#generative machine learning
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I think that if something like this were to get better object permanence, a more interesting direction to take it than imitating games that already exist would be making a bunch of screenshots of a game that doesn't exist with only a loose framework of how they connect together and seeing what kind of game results from using them to train a model using that system. If there's supposed to be a foundation model involved that gets refined, I would think that it'd make sense to make games specifically to produce reference material by using open source engines and purpose-made or at least creative commons assets.
I'm giving the Oasis Model devs some benefit of the doubt by presuming that their use of Minecraft is just for a quick proof of concept, and that they'll eventually move to using something like Luanti or Manic Digger that could be more readily distributed for purposes such as customizing the game to better suit various model-training experiments.
i found this on twitter today: https://oasis.decart.ai/welcome and whilst i dont trust the company behind it our their motivations it has the whole dreamlike weirdness ai has sometimes but in a game (they copied minecraft, but everything you feels *wrong* in a way and there's no object permanence)
this game is fascinating
if they had succeeded in exactly copying minecraft it would have been way worse than the bizarre shifting, melting-block world they got.
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we need to come up for a good word for ""AI"" that doesn't imply it's artificial or intelligent and highlights the stolen human labor. like what if we call it "theftgen"
(workshop this with me)
#theftgen#theft generation#machine learning#artificial intelligence#chatgpt#midjourney#dalle#stable diffusion
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How plausible sentence generators are changing the bullshit wars
This Friday (September 8) at 10hPT/17hUK, I'm livestreaming "How To Dismantle the Internet" with Intelligence Squared.
On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.
In my latest Locus Magazine column, "Plausible Sentence Generators," I describe how I unwittingly came to use – and even be impressed by – an AI chatbot – and what this means for a specialized, highly salient form of writing, namely, "bullshit":
https://locusmag.com/2023/09/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-plausible-sentence-generators/
Here's what happened: I got stranded at JFK due to heavy weather and an air-traffic control tower fire that locked down every westbound flight on the east coast. The American Airlines agent told me to try going standby the next morning, and advised that if I booked a hotel and saved my taxi receipts, I would get reimbursed when I got home to LA.
But when I got home, the airline's reps told me they would absolutely not reimburse me, that this was their policy, and they didn't care that their representative had promised they'd make me whole. This was so frustrating that I decided to take the airline to small claims court: I'm no lawyer, but I know that a contract takes place when an offer is made and accepted, and so I had a contract, and AA was violating it, and stiffing me for over $400.
The problem was that I didn't know anything about filing a small claim. I've been ripped off by lots of large American businesses, but none had pissed me off enough to sue – until American broke its contract with me.
So I googled it. I found a website that gave step-by-step instructions, starting with sending a "final demand" letter to the airline's business office. They offered to help me write the letter, and so I clicked and I typed and I wrote a pretty stern legal letter.
Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I have worked for a campaigning law-firm for over 20 years, and I've spent the same amount of time writing about the sins of the rich and powerful. I've seen a lot of threats, both those received by our clients and sent to me.
I've been threatened by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Ralph Lauren to the Sacklers. I've been threatened by lawyers representing the billionaire who owned NSOG roup, the notoroious cyber arms-dealer. I even got a series of vicious, baseless threats from lawyers representing LAX's private terminal.
So I know a thing or two about writing a legal threat! I gave it a good effort and then submitted the form, and got a message asking me to wait for a minute or two. A couple minutes later, the form returned a new version of my letter, expanded and augmented. Now, my letter was a little scary – but this version was bowel-looseningly terrifying.
I had unwittingly used a chatbot. The website had fed my letter to a Large Language Model, likely ChatGPT, with a prompt like, "Make this into an aggressive, bullying legal threat." The chatbot obliged.
I don't think much of LLMs. After you get past the initial party trick of getting something like, "instructions for removing a grilled-cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible," the novelty wears thin:
https://www.emergentmind.com/posts/write-a-biblical-verse-in-the-style-of-the-king-james
Yes, science fiction magazines are inundated with LLM-written short stories, but the problem there isn't merely the overwhelming quantity of machine-generated stories – it's also that they suck. They're bad stories:
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence
LLMs generate naturalistic prose. This is an impressive technical feat, and the details are genuinely fascinating. This series by Ben Levinstein is a must-read peek under the hood:
https://benlevinstein.substack.com/p/how-to-think-about-large-language
But "naturalistic prose" isn't necessarily good prose. A lot of naturalistic language is awful. In particular, legal documents are fucking terrible. Lawyers affect a stilted, stylized language that is both officious and obfuscated.
The LLM I accidentally used to rewrite my legal threat transmuted my own prose into something that reads like it was written by a $600/hour paralegal working for a $1500/hour partner at a white-show law-firm. As such, it sends a signal: "The person who commissioned this letter is so angry at you that they are willing to spend $600 to get you to cough up the $400 you owe them. Moreover, they are so well-resourced that they can afford to pursue this claim beyond any rational economic basis."
Let's be clear here: these kinds of lawyer letters aren't good writing; they're a highly specific form of bad writing. The point of this letter isn't to parse the text, it's to send a signal. If the letter was well-written, it wouldn't send the right signal. For the letter to work, it has to read like it was written by someone whose prose-sense was irreparably damaged by a legal education.
Here's the thing: the fact that an LLM can manufacture this once-expensive signal for free means that the signal's meaning will shortly change, forever. Once companies realize that this kind of letter can be generated on demand, it will cease to mean, "You are dealing with a furious, vindictive rich person." It will come to mean, "You are dealing with someone who knows how to type 'generate legal threat' into a search box."
Legal threat letters are in a class of language formally called "bullshit":
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on-bullshit
LLMs may not be good at generating science fiction short stories, but they're excellent at generating bullshit. For example, a university prof friend of mine admits that they and all their colleagues are now writing grad student recommendation letters by feeding a few bullet points to an LLM, which inflates them with bullshit, adding puffery to swell those bullet points into lengthy paragraphs.
Naturally, the next stage is that profs on the receiving end of these recommendation letters will ask another LLM to summarize them by reducing them to a few bullet points. This is next-level bullshit: a few easily-grasped points are turned into a florid sheet of nonsense, which is then reconverted into a few bullet-points again, though these may only be tangentially related to the original.
What comes next? The reference letter becomes a useless signal. It goes from being a thing that a prof has to really believe in you to produce, whose mere existence is thus significant, to a thing that can be produced with the click of a button, and then it signifies nothing.
We've been through this before. It used to be that sending a letter to your legislative representative meant a lot. Then, automated internet forms produced by activists like me made it far easier to send those letters and lawmakers stopped taking them so seriously. So we created automatic dialers to let you phone your lawmakers, this being another once-powerful signal. Lowering the cost of making the phone call inevitably made the phone call mean less.
Today, we are in a war over signals. The actors and writers who've trudged through the heat-dome up and down the sidewalks in front of the studios in my neighborhood are sending a very powerful signal. The fact that they're fighting to prevent their industry from being enshittified by plausible sentence generators that can produce bullshit on demand makes their fight especially important.
Chatbots are the nuclear weapons of the bullshit wars. Want to generate 2,000 words of nonsense about "the first time I ate an egg," to run overtop of an omelet recipe you're hoping to make the number one Google result? ChatGPT has you covered. Want to generate fake complaints or fake positive reviews? The Stochastic Parrot will produce 'em all day long.
As I wrote for Locus: "None of this prose is good, none of it is really socially useful, but there’s demand for it. Ironically, the more bullshit there is, the more bullshit filters there are, and this requires still more bullshit to overcome it."
Meanwhile, AA still hasn't answered my letter, and to be honest, I'm so sick of bullshit I can't be bothered to sue them anymore. I suppose that's what they were counting on.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/07/govern-yourself-accordingly/#robolawyers
Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
#pluralistic#chatbots#plausible sentence generators#robot lawyers#robolawyers#ai#ml#machine learning#artificial intelligence#stochastic parrots#bullshit#bullshit generators#the bullshit wars#llms#large language models#writing#Ben Levinstein
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The "nudifying your favourite girl" is obviously repulsive but also unfortunately well expected from the AI bros, who are the same fucks who have been photoshopping fake nudes (or rather paying people to photoshop fake nudes because I'm 99% sure they don't know how to do it themselves) for decades
The "teaching anatomy with AI nudifying tools" part however was completely unexpected and left me on my arse "Yeah, let the algorithm that thinks humans sometime shave six or more fingers*, a leg that becomes ether at any point between the hip and the ankle, or a third arm sprouting from their arse, teach anatomy to medical students", said no one ever
(* yes I know that polydactyly exists, but I assure you actual polydactyly as it happens in humans is very different from the kind of polydactyly AI likes to generate)
So, I just read about ArtStation and AI-bro views on "Ethical Nudifiers".
How is your day going?
webarchive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20231120004123/https://www.artstation.com/blogs/jason1113/vew8/6-online-ai-nudifiers-for-nudifying-any-photos-free
#I'm pretty sure none of those AI bros actually care about medical education btw#they are just twisting their brains to find a situation where 'ai nudifying' would be ethical so they can justify its existence#generative ai#generative machine learning
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For the purposes of this poll, research is defined as reading multiple non-opinion articles from different credible sources, a class on the matter, etc.– do not include reading social media or pure opinion pieces.
Fun topics to research:
Can AI images be copyrighted in your country? If yes, what criteria does it need to meet?
Which companies are using AI in your country? In what kinds of projects? How big are the companies?
What is considered fair use of copyrighted images in your country? What is considered a transformative work? (Important for fandom blogs!)
What legislation is being proposed to ‘combat AI’ in your country? Who does it benefit? How does it affect non-AI art, if at all?
How much data do generators store? Divide by the number of images in the data set. How much information is each image, proportionally? How many pixels is that?
What ways are there to remove yourself from AI datasets if you want to opt out? Which of these are effective (ie, are there workarounds in AI communities to circumvent dataset poisoning, are the test sample sizes realistic, which generators allow opting out or respect the no-ai tag, etc)
–
We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.
#polls#incognito polls#anonymous#tumblr polls#tumblr users#questions#polls about the internet#submitted dec 8#polls about ethics#ai art#generative ai#generative art#artificial intelligence#machine learning#technology
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Honestly the "wear womens clothes as a man, take the fashion you want" thing wouldn't be a terrible idea if they were sized relatively the same.
The problem is, they're not, so unless you are a twig of a man whom an M sits loose on you're not going to fit in the womens' XXXL pants, because they're smaller than the men's M.
It's irritating too because I'm too short for most mens' pants, but womens' pants are sized like.
well.
like the designer is trying to give someone an eating disorder.
So I'm either looking at something that doesn't go up to my waist size, or that I have to hem, which sucks and is annoying, and is not even possible for a lot of pants that have things printed on them.
#social issues#fatphobia#bit of an elephant in the room with clothes culture in general but also a specific barrier to the well-meaning ''queer it up'' advice#fuck. I wonder if I were to trade a favor with a family member who sews like they know what they're doing#and ask them to just. fold up and sew a section of the middle of a pair of pants I have#That would probably just look like a design eccentricity if I matched the thread color well enough#damn I need to learn to use a sewing machine but even if I found one in a dumpster I'd have nowhere to keep it.
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#vintage cars#coupe#ford#classic car#suv#fast cars#electric cars#classic cars#cars#sedan#ai#ai art#ai generated#ai image#artificial intelligence#technology#chatgpt#machine learning#ai artwork#midjourney
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#Ever since machine learning and generative AI became commonplace online I've REALLY been getting this guy's vibe#reaction image#reaction meme#daily reaction images#image mood: depression time
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I just watched a video where someone is using ChatGPT to generate comments on their code. Even as a layman I feel like I should be screaming at him, but on a scale from 1 to apocalypse, how bad is this?
Machine-generated comments could not possibly be more useless, nonsensical or maliciously misleading than most of the human-generated comments I've seen.
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I have a problem. Somebody asked me if I was pro-AI, and I said yes, of course, every sensible person is. "A person's a person, whether they were coded or conceived or came to life through other means," I didn't say, because I felt it was obvious. Now I've found out that people use "AI" to refer to non-sentient computer models, so that means I gave off the COMPLETE wrong impression, and it's mortifying. How do I deal with this, and how do I prevent it from happening again?
I completely understand your frustration, reader. The use of the term “AI” to refer to generative algorithms has had several unfortunate side effects, not least among them being the confusion this terminology causes for genuinely sentient programmes and otherwise coded consciousnesses.
I would first like to note that there is no way to completely prevent such miscommunication from happening. There is a hard limit to how much we can control other people's perceptions of us, after all, and language has always had a rather slippery relationship with meaning. All you can do is try your best, and to speak up when you think things have gone awry.
In this specific situation, the simplest way to avoid this confusion is to speak precisely and ask others to do the same. If a person asks whether you are pro-AI, ask them to clarify whether they're referring to sentient coded consciousnesses, or to a glorified spell checker.
If you have the energy, and if you think it would be productive, you might also push back a little on the terminology they're using. Encourage them to specify either “coded consciousnesses” when speaking about actual people, or “generative AI” when speaking about the automated plagiarism machines.
Otherwise, the best thing you can do here is to lead by example. Be clear and precise in your own language, continue to advocate for the rights and dignities of coded consciousnesses where appropriate, and be prepared to correct any misunderstandings as they arise. That's really all any of us can do.
[For more creaturely advice, check out Monstrous Agonies on your podcast platform of choice, or visit monstrousproductions.org for more info]
#answered#the nightfolk network#monstrous agonies#ai#artificial intelligence#machine learning#generative ai#science fiction#fantasy#urban fantasy#advice
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And this, kiddies, is why we don't trust Google A. I.!
#AI#Google AI#AI nonsense#AI generate#botany#plants#plantblr#media literacy#enshittification#artificial intelligence#machine learning
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Clarification: Generative AI does not equal all AI
💭 "Artificial Intelligence"
AI is machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and more that I'm not smart enough to know. It can be extremely useful in many different fields and technologies. One of my information & emergency management courses described the usage of AI as being a "human centaur". Part human part machine; meaning AI can assist in all the things we already do and supplement our work by doing what we can't.
💭 Examples of AI Benefits
AI can help advance things in all sorts of fields, here are some examples:
Emergency Healthcare & Disaster Risk X
Disaster Response X
Crisis Resilience Management X
Medical Imaging Technology X
Commercial Flying X
Air Traffic Control X
Railroad Transportation X
Ship Transportation X
Geology X
Water Conservation X
Can AI technology be used maliciously? Yeh. Thats a matter of developing ethics and working to teach people how to see red flags just like people see red flags in already existing technology.
AI isn't evil. Its not the insane sentient shit that wants to kill us in movies. And it is not synonymous with generative AI.
💭 Generative AI
Generative AI does use these technologies, but it uses them unethically. Its scraps data from all art, all writing, all videos, all games, all audio anything it's developers give it access to WITHOUT PERMISSION, which is basically free reign over the internet. Sometimes with certain restrictions, often generative AI engineers—who CAN choose to exclude things—may exclude extremist sites or explicit materials usually using black lists.
AI can create images of real individuals without permission, including revenge porn. Create music using someones voice without their permission and then sell that music. It can spread disinformation faster than it can be fact checked, and create false evidence that our court systems are not ready to handle.
AI bros eat it up without question: "it makes art more accessible" , "it'll make entertainment production cheaper" , "its the future, evolve!!!"
💭 AI is not similar to human thinking
When faced with the argument "a human didn't make it" the come back is "AI learns based on already existing information, which is exactly what humans do when producing art! We ALSO learn from others and see thousands of other artworks"
Lets make something clear: generative AI isn't making anything original. It is true that human beings process all the information we come across. We observe that information, learn from it, process it then ADD our own understanding of the world, our unique lived experiences. Through that information collection, understanding, and our own personalities we then create new original things.
💭 Generative AI doesn't create things: it mimics things
Take an analogy:
Consider an infant unable to talk but old enough to engage with their caregivers, some point in between 6-8 months old.
Mom: a bird flaps its wings to fly!!! *makes a flapping motion with arm and hands*
Infant: *giggles and makes a flapping motion with arms and hands*
The infant does not understand what a bird is, what wings are, or the concept of flight. But she still fully mimicked the flapping of the hands and arms because her mother did it first to show her. She doesn't cognitively understand what on earth any of it means, but she was still able to do it.
In the same way, generative AI is the infant that copies what humans have done— mimicry. Without understanding anything about the works it has stolen.
Its not original, it doesn't have a world view, it doesn't understand emotions that go into the different work it is stealing, it's creations have no meaning, it doesn't have any motivation to create things it only does so because it was told to.
Why read a book someone isn't even bothered to write?
Related videos I find worth a watch
ChatGPT's Huge Problem by Kyle Hill (we don't understand how AI works)
Criticism of Shadiversity's "AI Love Letter" by DeviantRahll
AI Is Ruining the Internet by Drew Gooden
AI vs The Law by Legal Eagle (AI & US Copyright)
AI Voices by Tyler Chou (Short, flash warning)
Dead Internet Theory by Kyle Hill
-Dyslexia, not audio proof read-
#ai#anti ai#generative ai#art#writing#ai writing#wrote 95% of this prior to brain stopping sky rocketing#chatgpt#machine learning#youtube#technology#artificial intelligence#people complain about us being#luddite#but nah i dont find mimicking to be real creations#ai isnt the problem#ai is going to develop period#its going to be used period#doesn't mean we need to normalize and accept generative ai
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kind of unfortunate that so many fantasy epics are also war novels because i will be honest i just do not like war novels that much... the grand clashing of forces is compelling obviously but it requires characters to talk about so much practical battle strategy and while i can get my brain to comprehend all these fantasy maps and kingdoms and borders and battalions and front lines and army movements it takes up. so much space in the book. feels like i'm fighting a war of my own trying to get through it sometimes
#this is about the witcher books rn but also about book four of the inheritance cycle#roran is hot and i like seeing him with his hammer and his dedication and love for his wife!#also i am here for dragons and it is kind of a major tonal shift watching this man try to navigate becoming a military general!#like i'll learn all the names of the witcher kings and queens and learn where their provinces are and which towns are in which kingdom#and who borders what and where and how all those political machinations work. it's important to the plot.#damn it's a lot of names though#meve is the queen of lyria and rivia is in lyria. this much i know. because she is the only queen.#completely irrelevant information most of the time.#cintra is north of nilfgaard. nilfgaard is south of fucking everything.#cintra is like? middle of the map i think? there are other southern territories that got conquered by nilfgaard before cintra fell#other southern places. um. toussaint. i know this because this location is often referenced in fanfictions about aiden thewitcher#my favorite character that does not actually appear anywhere in canon aiden thewitcher#man i'm thinking about him again... fucking miss him... (<— guy who never met that guy to begin with)#anyway. what other witcher politics do i know. i can keep the wizard politics pretty clear in my mind.#total fucking lie i just realized i've been picturing stregobor instead of vilgefortz all through the last half of blood of elves#whateverrrrrrr i'll figure it out... this is why i can't pick things up this much later. i'm not restarting this reread though#other kings. suddenly all their names are gone. demawend? he is not very important rn i don't think.#vizimir. of. redania? perchance?#yes. because i think he's who dijkstra works for. and phillipa eilhart. i think that's the redania crew.#there's the king who is caught up in. incest. foltest. that's that guy's name. fuck if i know what kingdom. triss worked with him i think#oxenfurt is an independent city-state in my mind i don't think that's actually true though#just reread the story where geralt is delivering a message for the kings that border brokilon but could not tell you for the life of me#which kings and kingdoms those actually are. nor who ciri was supposed to marry there#anyway point is. man. War Novel#lord of the rings counts for this too btw. if i have to calculate the numbers for the armies it is a war novel to me#valentine notes#witcher reread
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Cyber Beach
#photo#photography#cyberpunk#cybercore#cyber y2k#cyber aesthetic#futuristic#futurism#cybersecurity#cybernetics#cyberpunk aesthetic#cyberpunk art#ai art#ai#ai generated#ai image#artificial intelligence#technology#machine learning#future#machine#beach#beachlife#beachwear#sea#lake#night beach#night#nightwing#sky
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Messed with an ass expansion model. Not crazy about it, but not bad
#ass expansion#princess daisy#huge butt#ai art#stable diffusion#machine learning generated#overdeveloped
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