Doug7070

joined 1 year ago
[–] Doug7070 12 points 11 months ago

Meta has had plenty of chances in the past as a massive leader in the social media market. Those chances have been used to conduct illegal violations of user privacy, monopolize multiple market sectors, and ultimately go as far as actively abetting crimes against humanity. It is entirely reasonable and I think fundamentally imperative not to give them any more chances.

[–] Doug7070 4 points 11 months ago

This is the crux of it. Should people expect actual unlimited data? Maybe not, if you're tech savvy and understand matters on the backend, but also I'm fairly sure there's a dramatically greater burden on Google for using the word "unlimited". If they didn't want to get stuck with paying the tab for the small number of extreme power users who actually use that unlimited data, then they shouldn't have sold it as such in the first place. Either Google actually clearly discloses the limits of their product (no, not in the impossible to find fine print), or they accept that storing huge bulk data for a few accounts is the price they pay for having to actually deliver the product they advertised.

[–] Doug7070 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

For people authoring original content who may end up having the only copy of a given piece of news-relevant data in their possession, using a lossy compression method to back it up sort of defeats the purpose. This isn't stashing your old DVD collection, this is trying to back up privileged professional data.

[–] Doug7070 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a very obvious distinction between satire, I.E. imitating a public figure to make a joke about them, and using their likeness for marketing, I.E. making it seem as if that public figure endorses a product/service/etc.

One is legally protected free speech, the other is illegally misusing a person's likeness, and regardless of whether or not they are a celebrity should be protected against because it is deceptive to the public and violates the person's inherent right to control of their own likeness.

Regardless of your views on celebrity in general and the merit of famous figures in society, it's quite clear that this kind of AI mimicry needs to be stomped out fast and early, or else we will rapidly end up in a situation where shady scam artists and massive corporate interests will freely use AI zombies of popular personalities, living or dead, to hawk their wares with impunity.

[–] Doug7070 7 points 1 year ago

Then you can ignore/turn it off? It's also a function to protect users from malicious online behavior, dunno how that could be interpreted as a nanny, unless you also insist browsers shouldn't warn you when accessing known malware links or similar. If you really insist on having the absolute freedom to not be advised about it when you're being scammed then go off I guess.

[–] Doug7070 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Microsoft has a long and storied history of doing the worst and dumbest possible things with Windows as a platform, so, it's pretty easy to see why people find it very easy to assume the worst here.

[–] Doug7070 1 points 1 year ago

I've found a very simple expedient to avoid any such issues is just to not use things like ChatGPT in the first place. While they're an interesting gadget, I have been extremely critical of the massive over-hyped pitches of how useful LLMs actually are in practice, and have regarded them with the same scrutiny and distrust as people trying to sell me expensive monkey pictures during the crypto boom. Just as I came out better of because I didn't add NFTs to my financial assets during the crypto boom, I suspect that not integrating ChatGPT or its competitors into my workflow now will end up being a solid bet, given that the current landscape of LLM based tools is pretty much exclusively a corporate dominated minefield surrounded by countless dubious ethics points and doubts on what these tools are even ultimately good for.

[–] Doug7070 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My brother in Christ, building a bomb and doing terrorism is not a form of protected speech, and an overwrought search engine with a poorly attached ability to hold a conversation refusing to give you bomb making information is not censorship.

[–] Doug7070 41 points 1 year ago (5 children)

This is something I think a lot of people don't get about all the current ML hype. Even if you disregard all the other huge ethics issues surrounding sourcing training data, what does anybody think is going to happen if you take the modern web, a huge sea of extremist social media posts, SEO optimized scams and malware, and just general data toxic waste, and then train a model on it without rigorously pushing it away from being deranged? There's a reason all the current AI chatbots have had countless hours of human moderation adjustment to make them remotely acceptable to deploy publicly, and even then there are plenty of infamous examples of them running off the rails and saying deranged things.

Talking about an "uncensored" LLM basically just comes down to saying you'd like the unfiltered experience of a robot that will casually regurgitate all the worst parts of the internet at you, so unless you're actively trying to produce a model to do illegal or unethical things I don't quite see the point of contention or what "censorship" could actually mean in this context.

[–] Doug7070 40 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Bold of you to assume that wouldn't have just resulted in a coal burning power station every couple kilometers...

[–] Doug7070 29 points 1 year ago

Social media sites, infamously known for saying "We may collect all this data" and then totally not doing that and selling it to anyone and everyone for a shiny penny, right?

[–] Doug7070 1 points 1 year ago

Even if Edge was marginally better than Chrome (it's not), allowing monopolistic practices simply for the sake of slightly evening out a corporate race to the bottom is not a good standard. The actual solution is a browser like Firefox that actually has some remote respect and business interest in user privacy, and to aggressively litigate both Microsoft and Google for the use of their dominant service platforms to cross-promote their other products to captive audiences.

view more: ‹ prev next ›