I never buy gas at BP or Exxon. Ever. Smart phone though? That’s required for my job.

Who would do such a thing??

I don’t think I would agree that just because something is public that it’s a public forum. I feel like the public has to own it as well. I looked it up and maybe it’s because I predate social media by rather a lot, but I think of it in the classical sense:

Public forums are typically categorized into three types:

1. Traditional Public Forums: Long-established spaces like parks or sidewalks, where people have historically exercised their rights to free speech and assembly.
2. Designated Public Forums: Areas that the government intentionally opens up for public expression, such as town halls or school meeting rooms.
3. Limited Public Forums: Spaces opened for specific types of discussions or activities but with certain restrictions on the subject matter or participants.

The important factor being public ownership of the forum. I will concede that it has colloquially come to include public social media, but I think it’s important to distinguish that it’s not really the same thing at all as has been discussed through most of our history.

Food for thought. I just think calling them public forums attaches too much importance to a profit seeking endeavor.

I think the process of explaining what you want to an AI can often be helpful. Especially given the number of times I’ve explained things to junior developers and they’ve said they understood completely, but then when I see what they wrote they clearly didn’t.

Explaining to an AI is a pretty good test of how well the stories and comments are written.

Something something sharks?

You made a lot of points here. Many I agree with, some I don’t, but I specifically want to address this because it seems to be such a common misconception.

It does and it doesn’t discard the original. It isn’t impossible to recreate the original (since all the data it gobbled up gets stored somewhere in some shape or form and can be truthfully recreated, at least judging by a few comments bellow and news reports). So AI can and does recreate (duplicate or distribute, perhaps) copyrighted works.

AI stores original works like a dictionary does. All the words are there, but the order and meaning is completely gone. An original work is possible to recreate by randomly selecting words from the dictionary, but it’s unlikely.

The thing that makes AI useful is that it understands the patterns words are typically used in. It orders words in the right way far more often than random chance. It knows “It was the best of” has a lot of likely options for the next word, but if it selects “times” as the next word, it’s far more likely to continue with, “it was the worst of times.” Because that sequence of words is so ubiquitous due to references to the classic story. But over the course of following these word patterns, it will quickly glom onto a different pattern and create a wholly new work from the original “prompt.”

There are only two cases in which an original work should be duplicated: either the training data is far too small and the model is overtrained on that particular work, or the work is the most derivative text imaginable lacking any flair or originality.

Adding more training data makes it less likely to recreate any original works.

I am aware of examples where it was claimed an LLM reproduced entirely code functions including original comments. That is either a case of overtraining, or far too many people were already copying that code verbatim into their own, thus making that work very over represented in the training data (same thing, but it was infringing developers who poisoned the data, not researchers using bad training data).

Bottom line: when created with enough data, no original works are stored in any way that allows faithful reproduction other than by chance so random that it’s similar to rolling dice over a dictionary.

None of this means AI can do no wrong, I just don’t find the copyright claim compelling.

I had an A500 and the 40MB drive was as expensive as the computer.

I can definitely account for 1.

Also, this copy reads like it was written by AI. If this is indicative of the stuff on the website, I very much would not like to read more. If it was written by a human, they should definitely lay off the LSD before writing.

it is obvious that this powerful synergy will change our societal norms and potentialities.

Fuck right off.

I mostly get what you’re saying, though I don’t have the requisite understanding to follow formal proofs, but if there is one thing I do know for certain, it’s that “understanding” is anthropomorphizing and shorthand for something that is very much not understanding in a human context at all.

I get that it can be hard to find the right words to explain a some of these emergent phenomena, but I think it’s misleading to use words that make AI appear to have a thought process akin to anything we could understand as such—at least in settings where folks might not understand the shorthand as such.

And maybe everyone here is aware of that, but it makes me uneasy, hence this comment to hopefully make that point.

Okay. Well I’m not that worried until I see where things are headed. I can see a lot of ways for things to go badly, but no point in borrowing trouble over it.

Yes and this was my reasoning for saying it would be fine to federate. But I’ll point out that federating ads would mean using my server’s infrastructure to serve ads on behalf of someone else. That would cost the admin more money and would require more user donations to keep it going. So just being able to block isn’t the necessary solution. Not sure that was even your point but I wanted to bring it up.

My instance is defederated from threads. At the time I mildly disagreed with that decision. Federated ads would vindicate that decision. I don’t need threads content that badly.

Well that sounds enshitty.

We need to bring back people who can identify shops from some of the pixels and having seen quite a few shops in their time.

You’re not going to out-compete the sociopaths if you’re a saint. That’s a reality.

I’m not a fan of Hitler Steve Jobs, but I am a big fan of the guy who killed Hitler Steve Jobs.

Thankfully there are other options because you just nailed the two places I refuse to ever get gas from when there is any other option. If there was a good third option I’d take it here, but while Google commands so much market share and a new competitor would probably siphon users from Bing (and it’s not enough users) I don’t think a real alternative will come. I’m intrigued by kagi, though.

It’s on the falling edge of the hype curve. It’s quite expected, and you’re right about where it’s headed. It can’t do everything people want/expect but it can do some things really well. It’ll find its niche and people will continue to refine it and find new uses, but it’ll never be the threat/boon folks have been expecting.

People are using it for things it’s not good at thinking it’ll get better. And it has to an extent. It is technically very capable of writing prose or drawing pictures, but it lacks any semblance of artistry and it always will. I’ve seen trained elephants paint pictures, but they are interesting for the novelty, not for their expression. AI could be the impetus for more people to notice art and what makes good art special.

If that was what you took from my post, give it another read. I’m not pro MS. I’m pro not feeding Google. And Bing is fine.