diputsmonro

> Here's a machine that verifies 95% of calculations, but you'd still have to do 5% of the work.

The problem is that you don't know which 5% are wrong. The AI is confidently wrong all the time. So the only way to be sure is to double check everything, and at some point its easier to just do it the right way.

Sure, some things don't need to be perfect. But how much do you really want to risk? This company thought a little bit of potential misinformation was acceptable, and so it caused a completely self inflicted PR scandal, pissed off their customer base, and lost them a lot of confidence and revenue. Was that 5% error worth it?

Stories like this are going to keep coming the more we rely on AI to do things humans should be doing.

Someday you'll be affected by the fallout of some system failing because you happen to wind up in the 5% failure gap that some manager thought was acceptable (if that manager even ran a calculation and didn't just blindly trust whatever some other AI system told them) I just hope it's something as trivial as an IDE and not something in your car, your bank, or your hospital. But certainly LLMs will be irresponsibly shoved into all three within the next few years, if it's not there already.

An interesting perspective on this is that language is just another tool on the job. Like any other tool, you use the kind of language that is most applicable and efficient. When you need to describe or understand weather conditions quickly and unambiguously, you use METAR. Sure, you could use English or another natural language, but it's like using a multitool instead of a chef knife. It'll work in a pinch, but a tool designed to solve your specific problem will work much better.

Not to slight multitools or natural languages, of course - there is tremendous value in a tool that can basically do everything. Natural languages have the difficult job of describing the entire world (or, the experience of existing in the world as a human), which is pretty awesome.

And different natural languages give you different perspectives on the world, e.g., Japanese describes the world from the perspective of a Japanese person, with dedicated words for Japanese traditions that don't exist in other cultures. You could roughly translate "kabuki" into English as "Japanese play", but you lose a lot of what makes kabuki "kabuki", as opposed to "noh". You can use lots of English words to describe exactly what kabuki is, but if you're going to be talking about it a lot, operating solely in English is going to become burdensome, and it's better to borrow the Japanese word "kabuki".

All languages are domain specific languages!

There were several prime opportunities during his last term when those elusive "deeply concerned" (remember that meme?) Republicans could have chosen to act. We could have nipped this all in the bud, convicted him during his impeachment, and moved on from all of this. But those Republicans failed to act. Now even more congressional Republicans have been primaried and replaced by MAGA sycophants. I am, regrettably, past the point of having faith that the Republicans will do the right thing "this time"

You don't think Trump commands a cult of personality? I don't know where to begin with that.

The word "fascist" still applies as a descriptive term, even if Trump doesn't identify with or intentionally pursue it.

I mostly agree with your characterization of him, but those tendencies of sleazy egoism naturally lead to authoritarian policies. When your ego must be stroked and your word must be last, you naturally fight against important democratic safeguards that would restrain you, like apolotical bureaucracies and separation of powers, both of which we're seeing play out literally right now. Trump is defying Congress's sole authority of appropriating government funds, and has strongly signaled intent to defy court orders (and only hasn't technically defied them yet because decisions are still pending). DOGE is a thin excuse to purge federal agencies and fill them with partisan yes-men (or simply destroy them altogether and give Trump full control).

Despite Trump's personal politics, it's obvious that those in his orbit (including several cabinet appointees and his VP) do have intentionally fascist ideals and goals. Whether Trump personally cares or not is a distinction without a difference. He may not care about pursuing a "night of long knives", but many who have influence in his administration do, and Trump probably won't care to stop them, especially if it makes him seem like a strong, no-nonsense leader.

Fascism is coming to America and Donald Trump is the one commanding the cult of personality that is making it happen. That alone is worthy of criticism. It should be concerning to anyone who opposes fascism, regardless of who exactly is to blame or how exactly it is being done. Arguments like yours are mostly a distraction.

Duh, but we're obviously past the point of Republicans acting in good faith.

What's the point of submitting a story like this if you're just going to play the "both sides" game?

Yeah, Democrats suck too. But you'd have to be extremely uninformed or naive to believe that there's no difference between a party that mostly does things the right way with some occasional missteps (and yes, corruption), and a party that happily, brazenly wears it's corruption on its sleeve and threatens anyone who dissents.

If I'm reading that right, the attack assumes the attacker has (among other things) a private key (IK) stored only on the user's device, and the user's password.

Thus, engaging on this attack would seem to require hardware access to one of the victims' devices (or some other backdoor), in which case you've already lost.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't seem particularly dangerous to me? As always, security of your physical hardware (and not falling for phishing attacks) is paramount.

I mean, yes, technically it's "not new" for the President and Judiciary to disagree at this level. But doing so results in events like the Trail of Tears, which is pretty bad.

People are alarmed and concerned because they know it's not new. It's not difficult to find horrors in American history. Decorum and norms exist for the purpose of attempting to smooth over these stress points and make a safer power structure that hopefully prevents tragedies like this. The relative peace and safety we've enjoyed for the half century or so has been largely based on a modern era of good feelings and respectful norms.

When those norms go away and the authoritarian president dares the court to enforce the laws he breaks, people, rightly, get scared. The courts don't control the army, he does. I hope the generals remeber their oath, but oh yeah, he's been replacing them with loyalists too.

We know it isn't new. We've seen the horrors of history. That's why it's scary.

Yeah yeah, America lived on and stuff after all of that. But a lot of oppressed minorities didn’t. And if you're any minority group that the ruling party doesn't like right now, you are totally justified in being deathly afraid.

(For the record, I was against centralization of executive power under Obama and Bush too. But open and blatant disrespect like this is as especially alarming and should be treated as such, not normalized or justified)

For those looking for something to Google or concrete facts to back this up, "obstructionism" is the proper term for this.

Some key examples: Reagan saying "the government is the problem", Newt Gingrich starting the modern obstructionist movement in congress with the Contact with America (also backed by the Heritage Foundation, which is behind project 2025), and Mitch McConnel breaking norms to practically shut down congress under his leadership, openly stating his intent several times.

Republicans don't want to lead in any practical sense. They want to break the government and privatize the pieces so they can buy in and profit off of them. Anyone who can't buy in gets screwed, because services will cost more to pay for the investment and profits that the investors demand.

Trump's biggest achievement last term was a massive tax cut for the rich. So to balance to budget, they now want to destroy as many government services as they can, using "efficiency" as an excuse.

Breaking things is great when you run a social media company. Worst case scenario, your website goes offline for a few hours. When you start breaking the government, people die. Of course, if you're richer than God, you don't have to worry about the fallout. It doesnt matter if the FDA falls apart and leads to massive food contamination when you only eat Wagyu beef from your private ranch. People will die, you pay less taxes, and you only see it as a success.

There are many other critiques to be made, but this is just the surface.

I think you hit the nail on the head.

The president is a con man who larps as the richest person on the planet and his biggest accomplishment last term was a giant tax cut for the rich. The "actual" president is the richest man on earth and has a vested interest in destroying anything that can tax him or hold him / his businessess accountable in any way.

Awfully convenient that the richest people in the world think that the proper way to balance the budget isn't by raising taxes, but by burning the whole government to the ground. They have the resources to live in a walled garden for the rest of their lives and they don't care who else gets hurt.

I don't think it's that simple, for at least two reasons I can immediately think of:

1) Several Americans live paycheck to paycheck with no significant savings outside of property either. One unexpected emergency is enough to empty the savings of most Americans [1](https://www.yahoo.com/news/one-emergency-away-study-shows-22...). The idea that Americans make more money and that makes up for the difference just doesn't play out in reality for all but the richest and luckiest.

2) Taking a 30 day vacation and coming back to the same job without any threat of repercussion is much more valuable than simply 30 days worth of saved wages. The average American worker can't just take 30 days off, even as leave without pay, and expect to come back to the same job. If they want a 30 day period with no work, the vast majority of American workers will have to quit their current job and then hope to be able to find a new one later - which certainly isn't a given if you're working unskilled jobs to begin with.

It's not just about internet access , it's about the medically recognized highly addictive and predatory nature of social media. It is designed with the same principles as slot machines, to draw you in and keep you engaged for as long as possible. The internet we grew up in was much less centralized and not yet optimized for this kind of manipulation.

I know the site clarifies it, but the headline messaging on this is meaninglessly confusing.

"Wait until 8th!"

"Oh, you mean their 8th birthday?"

"No, 8th grade!"

"Oh, so wait until they're in 8th grade, got it!"

"No no, until the end of the 8th grade, when they graduate middle school!"

"Oh, so it's really wait until 9th"

Just seems like this would be the beginning of every conversation and lead to a non-unified approach. They should emphasize it being like an intro to high-school gift or something.

If people already understand what "hallucination" means, then I think it's perfectly intuitive and educational to say that, actually, the LLM is always doing that, just that some of those hallucinations happen to coincidentally describe something real.

We need to dispell the notion that the LLM "knows" the truth, or is "smart". It's just a fancy stochastic parrot. Whether it's responses reflect a truthful reality or a fantasy it made up is just luck, weighted by (but not constrained to) its training data. Emphasizing that everything is a hallucination does that. I purposefully want to reframe how the word is used and how we think about LLMs.

Precisely, I'm glad someone picked up on the reference!

> Even the most blatant lies, even all of fiction writing, they're all incorrect or fabricated only at the surface level - the whole thing, accounting for the utterance, what it is about, the meanings, the words, the grammar - is strongly correlated with truth and reality.

I would reject this pretty firmly. As you said, people write whole novels about imagined worlds and people about magic or technology or whatever that doesn't or can't exist. The LLM may understand what words mean and "know" how to string them together into a meaningful and grammatical sentence, but that's entirely different than a truthful sentence.

Truth requires some mechanism of fact finding, or chains of evidence, or admitting when those chains don't exist. LLMs have nothing like that.

Exactly this, I've been saying this since the beginning. Every response is a hallucination - a probabilistic string of words divorced from any concept of truth or reality.

By total coincidence, some hallucinations happen to reflect the truth, but only because the training data happened to generally be truthful sentences. Therefore, creating something that imitates a truthful sentence will often happen to also be truthful, but there is absolutely no guarantee or any function that even attempts to enforce that.

All responses are hallucinations. Some hallucinations happen to overlap the truth.

> At least the Right/Republicans seem more content to just call me an American and leave me alone.

I am honestly happy that you get that treatment.

A lot of other minorities don't. The left didn't just decide to play identity politics out of nowhere. They did it because this country has a long history of racism - people alive today experienced life before the Civil Rights act. And the racists who had to be told by law to cut it out didn't just stop being racist because a law was passed, just like how laws against murder don't stop murder from occurring. The racists just found other ways to be racist, and many of the underlying issues have persisted. People on the left are still fighting that fight. And their identity does matter, because it's the very thing that is being used against them.

I imagine if you were an immigrant from Mexico, accused of stealing jobs, running drugs, or being a leech on the system - or any other of the (and I quote Trump here) "shithole countries" that the right hates - you might feel differently. You are lucky that, right now, Japan is not on that list.

> Also, it's such a fucking stupid thing to not be friendly with each other just because of political differences.

Again, it's not just "political differences". They demonize minorities to the point of violence, and two of my friends have been assaulted because of it. It's not theoretical tax policy, it's dehumanization, in rhetoric and in actual laws they hope to pass. Not wanting to be around people who want to engage in violence against my friends is not unreasonable. This isn't theoretical, and my friends have scars to prove it.

I generally agree with your sentiment, and I do think open dialog is necessary to bridge the divide. It is way more easily said than done though, especially as political violence becomes more frequent.

But I will say - it's pretty terrible that the people being attacked and vilified in this situation are also expected to "be the better person" and bridge the divide. Why is the onus on the oppressed to make peace with their oppressor? Bystanders and allies should call out the bullies for starting the fight rather than blaming the victim for not advocating for themselves politely enough.

Sure, such misfortunes are a part of life and no progress is made without adversity. It is a pattern, though, that bystanders and allies should recognize and help reduce as much as possible.

> Pretend like you want to be a part of humanity instead of apart from it.

It's not me or my trans friends who want to live apart from humanity, trust me. We just want to live here, too - that's what the fight is about. It's the conservatives who are trying to push us out and remove us from society. The original sin of the fracture is theirs, not ours. If we live in a bubble, it's because they forced us into one, not because it's where we want to be.

> ...but that doesn't have to affect their ability to engage with trans people, or vice versa.

I disagree. How am I supposed to trust and feel safe around someone who knowingly voted for a politician who loudly campaigned on removing my rights and demonizing my very existence?

A politician who supports an esoteric policy that disadvantages me in some way is entirely different than one who loudly and plainly says that I am less human and should have fewer rights than others. That rhetoric kills people. And it's not a deal-breaker for you? I cannot call such a person a friend. A vote for a Republican in modern times is an expression to trans people that their rights and safety are less important to you than whatever esoteric tax policy or whatever than won your vote.

You can value that policy more than the rights of trans people if you want, that's your prerogative. But it will make trans people and their allies trust you a lot less when they discover that you think their rights are just a bargaining chip to be traded away, and justifiably so. What other situations are you willing to throw them under the bus over, not just in politics, but in life? It's not just a matter of pride or preference, but a matter of rights and safety.

I don't want to get into a giant political debate here, but I would urge you to follow the spirit of this post and actually talk to some trans people, in person, to get their perspective before voting for people who demonize them and take their rights away.

All of those are rooted in transphobia. The entire point of those bathroom bills to "protect women" is built upon the foundational idea that trans people are dangerous predators who want to assault people. It's a bigoted idea not supported by the data, which is built out of fear, and - appropriate to this whole post - a lack of understanding from never having actually talked to a trans person.

I agree with and second every word of that.

I grew up in the US during the 9/11 era, and I was just old enough to recognize the horrible nationalism that it spread through the entire country. How am I supposed to celebrate the flag of a country that invades the wrong country under false pretenses and rallies behind dumb propaganda like "freedom fries" to support it? How am I supposed to be proud of a country that chooses someone like Donald Trump as it's leader? (and is close to doing it again!)

I do generally love the supposed ideals of the US, and I would like to call myself a patriot - but it is difficult to do when criticism of the US (which is the whole point of a democracy) is met with "love it or leave it" type responses from people who cover themselves in the flag.

Real patriots want their country to improve via constructive criticism and change. But most conservative "patriots" in this country view any criticism as "hating America". Their "patriotism" is just fetishism for the traditions and symbols - which is why they cover every item they own with the flag.

In that context, the flag and "patriotism" can be very divisive, and those who abhor the conservative culture wars here can be very reticent to create the appearance thay they stand with them.

I respect that viewpoint and would be happy to adopt it in different times. But it's not as simple as political tribalism.

For example - Several of my close friends are trans. For the last decade or so, Republicans have been viciously attacking trans people and several states are actively taking away their rights. The entire right wing media ecosystem uses every chance they can to demonize trans people in the new culture war.

After years of these horrible attacks, we're seeing hate crimes against trans people rise. At least two of my friends have been assaulted in the last year or so.

How can I fault them for having a gut reaction to not engage with Republicans? And if someone is still happy to call themselves a Republican after all this hate, I think that reflects something about their character. Obviously if I were to vote for Republicans who want to hurt my trans friends (which is almost all of them), I could never look them in the eyes again. Similarly, I can't have much respect for those who do. The life and safety of my friends and family is the most important thing to me.

I am happy to engage in good faith dialogue with conservatives on these topics, but frankly, if I'm out and doing something I enjoy, I'd generally rather not spoil my time talking to someone who is statistically likely to be a hateful bigot.

> I didn't mention selling the picture I made of a Disney character. I mentioned only drawing it.

If you are paying for an AI service to produce art based on your prompts, then they are selling the art to you, rergardless of what you do with the image afterward. It's no different than going to an artist, describing an image you want, and paying them for what they produce. Generating images with propmts doesn't make you the artist, it makes you the commissioner. And if that commission involves a copyrighted character, then you have a legal issue.

> I think AI should see everything we humans publish, so it knows us better than if we limited its learning.

In an ideal world, I would agree. Unfortunately, the pressures of capitalism change the circumstances somewhat. As evidenced by the board shakeup, OpenAI doesn't care about lofty goals of bettering humanity, they want to make money. They built a plagiarism engine that will steal and sell the work of millions of artists, putting them out of business. In a better world where art production was not tied to their ability to feed themselves, then fine. But in this one, we're destroying the livlihood of millions to make some tech bro theives richer and flood the world with shitty "art". We have to consider the impact that technologies like this will have on society, given the way society is currently organized.

What if we flip the script - would it be cool if Disney scraped DeviantArt and created merchandise, movies, etc. based on the art and characters of small creators? Rules need to exist to protect the little guy.

Technically a lot of the merch people sell at conventions is infringing, but Disney, Nintendo, etc. recognize that pursuing action against them would ultimately be worse for their brand.

Generally speaking, whether a fandom existing around a creator's work is good is ultimately up to the creator. If the fandom economy chokes out the product of the artist, then the artist should have legal recourse (this is effectively the same scenario as counterfeits / knock offs). But if the creator's work is able to flourish alongside the fandom, then the creator may well decide that keeping the fandom engaged is worth more than being a legal prude. The protection should exist legally, and the creator should be allowed to exercise it as they deem necessary.

Information in the abstract, maybe. But it's entirely different to assume ownership of artwork other people produce, either for profit or personal expression. Maybe I would feel a little differently if all the AI art I see came from a place of earnest artistic expression, but everything is just some kind of scam or another. You aren't going to convince me that honest artists deserve to have their art stolen (often by name) and livelihoods destroyed so that crypto grifters can generate NFT assets a little easier and scummy companies can lay off their art departments. This is a tool that will be used to concentrate wealth and keep the little guy down, pure and simple.

And I'm definitely not swayed by the argument from this thread's OP of "I just want to steal everything I've ever seen and not have to do any hard work to create something myself".

Selling a picture you made of a Disney character is IP infringement. If the work you create is substantially derivative and competes against the IP holders work (which is pretty arguable given the prevalence of prompts containing the names of specific artists/characters/companies), then it is infringement. The same would be true if I paid you to produce art/merch/etc. of a Disney character.

> Meanwhile, the AI model developers, who have taken in massive amounts of capital, need to find a business model that will repay all that investment.

...

> The extreme case is these companies are no longer allowed to use copyrighted material in building these chatbots. And that means they have to start from scratch. They have to rebuild everything they’ve built. So this is something that not only imperils what they have today, it imperils what they want to build in the future.

...

> "the only practical way for these tools to exist is if they can be trained on massive amounts of data without having to license that data."

The simple and correct answer then is that they shouldn't exist. I don't care how much money they spent building a plagiarism machine, the expense and desire to build it doesn't excuse it being a plagiarism machine. Rich VCs don't get to ignore the rules just because they think they found a neat hack to make them billionaires. And after the shenanigans with the OpenAI board, the altruistic "for the betterment of humanity" argument has been revealed to be a thin sham.

> That's not what I'm talking about!

Okay, but when people are complaining about fines in this cases and similar cases, that is what they're talking about.

You can take a fine detail and make an argument out of it, but it's not a point anyone else cares about.