Yeah, Lemmy is a bit over-the-top anti-AI, but most of it is based in reality.

There are a bunch of problems with AI. And they outbnumer any good ones by a mile.

The main cause of that fact is the entire AI bubble.

AI wastes a fuckton of energy. Of course, this energy isn’t free: communities pay. Electricity demand goes up, and so does price. Then, most electricity isn’t green. And on top of that, the rise in demand causes more electricity peaks, which almost exclusively get “fixed” through fossil fuel-based methods.

From another angle, AI disrupts markets. And not in a good way. Companies dump millions into AI while neglecting their employees (who get laid off because AI “can replace” them), and their customers as well (since instead of doing useful stuff for consumers they pump out AI-branded bullshit no one wants or needs).

Then, big AI companies spit in the face of copyright and have the audacity to turn around and claim copyright on their models’ outputs. If inputs are free game, so are the outputs. Copyright is a very vague, misunderstood and misused term, and no argument I’ve heard claiming feeding stuff into AI is fair use was grounded in reality.

That all veing said, AI is here to stay. I’ve been thinking long and hard about similar fundamental changes to how human society functions, and I think i found one. Photography.

Way back when, you had to do things painstakibgly by hand. Drawing, copying books by hand, etc.

Then the printing press came. Revolutionary? Sure. But not as revolutionary as photography. Instead of writing by hand, you had to typeset by hand before printing. This made the process scalable, but it was still painstaking work.

But photography is a different matter. You just have to make (or buy) a camera and other required supplies (film, developing media, etc), and then you merely have to set up the camera, take the photo, develop the film, and make the photo.

Even in the early days of photography, while these processes took some time, it wasn’t painstaking. To take a photo, you set up the camera, and wait. To develop film, you dunk the film into a chemical bath, and wait. To transfer the image onto paper - a similar ordeal. Set, forget.

Photography fundamentally changed how the entirety of society works. Painters complained and lost jobs and livelihoods - like the “jobs stolen” by AI. Instead of drawing stuff, which required a lot of skill, taking a photo is much simpler (abd faster).

Yesterday, instead of having to paint stuff, you’d take a photo. Today, instead of taking a photo, you ask AI.

On the copyright front, the paralels are obvious: Taking a photo of a book is fair use. But photocopying a book isn’t. The problem with AI is that it does some transformations to the original, so it’s obfuscated inside the model. But the obfuscation can be undone, as AI often happily spits out certain inputs verbatim when asked. Take a photo of a page - okay. Photocopy the entire book? Not okay.

The situation is the same when we look at artwork instead of books. Taking a photo of an artwork in a museum is okay. Scanning an artwork (duplicating it verbatim) - isn’t. Same for movies. A frame is probably gonna be okay. The entire movie - won’t.

Going by the closest analogue, there is absolutely no justification to indiscriminately feed everything and anything into AI, for indiscriminately photocopying and vervatim copying the same material is clearly protected.

The opposite of “cow steak”

Eh, pedoisland is too conservative.

Make it be called Pedo Land.

deleted by creator

Honestly, this idea has me pretty mortified as well. Just seeing ”rm -rf /” as part of a string sends chills down my spine.

Granted, any reasons or explanations to cause a string being cut short to this godforsaken form and accidentally run is extremely unlikely, but a valid theoretical possibility: I can easily imagine someone mistyping the first letter after root and, wishing to delete it, pressing Backspace while simultaneously accidentally grazing the Enter key.

Sure, the chances of it happening are about the same as a gun user accidentally dropping their gun, clumsily catching it in the air and accidentally shooting someone right in between the eyes as a result.

Honestly, advertising is very dystopian. Online tracking being the obvious first example.

But that’s not all. How should I block physical ads in the city? Not only does it ruin the view, but roadside billboards surely caused at least one death by distracting a driver, and ads can get quite distasteful.

Also, it’s not just roadside - they’re plastered everywhere! Buildings, bus stops, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Some are classic paper, some are of the TV screen type. Some are quite small and inconspicuous, but a lot are huge enough to be seen from at least half a mile away.

Physical ads don’t finance anything. They’re just obnoxious. I don’t know how succeptible to ads other people are, but for me it takes an actually good offer to entice me - and usually that’s heard on radio or seen on TV (as far as ads go).

Some economist please corrcxt me if I’m wrong, but: Trickle down may not work. However, trickle up should.

If you do say, UBI, people will spend the stuff. And the money will go to the big players. They’ll buy their food at Walmart. Or meds at Target Pharmacy. Or get a loan at JP Morgan.

Unlike, say Walmart, who won’t buy their huge private jet collection from the swathes of less-than-well-off people across all of America.

So even if UBI made people lazy, even if it made people less productive, the money will still disproportionately end up in the hands of the rich.

Because historically (and for the most part today as well), it costs money.

Sure, today stuff like ChatGPT and the somewhat older Google Translate exists, but that doesn’t solve the cost issue. (And I’m skirting on the huge elephant in the room called quality for a bit of brevity).

There’s a huge chance someone paid a good chunk of money for all the books you find dirt-cheap at a flea market, check out at a library or happen to find in your own house.

Printing physical books is expensive. Publishers also want a margin, and a lot of authors want royalties.

In the end even if the publisher and author are both good souls demanding nothing, someone needs to foot the cost of printing. But before that, you’d need to go through non-trivial talks with most authors’ publishers and/or authors themselves.

Then you need to arange for translation, typesetting and printing if you’re not doing it yourself. That takes both time and money.

And if you were to do all that yourself, it’d be a huge time investment, with a potential lawsuit if you don’t do those damn talks. So most just don’t bother.

Businesses are incredibly inefficient, even though some are “successful” and have a lot of cash to burn. They need to pay workers, bills, buy and fix equipment, and of course, a cut needs to go to the top people. Usually the “golden” 80-20 rule applies to almost everything: 20% of books make 80% of money, 20% of employees make 80% of money, and a different 20% of people do 80% of the work, etc. And of course, in this world, it’s all about the money.

A translation is usually initiated by a publisher that has a manager who wants to get his section’s metrics up to go cry to his own manager about how good he is to get a raise or not get fired. This is a daily grind. Sometimes (but quite rarely), that leads the manager to the decision of publishing a new book. Usually such actions are guided by things like bestseller lists, reviews and personal biases of the manager and the company as a whole. Sometimes the publisher hires an agency to try to approximate the demand for such a book (even more money spent). Then they do the talks. This also costs money, and the result is also a cost of money (the royalties to be paid). Then comes translation, then printing, then distribution to bookstores, and finally advertising.

These are just the steps that come to mind. All cost money, and all the books you see for sale in a bookstore went through all of these steps. For a library, not as much (but still the vast majority) did.

Sure, not every situation is the same, so there are companies that specialize in providing translations of well-known works or companies whose manager at one point said they need to publish 25 translations yearly (instead of one individual one), so they kind of “flood” the market.

But sometimes it’s just the whim of a newspaper whose management thought printing classic works of shorter length and bundling them with their newspaper would drive up newspaper sales.

It’s incredible how each document (edition of a book or otherwise) has multiple stories (of the author, publisher, translator, seller, advertiser, buyer, worker in logistics/delivery driver,…) that shaped the life of it. Some lasted a few hours, and some took hundereds of man-hours. All of this somehow translates to money.

That’s the long answer.

The short one is: 80% the economy and 20% human laziness.

My main gripe with this travesty of a “Start menu” is that it isn’t the Tom Hanks movie of a similar name.

The other is that even if it were, it won’t just play, but rather send you to the shiniest new subscription service to subscribe.

Nor does it “read” its input. It doesn’t even process it.

It’s built/tuned using it. Or as AI techros would say, trained.

This.

Regardless of the up and downsides respectively, it should be the penis owner himself to decide.

some sort of tracking of him was done that the feds don’t want people to know about

That “tracking” is all the work they did to find a suitable fake perp. If they had any real evidence and Luigi did do it, it would’ve been admitted almost immediately. They have very little to lose.

it was something that may be ruled unconstitutional and risk the case against him

And besides, if that were true and Luigi truly did it, don’t you think the current SCOTUS would use this great stroke of luck as a way of undoing some “dangerous” precedent?

Well…

CK did want guns readily accessible. CK did say gun violence deaths were a sacrifice he was willing to make.

Given the fact that Luigi might be pinned for the crime, it’s equaly likely that CK truly has had a larger share of responsibility in the killing at hand.

Soon you cannot believe anything you read online.

That’s a bit too blanket of a statement.

There are, always were, and always will be reputable sources. Online or in print. Writteb or not.

What AI will do is increase the amount of slop disproportionately. What it won’t do is suddenly make the real, actual, reputable sources magically disappear. Finding may become harder, but people will find a way - as they always do. New search engines, curated indexes of sites. Maybe even something wholly novel.

.gov domains will be as reputable as the administration makes them - with or without AI.

Wikipedia, so widely hated in academia, is proven to be at least as factual as Encyclopedia Britannica. It may be harder for it to deal with spam than it was before, but it mostly won’t be phased.

Your local TV station will spout the same disinformation (or not) - with or without AI.

Using AI (or not) is a management-level decision. What use of AI is or isn’t allowed is as well.

AI, while undenkably a gamechanger, isn’t as big a gamechanger as it’s often sold as, and the parallels between the AI and the dot-com bubble are staggering, so bear with me for a bit:

Was dot-com (the advent of the corporate worldwide Internet) a gamechanger? Yes.

Did it hurt the publishing industry? Yes.

But is the publishing industry dead? No.

Swap “AI” for dot-com and “credible content” for the publishing industry and you have your boring, but realistic answer.

Books still exist. They may not be as popular, but they’re still a thing. CDs and vinyl as well. Not ubiquitous, but definitely chugging along just fine. Why should “credible content” die, when the disruption AI causes to the intellectual supply chain is so much smaller than suddenly needing a single computer and an Internet line instead of an entire large-scale printing setup?

the phone

So that’s it!

Seriously though, phones are terrible for file management. Probably because every file gets thrown… Somewhere. Most into Downloads, some into Documents, and then some apps have their own esoteric space.

All the file management UIs are equally terrible: made to look nice, but dysfunctional.

Nothing ever prompts you where to save your shiny new file.

And, to be fair, screen size doesn’t help.

YES.

I know a few artists and get their complaints against AI, but I feel they’ve been way too overblown.

I look at AI as what it is - a new technology. Everthing was one at some point.

For example - cameras. Do you think artists who learned painting were happy when cameras started displacing them?

Of course there was outrage. It’s natural to protect your interests. However, technology has to be allowed to progress and people’s rights have to be respected. Developments in technology such as photography or AI are a disruption of the existing legal framework, and the two sides’ rights (those of the users and if those displaced) must be balanced.

However, unlike photography, there’s a clear legal basis and precedent analogous to AI art - in most places recieving copyrighted material without permission isn’t punishable while distributing it to others is.

An AI model is in essence a retrieval system in the sense of the US DMCA. Most other places have substantially similar laws in spirit, and most places draw the distinction between distribution and “fair” uses of infinging material. A good rule of thumb is that selling access is a big no-no, distributing is a big risk, and merely using a much smaller one. All technically illegal (as are memes).

To adress the mems side of the question: Memes aren’t a large portion of the original work. Often times they’re screenshots of video material, so the “portion taken from the original” is minute. Some meme formats, however, are digital art pieces in and of themselves. (Note the word format - the “background” of the meme, for example the “If I did one pushup” comic)

But even with that consideration, a meme doesn’t bring harm to the original - it’s basically free advertising. And as the memes are usually low quality abd not monetized, it can be passed off as fair use or free speech in some jurisdictions, while others merely turn a blind eye. And why shouldn’t they?

As I said, memes have a multitude of points going against them being copyright infringement. They’re low-effort, short-form media, usually with a short “lifetime” (most memes don’t get reposted for years). Most often they’re a screengrab of a video (so a ‘negligible portion of the original’) and almost never bring harm to the original, but only serve as free advertising. Again, usually. This means most meme formats’ involuntary creators have no reason to go after memes. You could probably get a court to strike a meme, but probably on defamation grounds - and even then, the meme will most likely die (not the format!) beforehand, so such suits are usually dismissed as moot.

Compare this to an AI model (not an AI “artpiece”): It’s usually trained on the entire work, and they’re proven to be able to recreate the work in large part - you just need to be lucky enough with the seeds and prompts. This means the original is “in there somewhere”, and parts of it can be yanked out. Remeber, even non-identical copying (so takig too much inspiration or in academic speak, “plagiarism”) is copyright infringement.

And to top it all off, all the big AI models have a paid tier, meaning they profit off the work.

If you were to compare memes to individual AI “artworks”, then it is the same thing as memes. Except if the generation is a near-verbatim reproduction, but even then, the guilt lies with the one who knowingly commited infringement by choosing what to put into the model’s training data, and not on some unlucky soul who happened to step on a landmine and generated the work.

“You”, the user of the AI model isn’t engaging in copyright infingement directly.

However, whoever made the model that you used did. Most using copyright protected works.

Some people are paying for these models. This is what’s the problem: financially benefitting off others’ work without permission (or royalties).

It’s like the age-old piracy dilemma: the person using direct downloads or streaming can’t be fined in most jurisdictions - it’s the duplication and sharing that’s forbidden.

This exact analogue exists with AI models: training a model and giving it to others to use is distributing access to copyrighted material. Using an AI model is not.

Fucking duh.

You got me there. For that’s how words work.