ah hbomberguy talks about “generative AI” in proper terms (timestamped link because unfortunately it’s not its own chapter). thank you hbomberguy. it’s not a technical analysis at all, partly because he isn’t willing to waste his life learning about how this dumb stuff works — which is very respectable. but also, the offhandedness (well, 2 minutes of a 4 hour video is “offhanded” IMO) with which he talks about the reality of what general‐purpose artificial neural network models actually are and do perfectly illustrates how you don’t need any kind of complicated explanations to come to what are really basic conclusions about the situation. you need nothing more than his simple and broad observations to know that his conclusion of “these machines people are paying for were made exclusively from stolen property and are purpose‐built for deception” is undoubtedly true. he doesn’t leave any room for error because there doesn’t need to be. nothing else you throw at this has any more weight than the base facts. there’s no further nuance to introduce on how this data laundering works.
the public perception of NFTs — at least in more online circles — seemed much closer to this in tone compared to the discussions i’ve seen being had about cryptocurrencies or general‐purpose machine learning models. (and i’d say it matters more with the more online demographics, as they’re more easily targeted here.) there were swaths of people who instantly saw NFTs as a dumb scam and weren’t phased by any other information given to them about how it works, because the concept of computers prescribing ownership better than people do when ownership is an entirely social concept is so wildly disconnected from reality that anyone who’s at all reasonably grounded would never be persuaded to believe it. i can’t tell you exactly why this happened with NFTs and not cryptocurrencies or machine learning, where the arguments of “assets unregulated by design are purpose‐built to fund underground economies and are therefore worse at everything else than the pre‐existing solutions we already have” and “these capitalists are selling you stolen data remixed by a computer that can’t know what facts are” don’t seem to have caught on with quite as many people despite being just as straightforward and compelling to me. maybe it’s the lack of fugly apes showing how clear the disconnection from reality is in other aspects for the people being swindled by these?
the most technical observations hbomberguy makes about these general‐purpose neural network models are how it’s been demonstrated that they’ve been trained on things these comptech companies didn’t have permission to use, and how they don’t amount to anything more than “pattern recognition” because it can’t know facts (because it’s a statistical model and not a sentient being) which is shown by how often their output is false (despite the false output superficially sharing constructive resemblance to real facts). there are technical proofs of these things, but i’d argue that most people would understand that these observations are true without such long‐winded explanations as long as they also understand that computers are not made of magic, just heaps of non‐renewable precious metals. (i mean, judging by how much trouble everyone i know has using computers on a daily basis, i certainly don’t need any convincing that they’re not magic. if they were, we’d have at least one video editor that wasn’t slow as molasses, but we don’t!) but i suppose this is why the big comptech corporations are doing their damnedest right now to convince people that computers are actually magic by using every trick they can think of up to and including lying, stealing, and bullying.
anyway i wonder if harris bomberguy always keeps his head slightly tilted for like some random medical reason or if it’s specifically to agitate my OCD
(yes i’m late to this party, i was too busy playing Minecraft with friends to tackle this daunting 4 hour monster in one sitting. listen there’s an entire post with a wealth of my thoughts about TotK that i don’t know if i’ll finish writing because the month that everyone posted about that game all the time was oh fuck it was more than half a year ago what is time i’m not even done playing the game yet)
