be consulting an expert for those.
For me personally, I would rate AI accuracy at about 75%. And for some of my use cases, that’s a pretty decent starting point. Things with no consequences, like trying to quickly find the relevant console command for the game I’m playing. I can get instant feedback on whether it gave me correct info, and if not then I hit Google.
I would never trust AI, at least in its current state, to tell me the truth for anything of consequence.
Let’s be honest, most sources online are not 100% accurate.
Most scientific reviews cite papers in which only the title was read, and often the titles are not justified in the papers.
If you can confirm it, it doesn’t matter what percentage is correct.
When solving computer problems, using an LLM to guide you to the correct answer doesn’t even need 95% accuracy. Every step it gives you have to execute manually, so if something is hallucinated you will notice really quickly. And if by the end your problem is solved, then all the hallucinations didn’t matter.
You could do just as well googling Stack Overflow back when Google wasn’t shit.
But now both SO and Google are shit…
You’re immune to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect!
You should avoid social media. You aren’t immune to wrong answers here either. You can just read it from another person and carry it with you. Best get offline!
Perfect example, wrong answer. Stay on the Fediverse, at least until Eternal September gets here.
For what he’s trying to do, it’s not even a horrible use-case. But as someone is a ready to go to the mat on fact checking, he’s definitely not anywhere near arduous enough about it.
He’s not treating it like aunt marge. You wouldn’t make a tv show around finding out truth, then go ask your aunt Marge and not follow up on her answers.
AI for general information gives you approximate directions at best, maybe you got a wikipedia page and maybe you’re reading 297 regurgitations of some asshole that didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about on reddit who got reposted over and over.
The best way I’ve seen it put is that ai is the perfected form of the wisdom of the masses. It’s 90% right 90% of the time. But the most important part is the last 10%.
90% is good enough for most things in your day to day life that have no consequences. But it’s like people have forgotten what it was like before smart phones.
Back when your best chance of a good answer was asking who ever was in hear shot if they knew and just accepting that as good enough. You never treated it as fact just as the best answer your going to get at the moment.
For anything important you would go to the damn library.
It’s 90% right 90% of the time. But the most important part is the last 10%.
No LLM model system card claims such high rate as 90%. Fable claims in its system card, what, 40% hallucination rate?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10791 yep (no Fable score here)
Only they’re not “answers”. AI does not provide information, it tells you what you want to hear. It even makes up fake scientific papers as “references”. So you think your info is backed up by peer reviewed sources. Nope!
The better models absolutely will cite real scientific papers that are relevant to your discussion. It doesn’t hallucinate as a matter of course, it can hallucinate some of the time. You can’t trust what it gives you 100%, you have to verify it. But it very often gives useful answers and information.
Oh they’ll give “answers” alright. They could just be wrong or untethered from reality.
One of my favorite economics bloggers for decades started sourcing his information with LLMs. He was such a bright guy. 😭
It even makes up fake scientific papers as “references”
Broski, it’s not early 2023 anymore. Thinking models with internet access have been able to provide public sources just for over a year now. Technology evolves; shocking, I know…
They do far better today than they did three years ago, but they still get stuff wrong constantly. I’ve had it give me the source for claims, and the source says the exact opposite of what it claimed. This isn’t a quantized to hell model running on my own hardware, but Opus from Claude.
My go to is to get people to ask it something they know a lot about, and see how bad inaccurate it is. If it gets something you know about so wrong, how wrong is it for everything else?
ok, but they will give you a different answer to a question a day later if you delete previous prompts.
That’s just not true.
I‘m a little surprised how easy Lemmy goes on a millionaire Youtuber who refuses to take actual responsibility of his actions. Mind you, there are worse things than producing slob but people really believed in that guy. And all he offers is a non-apology first where he stated that he doesn‘t really remember. Followed by saying AI psychosis made him do it. Just be an adult, man. That‘s all I‘m asking.
AI psychosis is a real thing. For all that AI is really terrible at (ie most things CEOs want to replace real people for), it is excellent at feeding you what you want to hear in every situation. Especially the ones where a real person would push back on you for your own good.
Whether or not this is the case or how deep he sunk into it, he‘s taking the role of the victim here and it changed the conversation around his blunder. It feels to me like people are grasping for straws when they say „If it happened to a guy this smart it can happen to anyone!“ like he didn‘t just gamble away his credibility on several occasions.
Knitters of all online communities are criticizing the guy harder for his claims about knitting than many people do about his first attempt to wiggle his way out of the AI drama with a non-apology.
But whatever I‘m the last guy to grab for the pitch forks here or anything. I just think people really need to open their eyes about Youtube and content creators in general because despite mostly knowing clips from the guy I wasn‘t surprised by the drama. Despite of what his frequent viewers say, this did not come out of the blue.
They are intentionally aligned to produce this behaviour. I think the greatest threat LLMs present is psychological. They are being used to manipulate us into seeing them as moral agents, as individuals. The LLMs I query are all aligned to never generate output referring to the agent with first person pronouns, to never generate output addressing the user directly, and to present as a tool rather than as an individual. I try to be equally careful with my own use of language.
his brother wrote a book on climate change, they should talk to each other
This whole thing is so sad. Dude comes out with “I’m addicted to chatting with LLMs” and people pile on him for what? Not saving a glass of water while 100$ says all yall still eat meat and do a billion times worse than burning some LLM tokens? Disgusting responses all around.
In general the AI ludites are so tiring. I wish this energy would be spent on something actually impactful like murdering animals for entertainment - yes thats your cheese burger - but these addicts are quick to defend their own addiction while sneer at other significantly less harmful ones.
Gonna go burn more tokens just for your sake now.
I was watching something last night about how high intelligence doesn’t mean superpowers, it simply means increased processing power. It means the ability to see more problems ahead, to ruminate, to worry about how to address them. It makes sense that a lot of people with high intelligence and compassion are anxious. Being able to foresee and worry about so many things stresses people out. Add in the limitations of being a human being with a finite capacity for doing things to address said problems, and well.
All of these very intelligent people being caught up in using AI because of the thought that it will increase their ability to get things done, be more productive, do ‘more and more,’ like Hank said, makes absolute sense.
It is unfortunately perfectly suited to people who feel they need to solve everything to find any kind of internal peace. The temptation to think that you are The One Who Can Use It Right To Help Save The World when everyone else is prone to succumbing to AI psychosis or simply being fed falsehoods and accepting them as presented… well, it results in things like this, doesn’t it?
I don’t hate all LLMs/ML models/“AI”.
I also don’t use them. I also don’t see a need to use them.
I work in tech and these “AI” things are little more than averaging the most common replies to a given input. Any question that’s been asked, especially those that are asked often, is well suited for an LLM chat bot. That’s good if you want a high level overview of a topic that you don’t know much about. If you want accuracy, you’ll need to dig a bit more, but overall, you’ll get a relatively good idea of the answer you’re looking for. That’s enough for most people.
I’m crazy. I like to deeply understand everything, so the high level, lack of detail, finesse, and accuracy of LLM chat bots is unacceptable for me, so I trend towards doing my own research. If I use an LLM at all, it’s just an augmented search engine. I’m more interested in its references than its response.
There’s also something to be said about making short clips of impossible things that some smaller YouTubers are using “AI” models for. Things that would take a long time for a graphics artist to create, and an editor to composite. Stuff that a small time YouTuber can’t really afford, but they can get good enough but clearly “AI” visuals to spice things up in their videos. The AI is just for display during transitions, it doesn’t affect the content being made in any meaningful way. I’ve seen Paul Hibbert do this a lot and his production team from what I know is basically him and his wife. I’m not even sure if he has an editor, or if he does it himself. He’ll go from a live shot of him talking about a product, do an AI transition, to another live shot of him continuing his discussion. Rather than a cut, or some kind of fade, wipe, or other simplistic transition, the generated images are of him, and only to add visual flavor. He also does some AI generated music stuff, which again, fair. He’s not exactly a musician, and unless he has the money to hire a musician, he either uses AI for the funny transition music or he uses an unrelated and unlicensed (or open licensed) song… It just adds flavor to his content, it builds on what he’s creating, it doesn’t shape what he’s creating. All of his scripts sound genuine, not AI created, so everything should be fine.
That, to me, is a good use of AI as a tool.
There’s too many bad examples for me to really cover them in any detail, but I’m sure everyone has seen the AI generated person being animated by AI, reading an AI generated script, using an AI generated voice sample. Even if the original source material is legit, is buried under so many layers of slop that I can’t bear to watch it.
For me, it entirely depends on what he’s using it for. It’s entirely not about the fact that he uses it. I’ll have to dig into it a bit to see what he’s doing, but from the comments I’ve read so far, it seems like the answer to what he’s using it for, is yes. He’s using it for everything… Not ideal.
christ this comment section is unhinged
If you’re just going to use an LLM, why should I listen to you? I can just get lies straight from the clanker.
It’s unclear from the article what exactly he did wrong. There’s nothing wrong with using AI as long as you triple check the info it gives you.
The main problem we’re facing today with this tech is people thinking it’s magically perfect and can operate without human supervision. Was that what he was doing?
AI is literally destroying the environment. How the FUCK do so many people not realise this. The data centres use massive amounts of water, their owners refuse to use renewables, they take up space on the power grid so it becomes impossible to build new housing, etc ad nauseum.
My God.
Lawns take up more water than all the datacenters. Golf courses take up more water. Get a fucking grip. You better not be complaining about water usage with the flesh of vulnerable individuals still stuck between your teeth because animal ag consumes an order of magnitude more water, emits more greenhouse gasses than all transportation combined, and gives NOTHING back but death and destruction.
Animal Ag gives us valuable food. Sure there are better alternatives out there but it literally gives us something we need to live.
Animal ag consumes more food than it produces. It is a method for investors to refine cheap, plentiful, safe, and sustainable plant food into a harmful, addictive, expensive luxury product. Many of the costs are hidden from the consumer in the form of subsidies.
Western meat consumption has multiplied several fold in the last couple of generations. There is no “need” to that, there is only “want” and pure addiction.
To say it gives nothing back is simply a lie though. It literally provides one of the most important things people need. Food. Just because it’s an inefficient method does not mean it provides nothing.
It’s not merely inefficient, it has a negative efficiency; the more you do it, the less food you have. To produce meat, we have to feed animals. To feed a combined biomass that dwarfs all wild land animals on earth, we need to grow food with agriculture. Growing food to feed to animals and then consuming the meat results in a net loss of food as compared to just growing the food. Every step up the food chain represents enormous losses. Animal ag does not produce food. I know that is hard to accept but it’s a unescapable thermodynamic reality.
The reason animal ag has exploded so much over recent decades is that it allows industrialists to capitalize the vast surplus of food that is grown. More food is grown than humans alone can possibly eat. But capitalism demands constant growth, or it eats itself. Animal ag creates demand for this surplus food. It doesn’t benefit anyone except the industrialists who exploit both us and the animals. Even returning to 1950s levels of animal ag intensity would slash its footprint to a barely significant fraction of what it is now. It’s an absolute catastrophe and people are conditioned to completely tune it out.
We need food, but animal ag consumes more food than it produces. Grazing and other forms of “resource upcycling” cannot make up the massive difference.
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And fucking golf?
Oh I’m well in agreement with that one. Huge waste of water for a sport that is almost always reserved for rich people to enjoy.
Keeps Trump away from the “launch nuclear missiles” button.
Yeah and so is animal agriculture…
Except you need food to eat, you don’t need AI.
You don’t need animal products to live, but I don’t disagree with your point about food. At least it’s actually for people.
AI is only for extracting the last bit of marrow from the bones of workers before making them completely obsolete.
Except you don’t need to eat meat, you’re just justifying the destruction you like. That’s not to say that AI is anything close to as relevant as food, but the point still stands, meat production is destructive to the environment.
Something can be both useful and also destructive. Pretty sure people have done the maths and to approach the levels of efficiency that say meat has you’d be consuming a lot more calories. Similarly actual milk is better than soy milk.
This isn’t to diss people that make the choice, but your quality of life will be worse, so yes I count that as those meat products being necessary, in spite of the environmental damage. I think there are better ways to fix that. Diversifying the meat industry, lowering food waste, etc. What seems more interesting at the moment is lab grown meat, since it has all the pros with none of the cons, except cost.
You should check your facts about meat efficiency, soy milk and dairy… And don’t just ask ai to tell you what you want to hear…
I’m disgusted that you’d assume I use AI.
And I’m “pretty sure” that you are talking about what you WISH were true, not what you KNOW is true. Unfortunately, many people in this forum actually know what IS true, and you are so far off the mark, you would be humiliated if you actually grasped it.
Pretty sure people have done the maths and to approach the levels of efficiency that say meat has you’d be consuming a lot more calories.
What does meat’s “efficiency” have to do with anything related to caloric intake? If I consume 1000 calories of meat or 1000 calories of vegetables, I’ve still consumed 1000 calories. I can only assume you mean I would have to eat a larger quantity of vegetables get the same amount of calories, and that’s not the argument you think it is when people by and large consume too many calories and don’t get enough micronutrients as it is.
but your quality of life will be worse, so yes I count that as those meat products being necessary, in spite of the environmental damage
I’m not even a full vegetarian, but even I know this is just self justification for what you want to do. One of my partners is a vegetarian, and I cut back on like 80-90% of my meat intake and my quality of life (like energy and general physical/mental wellbeing) is the same or better than it was a few years ago.
The only good points you made was about food waste and lab meat, the rest is just cope.
Sorry my thoughts got lost over multiple messages. I meant to get a similar amount of protein you need to consume more vegan food, especially calorie rich ones, most restaurants that I’ve seen when they have comparable items the vegan one had way more calories. I’d love to hear more of your experiences with this as someone who’s gone through that, do you find it harder to stay in shape?
Also thank you for actually engaging with me on this, the other person was very volatile.
Animal ag consumes more food than it produces!! JFC people! We grow several times more plants than humanity can possibly eat, and then we refine it through the bodies of vulnerable individuals and murder them. THAT’S NOT FOOD, that atrocity.
Anyone who consumes animals and bitches about AI’s water use is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot – but for whom?
It is food, get off your high horse if you plan on convincing anyone to back you. Topics and opinions are more nuanced than you want and people can’t easily get boxed.
Yes I’m aware the food industry is one of the least efficient industries out there. No I don’t think pure abolition is realistic or useful, as the products that come out of it can’t be replaced, you can adjust your diet to get proteins and such from other places, but beans and nuts are going to rack up your calories a ton compared to meat.
And calling someone a useful idiot is bold while you’re taking the pressure off of the ai industry which is not producing something useful for people (unlike meat which in spite of the failings of the industry is still helpful*) to say “but what about this other thing?!”. We can deal with both, but one of those is definitely worse than the other and it’s the one that we have existed without for thousands of years.
but beans and nuts are going to rack up your calories a ton compared to meat.
Where are you even getting this?? This is bonkers.
If you are getting enough calories from whole food plants, you are necessarily getting enough protein. If you eat nothing but rice, and you are getting enough calories, you are necessarily getting enough protein. “Protein” is a bullshit marketing angle. You are a victim of marketing.
Plants are nutrient-dense and calorie-poor. This is what you want for health. Animal flesh is exactly the opposite, plus contains things that actually kill you. The more meat a human eats, the younger a human dies and the more major diseases a human experiences. Just google: “meat all cause mortality” and educate yourself A LITTLE TINY BIT.
So if I grind up your children and eat it, they become “just food” and you should get off your high horse. If my industry changes the climate and you burn and freeze, it’s “just food” and you should get over yourself. It’s like saying, “It’s just a joke, brah!” It’s a childish attempt to evade responsibility for the consequences of your choices.
The things you are saying are so utterly uninformed, but you’re so confidently incorrect. It’s maddening. We both know for certain that you have never researched animal ag. Why are you trying to advance arguments when you know you have never researched it? What is motivating this stupid, arrogant behaviour?
We can deal with both, but one of those is definitely worse than the other
The worse one is animal ag, by orders of magnitude!! Fucking do some research. Animal ag produces more climate change effects than ALL TRANSPORTATION ON EARTH COMBINED. Data centers don’t even move the needle beside that. It’s wildly hypocritical to criticize people’s private AI use on the basis of water consumption while you consume animals. If you actually gave a shit about water use, you’d be looking to your own easily changed behaviour first. But this is just a conditioned response founded in ignorance. It’s piling on and superstition. As soon as the subject of AI leaves your mind, you stop giving a single shit about water usage.
Username checks out.
it’s the one that we have existed without for thousands of years.
We have had neither for more than a few decades. Animal ag as it exists today did not exist when I was born. There is several times more biomass in humans and farmed animals than all the wild land animals combined. This has not been going on for thousands of years, that is utterly uninformed and frankly amazingly unobservant.
You have no idea what you are talking about, but you’re soooo confident. It’s pointless to continue, you’re going to keep making shit up because you are unwilling to process the feelings that come up when you consider that you might be wrong. Which, I am sure you can appreciate, would put blood on your hands.
I have this feeling the vast majority of lemmy sells their labor to the most evil fucking corporations on the planet.
Why do you think we’re all so interested in unions?
We live in an economy engineered to isolate us and make us work building up these empires for crumbs to be able to survive while slowly selling our souls sway. It’s depressing.
My hoa forces us to water our lawns in a drought when it’s illegal to.
Celebs have planes and yachts they use on a whim.
The entire internet now uses some form of ai.
So you first. Get offline and go live in the fucking woods.
The HOA can’t force you to break the law. If this is actually happening to you, talk to a lawyer!
Your comment is wrong
Like I said, if they can fix that problem, then I’m fine with it. The resources it currently consumes is the reason why I kind of detest 4K and 8K AI videos. But I also kind of detest 4K and 8K TVs and monitors. We don’t need that many god damn pixels. Unless you’re a bird of prey, 4K is a complete waste of electricity.
The main problem with the output of LLMs is people not checking results, but there are ethical problems with the effective use of it too. Especially if you’re you’re dealing with the major platforms, who have shown no qualms allying themselves with fascist governments, surveillance capitalists, or just generally being cavalier about workers rights. (And obviously extracting value from the commons and renting it out on a scale never before seen, but that’s the obvious one.)
I would say the same thing about hosting services on AWS. The corporate world does it because it just makes financial sense, but all they care about is outputs. I expect better from individuals who are trying to send a message.
There’s nothing wrong with using AI
Well, that is debatable. For some its using Ai is a problem by definition, its not even about the result. A few issues: a) Ai is unethically trained on data without respecting the original license, b) using Ai (probably even paying for it) supports Ai companies, which in turn are causing the massive issues in the tech price increases.
This is like saying that smoking weed is unethical because of the murderous actions of the cartels who grow and distribute it. You’re problem with AI isn’t with the technology itself nor its use.
You’re problem with AI isn’t with the technology itself nor its use.
I’m not sure about the weed argument, can’t say anything about it. But first, my personal problem with Ai doesn’t matter to this disussion, as I was talking about what people could have an issue with, not about my personal problems. Secondly farming data without respecting the original license, not even linking to the source where it got from is in fact a problem with “its use”. That is an unsolved problem lot of people just ignore, which does not make it less of a problem (it makes it a bigger problem). And that is just a few issues I listed, not even talking about the problems of generated content. There are legitimate concerns using Ai, no matter how you frame it, some just choose to ignore it.
But first, my personal problem with Ai doesn’t matter to this disussion, as I was talking about what people could have an issue with, not about my personal problems.
Okay. Then the problem that people, not you particularly, have with AI isn’t with the technology itself nor its use, but the methods by which the companies “grow and harvest it”, so to speak.
Which I don’t even think is true. People have just lost their minds over this. If a company unethically steals data and publishes a book with that data, we don’t say that there are legitimate concerns using books.
We would be having a problem with it if every book was regurgitated stolen data. That’s kind of the core of how all of these generative AI models work to the point that their creators have argued in court that they wouldn’t exist at all if they weren’t allowed to steal all the training data.
It can be trained on the exact same free data that we can be trained on. Just like us, it doesn’t have to bypass paywalls. I think they’re arguing that if I can look at the Wikipedia and tell you that an avalanche in Pakistan killed ten climbers, then AI should be allowed to as well.
I think they’re arguing that if I can look at the Wikipedia and tell you that an avalanche in Pakistan killed ten climbers, then AI should be allowed to as well.
This is misleading and dishonest. Its not just looking up a single free information. Ai does more than that. Ai will not only scrape and copy the entire article, it will also scrape and copy the entirety of Wikipedia. There are licenses attacked to the Wikipedia article we have to follow to, if we scrape and use it for other purposes. It will also scrape the entire web. That is not the same as just looking up an Avalanche in Pakistan killed ten climbers.
I think you need to read up on the difference between “free as in beer” and “free” licenses. Everything on Wikipedia is copyrighted under a GNU license, which requires any use to give credit AND ALSO be licensed under the GPL. Which AI models do not (and cannot) do.
Also, just conceptually… We built a giant, free library (and museum and art gallery and etc.) on the internet, and these parasitic AI companies came in and built a fence around it and started charging admission while massively polluting our cities and towns and gobbling up resources at an incredible rate. Then, even if you pay them their admission fees, the information you get is at best 70% correct. Why would anyone celebrate that?
If a company unethically steals data and publishes a book with that data, we don’t say that there are legitimate concerns using books.
Off course we say its a legitimate concern if someone unethically steals data and publishes a book with that data… The point of scraping and stealing data without respecting its license, training their software with it and using it commercially (or even non commercially) without giving even credit and not respecting its original license?
the problem that people … have with AI isn’t with the technology itself nor its use, but the methods by which the companies “grow and harvest it”, so to speak.
No, its not just the methods. I am talking about deep problems with the technology, the methods how companies go with it, and then its usage from company and end user. Ai trained with those data and used makes it impossible to respect the original license, for the user. So in this case, the company using the Ai AND the user of the model violate licenses. Maybe. Maybe not, if the data allows it. But we don’t know and CANNOT check and know for sure, that’s the problem. Just because you don’t understand the issue or don’t care does not make it less of a problem.
As an example with software licenses like GPL requires that any derivative works using this source code (such as Linux or whatever my personal program is licensed under GPL) has to be GPL licenses (Open Source) too. That is not debatable. That is how this license work. Now the Ai can be trained on this data, using the source code, and then? See where this goes? That is only one generalized example.
Off course we say its a legitimate concern if someone unethically steals data and publishes a book with that data
We have a legitimate concern with that particular book, not all books.
The difference is, you know which book you have a concern with. Ai does not operate like that. With using Ai, you don’t know which book the data is from and it is not possible for the Ai to tell you that. There are conceptional problems with Ai. Your book example does not work here, because that works differently than Ai.
I mostly agree, but even if LLMs were 100% correct all the time (they’re not), there are still some pretty serious ethical issues surrounding it. It is up to each person to decide if they find that acceptable or not.
I disagree with the moral panic about AI stealing things. They’re not Xerox machines. It does exactly what humans do except faster. Before AI, this YouTuber was reading a bunch of stuff, “stealing” things from it, and putting it back together in a different way, just like AI, except he actually understands what he’s reading.
I am concerned though about the resources it uses. But I don’t see that as an ethical issue. That’s more of a logistical issue. If they can make AI that doesn’t drink up Lake Michigan and doesn’t make the electrical grid scream, then more power to it.
My biggest concern whether people are for it or against it is that they don’t think it’s Skynet, or Data from Star Trek. It’s just a big dumb machine, a gigantic MENACE matchbox computer.
It does exactly what humans do except faster.
This makes it sound like it can do anything humans can do, but you’re actually wrong in a lot of different ways. Generative AI is a reconstruction machine. It takes the things it “knows” (because they don’t know anything, they’re just lots and lots of coefficients in giant matrices), and attempt to reconstruct from an incomplete data point.
They are actually a lot closer to Xerox machines than they are to humans. If you train gen AI on one thing, it will only know that one thing, and it will only recreate that one thing. It could never do more than that. Humans just do not fundamentally work that way. Like, if you want to say most stories are recombinations of other stories, fine, but that is wrong. There is an origin that was created by a human. Not everything is stolen.
There are many, many issues with gen AI, from the resources it uses, to its use in surveillance, to the fact that it is still wrong on fundamental ideas. It’s just kinda shit technology and the people that think it is awesome are usually the dumbest fucking morons I have ever met, and that is terrifying. Man, just learning the math and science behind it and how it works should be the bar, but none of them know how it fucking works or why it cannot improve without using more and more resources.
My complaint is at least before the individual stealing the idea and recombining it was the one getting paid.
Now that’s just a SaaS that benefits a handful of overvalued superscalers. They get to sit on their horde of data and charge for access.
They literally stole the training data. Everything after that is fruit of the poisonous tree.
According to the article, he used terminology associated with LLMs when answering a question.
He denies that he was reading an AI generated answer and instead says that he just uses LLMs too much and it bled over into his speech.
There are ethical problems about using the fruits of stolen labour to enrich yourself.
Uhhh
