Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    7 days ago

    Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers

    A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google’s AI Overview.

    Anyways, personal sidenote:

    Beyond putting another blow to AI’s reliability, this will probably also make the public more wary of user-generated material - its hard to trust something if you know the masses could be actively manipulating you.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      14·
      7 days ago

      there used to be a shitposting fb page called “places in warsaw you had no idea about because they don’t exist”. glad that somebody weaponised that concept

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      3·
      5 days ago

      I keep wanting to give zed a serious go (even just to try it out because it looks interesting) but there’s some design decisions that are raisedeyebrow.gif and feel like a very telling thing about the mindset of the devs

      fresh install:

      • at start, it immediately attempts to start making connections to github copilot and a couple of other network sources. no user prompt, no indication that it’s going to be doing this, no indication that it is doing it
      • figuring out how to turn said undesired features off was not documented and just by the by semi answered elsewhere (also: I applied those settings and it still did a bunch of shit, so I had to pull the repo and scratch through it myself…)

      while I’m certainly from the older guard of crotchety, I still think it’s fucking reasonable to ask the user before your software goes off and does shit. you don’t even have to overload them with requests, you can make it granular with a customize button. this shit has been solved in fucking windows application installers since the goddamn 00s

      christ I’m gonna stay angry at the last decade for a long time

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    23·
    8 days ago

    Update on LLM reviewer situation:

    PM is down to let us pitch them our argument. Good news: PM seems like a cool person, is open minded, and is being pretty frank about the forces at work here. Bad news: taking action on this will open a whole can of worms, so any proof has to be ironclad. After conferring with our local grant wizards, the battle plan is to crank out a 15 minute pitch consisting of:

    • a 2 min elevator pitch of our tech, highlighting what the reviews mangled
    • intro to LLMs for people who know what glycosylation is
    • intro to semiotics for the same
    • show how transformer architectures transform symbols into symbols to produce text-shaped objects without actual intent, ideas, or context (and why “automated AI detection” is also bullshit).
    • show a few examples of plausible-at-first-glance gen-ai slop (the nonexistant turkish fortress, mouse dck, etc)
    • Highlight how our weird reviews (both good and bad) fit exactly into this bin (absolutely mis-interpreting a table, inventing a bacterial species we didn’t use and talking shit about it, miscounting our team members, etc)

    We’ll be leaning on the Stochastic Parrot paper pretty hard, because it’s a good entry into the field on the skeptical side and is just well constructed in general. I’m also on the hunt simplified diagram for how LLMs convert tokens to arrays to tokens from the original transformer literature. Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose, and I want to avoid falling into the “It can’t be that stupid” trap. Any pointers in that direction are most welcome!

    Wish us luck, heh!

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      7 days ago

      good luck! it sounds like you’re coming in remarkably well-prepared, so unless they’re gonna go fingers-in-ears (and it sounds like the PM’s better than that), you’re at least likely to make an impact

      Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose

      between this and all the SEO on OpenAI’s marketing horseshit and breathlessly parroted press releases, it’s exhausting to find good sources for how any of this stuff actually works in reality. shit, I’ve had old primary sources on things like Sora get buried after OpenAI’s promises didn’t pan out. I’m hoping you can find what you need — our back archives might have a few links if you haven’t searched through here yet.

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
    22·
    11 days ago

    Actual message I got while renewing my insurance plan last night. Thank you for adding a shitty chat bot which will give me false information about my life and death decisions, bravo.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      8 days ago

      This tool solely exists so that you can ask it questions and get assistance, but also we disavow any responsibility for the answers to the questions we just told you to ask it. Has this kind of clause been held up in court anywhere? Like, I’m sure it has but it seems like the same logic would be ridiculous in any other context. Like, consider the fraught legal history of the anarchist cookbook.

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        12 days ago

        It’s almost completely ineffective, sorry. It’s certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.

        On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasn’t yet been invalidated and there’s no upcoming mathematics which tilt the scales in favor of anti-training techniques. In general, scrapers for training sets are now augmented with alignment models, which test inputs to see how well the tags line up; your example might be rejected as insufficiently normal-cat-like.

        I think that “force-feeding” is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that “forced” input is destined to be discarded or retagged.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          11·
          12 days ago

          yeah this is the thing I’ve been thinking a lot about

          fucking reCaptcha is literally mass-weaponising users for data filtration, and there is no good counter besides just not using reCaptcha (which is something one can’t easily pull off without things like regulatory action, massive reputational problems that make people gtfo, etc)

          I have similar worries about cloudflare being such a massive chokepoint and using that position to enable “ai bot filter” services. feels extremely monopolistic, but ianal and I’m not entirely sure what the case grounds/structure on that would be (if any)

          the only other viable strategy at the moment is fully breaking contact with any potential bad traffic systems, and that’s extremely fucking dire because that’s yet another nail in the coffin of the increasingly less open internet

          • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
            9·
            11 days ago

            The whole Cloudflare bot detection is so weird and eerie. I’ve had issues where I can’t get past it presumably just because I’m using some in-application browser just to get a login cookie, but other times it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked.

            • flavia@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              5·
              11 days ago

              it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked

              Fucking what. I’ve heard of sites blocking curl and I’ve been able to get around it by copying user agent and sometimes cookies from the browser. Now I’m cursed with the knowledge that I could probably just scrape stuff from everywhere

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        12 days ago

        I saw people say they would add 10% opaque layers of the musk with Epstein’s accomplice (whos name i forgot for a second and too lazy to look her up) photo. Would be nice if there was a tool to do so automatically. (Not that i post on twitter anymore).

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          12 days ago

          tbh that sounds like a pretty easy script to write! Too bad I am not near a computer rn

          • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            11 days ago

            I got nerd sniped into trying to resize felons_musk_and_maxwell.webp to the same size as some base image before compositing it on top with a 10% dissolve in the same magick invocation but I need to sleep so I’m giving up for now.

          • ShakingMyHead@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            12 days ago

            Wouldn’t really need a script, though. Just open up photoshop or GIMP and add a layer after everything is finished.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              6·
              12 days ago

              But that doesn’t scale properly, you want ideally some sort of browser extension that just automatically does it for you before the data gets send to twitter.

    • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      12 days ago

      They added sleeps to training jobs? Sounds like they deserve a raise for improving energy efficiency instead…

    • luciole (he/him)@beehaw.orgEnglish
      6·
      12 days ago

      I thought they were gonna do that themselves by feeding on their own outputs littered all over the www. Maybe they can use some help.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    20·
    8 days ago

    Update on the character.ai lawsuit:

    Gizmodo just reported on the story - in addition to the suicide that kicked this litigation off, they’ve also discovered an hour-long screen recording where a test account (self-reported as thirteen years old) gets sexted relentlessly by the site’s chatbots.

    So, in addition to driving one specific teen to suicide, character.ai is also facing accusations that their bots are sexually harassing children.

  • Rinn@awful.systemsEnglish
    20·
    10 days ago

    A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI “hosts” (non-English link).

    They’re trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason they’re firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be “an experiment to appeal to Gen Z”. Fortunately, most people’s response seems to be “fuck off with this crap”.

    I just… can’t with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run “experiments” with AI media. Heads should roll for this.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      10·
      10 days ago

      I just… can’t with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run “experiments” with AI media. Heads should roll for this.

      i think it might be code for firing these people, but technically not, because they just terminated contracts with 15 single-person companies, so they never really hired them in the first place

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    19·
    12 days ago

    The Bookseller: Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff

    Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear “in imprint pages across our markets”. The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.

    Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn’t gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it’s time to give Big AI a wedgie.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      11 days ago

      It’s weird how rarely I see people point this, but in theory this kind of boilerplate should be technically meaningless. If copyright protections include the privilege to use the work for training a machine learning algorithm, you need explicit permission anyway. OTOH if it’s fair use or otherwise not something copyright law is concerned with, the copyright holder’s objection doesn’t matter.

      For the record, I think AI models are derivative works and thus they’re not only infringing on typical “all rights reserved” works, but also things such as Free software whose license terms require attribution if used in derivative work, and especially share-alike copyleft licensed work.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        11 days ago

        I thinkt it’s pretty well-lknown that Spotify got all its initial music from Oink. They moved fast, got dominant, and were able to present the record labels with a big audience prepared to pay for streaming music. The labels quickly ensured they’d get the lion’s share of that revenue.

        OpenAI and friends tried the same thing - scrape everything, build AGI, reap the rewards. Except it didn’t work, and they’re in a much worse position morally. Even if they can get a judgement that what they’re doing is legal, it will cost them a lot in litigation fees, coupled with the public perception that these culture vampires are ripping off the poor honest author. Not a good place to be in.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      12 days ago

      Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn’t gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it’s time to give Big AI a wedgie.

      Considering the massive(ly inflated) valuations running around Big AI and the massive amounts of stolen work that powers the likes of CrAIyon, ChatGPT, DALL-E and others, I suspect the content mafia is likely gonna try and squeeze every last red cent they can out of the AI industry.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        11 days ago

        At some point, something is going to reveal that all the money in AI has gone into power costs for datacenters and NVidia chips and that the AI companies themselves aren’t doing so hot. I hope it’s the discovery process for some of the inevitable lawsuits.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      10 days ago

      Fuck, I didn’t need to be reminded that they named the robot Optimus. Was “Bender” or “Wall-E” too much of a deep cut? Or is it just that Disney’s trademark lawyers are scarier than Hasbro and Nvidia combined?

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      10 days ago

      My read: sounds like a teenager that knows the touted functionality of the scam tech they are referencing, but is not wise enough to the ways of the world to know they are scams.

  • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    17·
    10 days ago

    this is peak AI. you might not like it, but it’s how top of the bubble looks like

    Radio station uses AI to interview the ghost of a dead Nobel-winner with 3 quirky zoomers who don’t exist, seems baffled people don’t like it starring three bots and deepfake of Wisława Szymborska

    related notesfrompoland and onet article they probably referenced (in polish) and another. would you guess that they fired a dozen or so* people just before? (and somehow had money for whatever horseshit they were sold) small radio stations aren’t probably bringing serious money either way now

    homepage of that radio boasts about their “almost entirely created by AI” content. it looks like they tried to convince zoomers to get an FM radio and listen to it somehow. it’s gonna go great

    apparently this radio is in liquidation since january however this might be related to dislodging previous govt’s propagandists from public media

    *original report used very handy word that does not appear in english that one could translate as “fewteen” and can mean any number from 11 to 19 inclusive

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      9 days ago

      What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don’t sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I’ve come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT’s attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it’s trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.