Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

i mean the economy has grown quite a bit since automation started

My understanding of this is incomplete (intentionally, for reasons already discussed). But didn't Open AI stop collecting new information a few years ago?

As a result, AI's assumptions are incomplete at best, and at worst will just get more and more outdated.

To be useful in future, it will need more humans to fuel it and give it more IV injections of that sweet, sweet, content. Yeah baby (I hear it saying), feed me content.

We are all Seymour from "Little Shop of Horrors."

what if the ai apocalypse is just the machines forcing us to make more content, which we were doing anyway

Trenchant

I will go in to work tomorrow and cheerfully type for my robot overlords. Because it's not like I have a lot of other choices.

Personally I am too old to shift gears and become, like, a useful member of society or whatev

If it's dumped onto the internet anywhere it's all fodder for LLMs, because copyright doesn't apply to how AI munches on its manifold inputs, digests them, and creates its mindless homogenized sentences. We ilxors converse openly about whatever interests us and consequently we are ingested. It even applies retroactively and involuntarily to conversations long before these chatbots existed.

My understanding of this is incomplete (intentionally, for reasons already discussed). But didn't Open AI stop collecting new information a few years ago?

The version anyone can use has a training cut-off date (currently April 2023). But behind the scenes newer models are being retrained & they'll be up to date, tho I don't know what the deal is with the presumably significant problem of it being fed its own shit.

Can users customize an ai dataset? I’m curious about an AI trained solely on the ilx archives. Would they be chill? Would they be an asshole? Would their prose still seem like an alien wrote it while wearing a human suit?

AI Centipede

xp

didn’t I post a few times about how people add data sets and knowledge bases to ChatGPT/llama/etc or am I taking crazy pills here

fwiw the entire shtick we’re all doing where we ask it questions and assume it’s giving facts of some sort is just a side effect of how it works. it’s overall irrelevant, or supposed to be, to their business model that ChatGPT spits out things resembling facts, afaict. it’s just a chatbot that can string together language in a human-like manner. GPT as a product that you license and plug your own factual data in is supposed to be the value add

Can users customize an ai dataset? I’m curious about an AI trained solely on the ilx archives. Would they be chill? Would they be an asshole? Would their prose still seem like an alien wrote it while wearing a human suit?

― treeship., Wednesday, November 22, 2023 7:52 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah its not too hard if you know to c0de a lil bit, the computer geniuses have done all the heavy lifting you just need to feed it the training data, scraping and tiding up all the ilx posts would prob be the most difficult part

maybe theres even some more non technical interface out there idk

iirc ilx search uses the Lucene library, although I don’t remember what the persistent storage for the indexing is. pretty standard and people appear to have libraries or plugins to bridge that to GPT

you be funny if you trained it on full ilx threads just to see what user names it came up with when its making its post

ethereal brigadier lethbridge-pfunkboy

the whole AI/automation panic makes me wonder what jobs there are out there where you learn a stock set of skills and never have to learn new tools, techniques, etc

my friend’s prior job had a couple peers who were told to do some online training and one guy went nuts. saying he didn’t have time, he was getting close to retirement, he was busy at home. he ever blurted out something like “I don’t need a raise just let me keep doing my job!”

absolutely dead-end crazy ranting. the funny part was that the training was online and they were allowed to do it during work hours, and the group was not that busy!

Openai released a non-coding custom dataset solution a couple of weeks of ago - they're confusingly called GPTs but you can just feed it a knowledge base and give it custom instructions. I think the additional stuff you can add is comparatively small - I read 300 pages somewhere but I have no idea what a page is in this context. idk dig around

yes haha yes

OpenAI Employees Say Firm's Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims

https://futurism.com/openai-employees-say-firms-chief-scientist-has-been-making-strange-spiritual-claims

its very funny that these people have produced nothing that resembles artificial intelligence and their tech certainly has no hope of ever getting there and yet they feel like theyre just on the edge of some world changing event, it is kind of a religious situation

saw a chart a while ago saying that american participation in organized religion had dropped 15% in just the last ten years, between this ai shit and taylor swift fans i think maybe people should just go back to church, its all set up already go once a week and get it out of your system

xp lol this story is fun all the way

and yeah as mh and lag∞n say I think it wouldn't be that hard to take a model and retrain it on a big scrape or dump of ilx. But you might need a lot of computing power, money or patience?

assume everyone knows GPT is definitely trained on ilx already. But it's such a tiny part of the data - if you try to get it to mimic ilx style it can describe the tone it is aiming for but the results are not good (I won't clog up the thread with more chats).

i realise this is creepy but i’m hoping we get to that black mirror / house of usher tech soon where i can feed in someone’s social media history, emails, etc and get a reasonable facsimile of their vibe so that i can converse with them when they’re gone. sure it’s not them, but if it’s incorporated all their text it kinda is them, for certain purposes, and yknow if we can fool ourselves into thinking dogs have souls it can’t be too much of a jump to feeling a sense of a connection with a bot tuned to the frequencies of a loved one

youre saying you want that

yes!!

maybe i could tune it to myself, just to see how annoying it is to talk to me

lol they do have it already but its pretty low quality

the whole AI/automation panic makes me wonder what jobs there are out there where you learn a stock set of skills and never have to learn new tools, techniques, etc

Fair point for a lot of jobs.

But if you, um, write poetry or play classical violin or do oile changes or bake baguettes or carve wooden figurines or coach gymnastics or make ceramic vases or trim shrubbery or teach tap-dancing, you might be forgiven for thinking that you would prefer to do the job without robotic help.

https://i.imgur.com/Ofmdt5r.jpg

the pundit class worries about job losses because it’s their jobs that are the most replaceable

So much of politics and ethics in america is built on what you described kate. The idea that if people were willing to work they would at least prosper moderately. If chat gpt destroys, say, 80% of lawyers’ jobs all of that kind of thinking is going to seem laughable, even to the formerly comfortable middle and lower bourgeoisie.

It could be a revolutionary moment. More likely America will just become colder and angrier.

― treeship

the "boot stamping on a human face forever" model is really tempting to buy into, particularly when there's no apparent path for us as individuals to, like. stop being stamped on.

you're right in that american values, which were never _good_ values, serve fewer and fewer people as time goes on. technology plays a role in it, but my opinion is that the role of technology in the changing economy is frequently vastly _overestimated_ and the role that capitalists play in those changes are frequently vastly _underestimated_.

because it's not just the jobs that are changing. if you look at how amazon warehouses are being run, the nature of the job is itself _changing_. it's changing into a job that's less suitable for humans to do and more suitable for machines to do. whether or not that's anybody's active intent doesn't matter. at some point warehouse jobs will be done by machines and not by humans.

what am i going to do? mourn the loss of those jobs? there are people out in kentucky lamenting the fact that there aren't coal mining jobs anymore. at the same time, at least in the '90s there were a significant number of people alive receiving financial compensation due to the long-term health conditions caused by the coal mining. to me, the issue isn't a question of coal mining, it's that people out in eastern kentucky have no opportunity, no prospects, no hope. the only thing they can even think of helping them is, well, bringing back the coal mining.

-

so they're voting for the leopards eating people's faces party, because that's what the leopards eating people's faces party is promising them. i see a lot of people just, like, mocking and laughing at people who are suffering, because those people are voting for their own oppressors. personally, i'm not laughing. i'm not morally condemning them.

what i see is people who... have chosen to try and eat my face rather than work together with people like me. they're suffering. and i guess a lot of them believe that if my face gets eaten they'll stop suffering. these are not people who deserve to have their faces eaten, but as long as they keep insisting on trying to eat my face, i'll stand back and let it happen.

i mean i'm implicated. for 40 years of my life i more or less acted in ways that were normal for a cishet white man to behave. i was ignorant, and my ignorance hurt me, and it hurt people who weren't like me. people who have been getting hurt for at least as long as america's been around.

back in the day, during vietnam, some people who were up for being drafted had a pretty cynical saying: "i'd rather switch than fight". i mean, in a sense that's what the "transmaxxers" are saying, isn't it? that stupid manifesto about how "the male gender is broken". what they mean is that they have no place in it. they have no place in that world.

me? i think they're lying to themselves. the male gender is _fine_. what's broken, what's _always_ been broken, is the values i was taught, they were taught. decent american values. that brokenness is becoming more and more apparent. the "safeguards" that were supposed to protect against its america's breakdown, like the electoral college, have only wound up accelerating the breakdown.

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there's an episode of twin peaks where david lynch shows up in a cameo role, and he's talking about denise bryson, the trans woman who was working as a DEA special agent. and he shows up and he says "Fix your hearts or die." Literal fucking author tract. However I feel about the character of Denise Bryson...

Well, you know what it reminds me of? W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939. "We must love one another or die." He came to hate that poem, to be ashamed of it. I read that one time, it was reprinted, and Auden had changed the line. It said "We must love one another and die." You know what? I think it's better that way. We're all going to die. I'm going to die, and my death may well be meaningless. My life isn't, hasn't been, won't be. I'm saying that as fact. Axiomatic. Not up for dispute. it used to be important to me that I died for something, and it took me a long time to get over that belief. i'm getting over it, though.

we must love one another. not a command, but a statement of fact. it's an essential part of who we are, of what we do. i spent decades trying to fight that truth, trying to, well, die rather than love, and i lost that fight, and i'm going to die anyway.

america can be as cold and angry as it wants, kill like it's always been killing, exterminate like it's always been exterminating. its supporters can practice hate and call it love. blame us for their deeds, or else say it's ai, say it's computers. all of that stuff. it's been working for centuries.

it's not working like it used to. a lot of what keeps america going right now is fear of something worse. that fear isn't unfounded. maybe whatever comes next is openly cruel and vicious and winds up killing more people than the ones america's killing. maybe it kills me. there are a certain number of people who think my existence is a problem and would put a lot of effort into looking the other way if someone decided to fix that alleged problem.

i'm not afraid of death like i used to be. because that's what we're talking about here. it's not about ai taking lives. it's about people suffering and dying, and about how we choose to react to that. for a long time i pretended it wasn't happening, and i can't pretend anymore.

i mean i do think abraham lincoln is right. you can't fool all of the people all of the time. people stop pretending everything is fine. i don't know what happens after that.

every day i see people fixing their hearts. every day i see people growing up whose hearts aren't broken the way in the way mine was, when i was their age. my life is one of hope and joy, and when i see those things, well, that's a lot of where that hope and joy comes from.

-

idk. i took the meds that allow me to focus on my job and i don't really feel like focusing on my job. so i wrote this instead.

i realise this is creepy but i’m hoping we get to that black mirror / house of usher tech

^^^lanchester novel incoming :|

the pundit class worries about job losses because it’s their jobs that are the most replaceable

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand)

their jobs don't _need_ to be replaced. i don't see the point of paying people to have opinions. i think we should pay people to _not_ have opinions. that would help.

yeah there will always be work for people willing to apologize for genocide and so forth

Opinion-having is one of my income streams, not the main one. My unbiased belief is that my opinions should be valued and respected more. Way more.

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:45rib2dexqjdb7qgnesejxbo/bafkreiexjljlgsfqzpqa6axsilm65tcw5trby5nngkozdoog3zx6dqssee@jpeg

honestly it’s all like that

If someone paid me, say, $150,000 a year to shut up and not have opinions, I would take that deal in a heartbeat. You would not hear from me again. And I (and my mostly corny stupid opinions) would not be missed.

Where do I sign up for that?

It's like that line in Ghost World where Thora Birch says "find someone who shares your interests" and Steve Buscemi says, "I hate my interests."

you don’t get paid for not having the opinion, you get paid for not voicing the opinion

and by the opinion I mean speaking up when someone is like “we should do this even though there’s a high probability it’ll dump toxic sludge into the river” and you’re like, I have no opinion on this toxic sludge thing

the value i add as a human being is to say 'how about dump toxic sludge into the river 8k high resolution dramatic lighting high contrast'

If someone paid me, say, $150,000 a year to shut up and not have opinions, I would take that deal in a heartbeat. You would not hear from me again. And I (and my mostly corny stupid opinions) would not be missed.

― Oh I believe in Yetis' Day (Ye Mad Puffin)

i would like to be paid $150,000 a year to, when a cis person starts in on some ignorant bullshit about trans people, smile and politely explain to them why they are wrong, while going out of my way to help them to not feel insecure about being wrong

seriously that is a hard fucking job and i deserve to be paid a lot of money for doing it

on the drama, maybe a reasonable summary from available sources?

I didn't know Sam Altman had been fired from Y Combinator in 2019. Not that Garry Tan is better

Kate’s booming long post OTM. Re: the future of jobs and AI (or the future without coal),

The techno-utopians have always dreamed that the massive surpluses gained by automation would lead to a world where people are freed from the drudgery of labour and we’d all be able to achieve our full potential doing flower arrangements or hosting philosophical salons. Until I dunno fairly recently, certainly within my lifetime, it was inconceivable that no entity besides a state could marshal the kind of resources required to achieve these advances. And if corporations did, then they would be regulated heavily for the public good. And so everyone would reap the benefits of this race toward the future; we would all be Jetsons (altho as I remember George had some kind of soul-sucking Man in the Grey Flannel Spacesuit job, but youknowwhatimean).

But of course we’ve now seen that corporations are unwilling to be governed or regulated (and emboldened to take every measure to avoid it), and that capital has bludgeoned states into complete submission re: anything to do with the public good, and that for some people there is no such thing as enough, ever. If Musk owned the world he would also need to own the solar system, and if he achieved that he would need to own the galaxy, and everything in his purview would necessarily be bent towards more, more more. I really do remember a time when such behaviour would have been widely considered obscene; now it’s just the way things are. 19th C commie cartoons depicted capital as a ravening lion or the hopper of a big machine, but it’s really a supermassive black hole that will literally devour everything in its ambit.

Ehrm, anyway, there’s a whole class & generation of kids who’ve given up completely on the Dream and who just spend their money on whatever makes them happy for the moment, and most of their dough trickles up to its natural home in the pockets of the Bezoses & the like, because we’re all gonna be dead in 30 years anyway, this kind of fatalistic surrender to the Black Hole.

And I just all kind of see it heading toward this situation where there’s the 1%, and below them a tiny upper-middle class with McMansions & Teslas, and then everyone else just scrambling & eking out whatever kind of existence we can & chucking our money into the hole of Expedia and Bed Bath and Beyond in almost a sad parody of what used to be the middle class. And then there are the Proles, who vote for the interests of the rich because they’ll keep the cartoon villains at bay.

I guess this is AI-related because, like, first they came for the factory workers, then they came for the truck drivers, now they’re coming for the knowledge workers kinda vibe, ya know?

Just some dark thoughts that have been rattling around in my skull for the past while. Thanks for letting me vent. As you were.

It’s a paradox though because while automation causes individual firms to save money and increase profits, in the end it causes the economy to shrink.

I think. Wouldn’t it cause a crisis if unemployment drastically rose? Who would be spending money on goods and services?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall

― treeship., Tuesday, November 21, 2023 8:52 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

the resolution of the paradox is that marx was wrong

He was wrong because capitalism adapted to find jobs for people. And monopolies broke up due to crises, allowing the capital accumulation game to start over again and fuel growth.

This time though, who knows?

Marx is playing the long game of history

I don’t think a crisis caused by capitalism failing inevitably would lead to socialism though. I don’t even feel that is likely. Victories for the working class historically are achieved at boom times—crises are used to push through austerity. Marx was wrong about this, I think.

The search for the artificial general hype machine edges one step closer

https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai-was-precipitated-by-letter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22/

"Q*" – you've got to hand it to them