I find that unlikely when considering the current trajectory of AI.

Unless…?

Everybody starts somewhere. Few come out the gate being Depeche Mode. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth the struggle to get better.

If you want to fight for something, please learn what you stand behind.

And how do you know I haven’t? Do you have insight into my mind?

Here’s my stance: Fuck Google. When have they ever done anything for the benefit of humanity? If this turns out to do exactly what it says on the tin, I’ll be happy to eat my words, but pardon me if I don’t believe that Google is suddenly interested in clean energy.

Great. So we’ll waste energy capturing and compressing a useless gas, then we’ll just release that into the atmosphere when it’s capitalistically convenient? Brilliant. Great work, Google. You’ve really gone green. /s

Human digital interfaces aren’t a secret, but other things like remote-viewing, etc. have been known about for a long time, and they were failures. There’s even a whole movie about it called Men Who Stare At Goats. Pointing to a few examples of actual conspiracies or weird projects doesn’t mean every claim has validity. It just means the government is generally untrustworthy, but that also means you need to take each claim individually, in practice. You can’t just generalize and say that “government untrustworthy, therefore believe the opposite of anything they say.” That’s being reactive, not skeptical.

That’s not to say that there’s not scary tech out there (it’s been demonstrated that they can not only see but hear conversations through walls by interpolating Wi-Fi signals), but it’s all very much within the realm of science, not the paranormal.

It’s not just the money. It’s the knowledge and expertise needed to use the algorithms, at all…Not everyone has the time, energy, and attention to learn that stuff.

I agree. That does not mean that LLMs are leveling the playing field with people who can’t/won’t get an education regarding computer science (and let’s not forget that most algorithms don’t just appear; they’re crafted over time). LLMs are easy, but they are not better or even remotely equivalent. It’s like saying, “Finally, the masses can tell a robot to build them a table,” and saying that the expertise of those “elite” woodworkers is no longer needed.

…damn if I am tired of having to rely on “Zillow and a prayer” if I want to get a house or apartment.

And this isn’t a problem LLMs can solve. I feel for you, I do. We’re all feeling this shit, but this is a capitalism problem. Until the ultracapitalists who are making these LLMs (OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, Palantir, etc.) are no longer the drivers of machine learning, and until the ultracapitalist companies stop using AI or algorithms to decide who gets what prices/loans/rental rates/healthcare/etc., we will not see any kind of level playing field you or the author are wishing for.

You’re looking at AI, ascribing it features and achievements it doesn’t deserve, then wishing against all the evidence that it’s solving capitalism. It’s very much not, and if anything, it’s only exacerbating the problems caused by it.

I applaud your optimism—I was optimistic about it once, too—but it has shown, time and again, that it won’t lead to a society not governed by the endless chasing of profits at the expense of everyone else; it won’t lead to a society where the billionaires and the rest of us compete on equal footing. What we regular folk have gotten from them will not be their undoing.

If you want a better society where you don’t have to claw the most meager of scraps from the hand of the wealthy, it won’t be found here.

Okay. Claims are not evidence. “I read it somewhere” is not even close to substantial, because anyone can write anything they want on the Internet. Without evidence or even consensus amongst experts, it just sounds like a conspiracy theory.

The CIA is often the bogeyman, because they do lots in secret, and the government is inherently untrustworthy. That doesn’t mean they have wireless brain interfaces, however.

No they’re not. That’s just the claptrap the billionaire Tech Bros want you to believe in. “Ooo, AGI is just around the corner! Buy in now to get it first! Ooo!”

They just have access to militarized versions through specialized LoRAs and no restraints. It’s not anything beyond what’s possible for regular people right now, it’s just that regular people will never get access to the kind of training data needed to achieve the same results (not that the government should be able to, either).

Then along comes the language model. Suddenly, you just talk to the computer the way you’d talk to another human, and you get what you ask for.

That’s not at all how LLMs work, and that’s why people are saying this whole premise is a bad take. Not only do LLMs get things wrong, they do it in such a way that it completely fabricates answers at times; they do this, because they’re pattern generation engines, not database parsers. Algorithms don’t do that, because they digest a set of information and return a subset of that information.

Also, so what if algorithms cost a lot of money? That’s not really an argument for why LLMs level the playing field. They’re not analogous to each other, and the LLMs being foisted on the unassuming public by the billionaires are certainly not some kind of power leveler.

Furthermore, it takes a fuckton more processing resources to run an LLM than it does an algorithm, and I’m just talking about cycles. If we went beyond just cycles, the relative power needed to solve the same problem using an LLM versus an algorithm is not even close. There’s an entire branch of mathematics dedicated to algorithm analysis and optimization, but you’ll find no such thing for LLMs, because they’re not remotely the same.

No, all we have are fancy chatbots at the end of the day that hallucinate basic facts, not especially different from the annoying Virtual Assistants of a few years ago.

Something to do over Christmas!

Google and other megacorps with AI slopbots: AI bots should be free to slurp up as much data as they want. It doesn’t break copyright!

Also those companies: Wait, AI isn’t allowed to steal from us!

That’s not how evidence works. If the original person has evidence that the software doesn’t work, then we need to look at both sets of evidence and adjust our view accordingly.

It could very well be that the software works 90% of the time, but there could exist some outlying examples where it doesn’t. And if they have those examples, I want to know about them.

Okay. Same. I’m not asking you to believe Glaze/Nightshade works on my word alone. All I said was that artists should try it.

Okay. I have that. Now what?

ETA: also, you can prove a negative, it’s just often much harder. Since the person above said it doesn’t work, the positive claim is theirs to justify. Whether it’s hard or not is not my problem.

Because it’s hard(er than doing nothing) and takes changing habits.

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I haven’t seen any objective evidence that they don’t work. I’ve seen anecdotal stories, but nothing in the way of actual proof.

On that note, if you’re an artist, make sure you take Nightshade or Glaze for a spin. Don’t need access to the LLM if they’re wantonly snarfing up poison.

Can’t seem to find the actual article, so I’ll just engage with this small paragraph here.

Capitalism needs to be regulated (or better yet, replaced). Given that the US is currently experiencing the effects of unfettered capitalism (fascism, bribery, oligarchy, price gouging, monopolization, market collusion, just to name a few), I’m for more oversight.

However, the current administration and current Congress are both generally disinterested in actual regulation and, in my opinion, unqualified to implement something like AI-powered guardrails. It’s just the whole “blockchain everywhere” debacle all over again.

Furthermore, who would develop and maintain such a system? There would almost certainly be bids from the usual suspects (i.e. billionaires) who would “definitely develop it in good faith, trust me bro.” They definitely wouldn’t use that kind of access to hamstring the bot that’s supposed to be regulating them. /s

Rather than just putting a bot in charge, how about we just make the wealthy pay their fair share? How about strong legislation that prevents fraudulent transactions and mergers? How about meaningful punishments that deter bad actors, rather than slaps on the wrist that are just “the cost of doing business?”

We don’t need robots and software, we need sensible legislation.