atomicthumbs

remote sensing practicioner

gregarious canid. avatar by ISANANIKA.


Website League address
@wolf@forest.stream
send me an email
atomicthumbs@wolf.observer
twitter but hopefully i only post photos there in the future
twitter.com/atomicthumbs
newsletter!! this one will let me tell you where i go
buttondown.com/atomicthumbs
newsletter rss same thing
buttondown.com/atomicthumbs/rss
Website League (centralized federation social media project)
websiteleague.org/
Push Processing (Website League photography instance)
pushprocess.ing/
88x31 button embed code
<a href="https://wolf.observer/88x31"><img src="https://wolf.observer/images/wolf-88x31.png" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"></a>
forest.stream (general admission website league instance)
forest.stream/
bluesky (probably just for photos)
bsky.app/profile/wolf.observer
this will be a cohost museum someday
cohost.rip/

fullmoon
@fullmoon

The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies produce have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like the answers might be good and the answers are very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting. Because such answers are so easy to produce, a large number of people are posting a lot of answers. The volume of these answers (thousands) and the fact that the answers often require a detailed read by someone with significant subject matter expertise in order to determine that the answer is actually bad has effectively swamped our volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure.


76f0e4667ed32667d2bfc063699b246e
@76f0e4667ed32667d2bfc063699b246e
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nicky
@nicky

...they weren't allowed to delete posts solely for being AI-generated (using the language of social justice to call mods racist, naturally)

semi-related but okay so you have this small detail, and add the whole recent thing with Nanowrimo trying to claim that you're ableist and classist if you don't care for the boring output of LLMs. i'm sure there are other examples i can't remember rn but it's absolutely fascinating seeing how the people trying to force this AI shit onto us try out different social-justice-language-exploiting PR tactics, and how they quickly drop these mini-campaigns when they realize it's not working. like, you don't hear them talk about "democratizing" art much anymore, do you? now they're simply trying to guilt people into shutting up about it. interesting move, let's see how it works out for these businessboys


amydentata
@amydentata

It really highlights how, pardon my language, artificial the push for AI is. There isn't demand. There are just advertisers and CEOs trying to push this on everyone, and they'll make up any old bullshit to try and move an inch.


atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

they'll post a video from their multimodal LLM and talk about how revolutionary it is and how it can make movies now and then you watch it and it's a 90 second long collection of 5 second shots (model can't maintain context any longer than that) of things that look somewhat plausible and Pixar-ish as a still moving and shifting and twisting and changing in ways they should not, cannot, and you realize that the people pushing these things are suffering from the same disease their models are: they can't create any original ideas either and so all they can do is look at what people have created with their minds and think "I can do that just as good because I am a smart boy who's good with computers and I'm going to make everyone like me" and then they start copying their work, but they don't know what they're even trying to copy, do they? Because they look at all creative work at nothing more than a surface level. If they went to an art museum they would think it was a bunch of pretty pictures, linger in the section with the Renaissance paintings, marveling at the chiaroscuro, and if they even got to the contemporary art section they'd stare at a Rothko for a while, scoff and move on, or just walk past it because it's not representational and so to them contains nothing to Look At and feel something. To them, a painting functions at the same level as someone who choose a Mickey Mouse watch face for their Apple Watch and then looks at it and smiles because they saw Mickey Mouse. They would not do any of this AI shit if they understood why people more creative than them create art. All they can do is copy without understanding, in their work and in their internal models of why people should want to consume their work and why it's wrong to oppose what they're doing, and so it comes off as bizarre, inhuman, inauthentic. They're remixing without comprehension.


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in reply to @fullmoon's post:

"Of course we do care about quality of answers on SO. For the sake of our own AI though, users are just source of traffic that costs us a fucking lot and don't pay us shit, why would we care."

This is unsurprising! these LLMs are basically "wisdom of the crowds machines" right? they scrape the whole-ass internet and then mulch it for patterns. It's not like there's any deductive reasoning going on behind the scenes.

so if the majority of people on the internet think the earth is flat, and that's what ends up in chat GPT's training data, then that's what it's gonna tell you.

So yes! peak human intellect has produced a machine that regurgitates common misconceptions, good for us.

A more accurate description in laycreature's terms is that it's a freakishly good AutoComplete. Just like AutoCarrot sometimes suggests nonsense that is nothing like what you were actually trying to type, LLMs have no idea what they're saying and are just picking the most likely word to come next. Sometimes it happens to form a complete and factually correct sentence, but in practice it's subtly yet critically wrong most of the time.

for people who might be unaware: this isn't a new policy - it was first written in December 2022, i. e. shortly after ChatGPT became available, and has been in place continuously since then (even though it was originally called a "temporary policy"). As far as I can tell, the only meaningful changes since then have been that they reworded it over time to apply to all generative AI tools, not just ChatGPT, and that they made it no longer "temporary".

in reply to @76f0e4667ed32667d2bfc063699b246e's post:

I honestly cannot make clear head or tail of the "monica" buisness.

as best I can see it looks like Monica was asking for some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card wrt using people's preferred pronouns (instead opting to use "they") and a lot of the sight erupted into terf-adjacent apologetics in her defence-

but a big corporation defending transgender people's right to respect against an incensed and substantial contingent of their community doesn't pass the smell test for me so I can only assume I have something backwards somewhere

I'm unfamiliar with the situation, but did a quick search for information and took a glance through Monica's timeline of events as well as a couple of older posts. From that it sounds like Monica is a professional technical writer and has always avoided use of singular third-person pronouns in general, using either "you", the plural "they," or just the person's name or a placeholder like "somebody" to avoid any kind of ambiguity.

Stack Exchange proposed policies that changed the requirement from the negative "you must not intentionally call people by third-person pronouns they don't want to be called by" to the positive "you must call people by the third-person pronouns they want to be called by" and Monica asked "Hey, so I don't call people by any third-person pronouns at all; will this policy change require me to change my writing style to start including third-person singular pronouns, or can I continue not using those"?

So I don't think it's a "get out of jail free" card situation? Monica wasn't asking to use the singular "they" for everyone regardless of gender, but to continue not using singular third-person pronouns at all for anyone.

in reply to @amydentata's post:

I've been following Ed Zitron's coverage of the whole thing, and it really seems like it's basically like six dudes driving this whole craze and it's all just to keep the stock market line going up for another few quarters.

in reply to @atomicthumbs's post: