nightsky
sometimes a dragon
“Shortly after 2027” is a fun phrasing. Means “not before 2028”, but mentioning “2027” so it doesn’t seem so far away.
I interpret it as “please bro, keep the bubble going bro, just 3 more years bro, this time for real bro”
With your choice of words you are anthropomorphizing LLMs. No valid reasoning can occur when starting from a false point of origin.
Or to put it differently: to me this is similarly ridiculous as if you were arguing that bubble sort may somehow “gain new abilites” and do “horrifying things”.
If the companies wanted to produce an LLM that didn’t output toxic waste, they could just not put toxic waste into it.
The article title and that part remind me of this quote from Charles Babbage in 1864:
On two occasions I have been asked, — “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
It feels as if Babbage had already interacted with today’s AI pushers.
I wonder if this signals being at peak hype soon. I mean, how much more outlandish can they get without destroying the hype bubble’s foundation, i.e. the suspension of disbelief that all this would somehow become possible in the near future. We’re on the level of “arrival of an alien intelligence” now, how much further can they escalate that rhetoric without popping the bubble?
Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!
Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop… blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs… noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these “AI” generators can’t leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don’t know for sure, and maybe I’m doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff…
Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with “art things made by actual humans”, but I guess that certainty is outdated now.
This sucks so much. I don’t want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know… How can trust be restored?
404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can’t Be Bothered
It’s a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don’t have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.
I really didn’t think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, “an insult to life itself”.
drowning in signal-shaped noise
Ooh, I love that phrasing, wonderful :D
But yeah, it’s an interesting point… It’s weird to think that “good search” may just be permanently gone. Somehow I thought that it would come back eventually… but maybe it won’t? Wouldn’t be the first time a good thing just disappears from the internet…
Was browsing ebay, looking for some piece of older used consumer electronics. Found a listing where the description text was written like crappy ad copy. Cheap over-the-top praising the thing. But zero words about the condition of the used item, i.e. the actually important part was completely missing. And then at the end of the description it said… this description text was generated by AI.
AI slop is like mold, it really gets everywhere and ruins everything.
Whatever has happened there, I hope it will resolve in positive ways for her. Her amazing work on the GPU driver was actually the reason I got into Rust. In 2022 I stumbled across this twitter thread from her and it inspired me to learn Rust – and then it ended up becoming my favourite language, my refuge from C++. Of course I already knew about Rust beforehand, but I had dismissed it, I (wrongly) thought that it’s too similar to C++, and I wanted away from that… That twitter thread made me reconsider and take a closer look. So thankful for that.