I’m glad someone is fighting the good fight. It’s becoming more and more obvious that the prevalence of these tool in academic circles may cause more harm than good.

It’s a great dream, leaving. I’m not rich enough to make that happen, though. Maybe once things get worse, I can become a refugee- but, it’s more likely that I’ll cling to life here until it’s impossible to continue.

Oh God, I checked and I’m so glad the trans ban didn’t make it to the final budget. I was so worried about that.

That means, at least, it’s going to be a few more years before they try to ban trans people from existing.

There’s a conversation that could be had about how there are no truly public platforms on the web. Ultimately, everywhere you can speak is owned by someone, and any community you build exists at their mercy. This can exert a lot of pressure on a community’s standards and beliefs, and when I started using the internet, abusing this was a major faux pas.

However, that conversation requires a lot of nuance and patience. You are kind of transparently posting this in response to a moderator in another community removing your posts. If you’d like to complain about that, there’s actually a community specifically for that.

By the by, free speech complaints have become strongly associated with certain political movements as dog whistles. You might want to look into that and make sure you want to present that image.

How long have you been using the internet?

Fancy savings account for retirement that’s stored in stocks so it can explode at any point. Basic perquisite to ever retire in the US. Many people don’t have them.

Superbrain in a vat??

I’m not sure why so many people begin this argument on solid ground and then hurl themselves off into a void of semantics and assertions without any way of verification.

Saying, “Oh it’s not intelligent because it doesn’t have senses,” shifts your argument to proving that’s a prerequisite.

The problem is that LLM isn’t made to do cognition. It’s not made for analysis. It’s made to generate coherent human speech. It’s an incredible tool for doing that! Simply astounding, and an excellent example of the power of how a trained model can adapt to a task.

It’s ridiculous that we managed to get a probabilistic software tool which generates natural language responses so well that we find it difficult to distinguish them from real human ones.

…but it’s also an illusion with regards to consciousness and comprehension. An LLM can’t understand things for the same reason your toaster can’t heat up your can of soup. It’s not for that, but it presents an excellent illusion of doing so. Companies that are making these tools benefit from the fact that we anthropomorphize things, allowing them to straight up lie about what their programs can do because it takes real work to prove they can’t.

Average customers will engage with LLM as if it was a doing a Google search, reading the various articles and then summarizing them, even though it’s actually just completing the prompt you provided. The proper way to respond to a question is an answer, so they always will unless a hard coded limit overrides that. There will never be a way to make a LLM that won’t create fictitious answers to questions because they can’t tell the difference between truth or fantasy. It’s all just a part of their training data on how to respond to people.

I’ve gotten LLM to invent books, authors and citations when asking them to discuss historical topics with me. That’s not a sign of awareness, it’s proof that the model is doing what it’s intended to do- which is the problem, because it is being marketed as something that could replace search engines and online research.

Yeah, see, I am on your side but the focus on “destroying books is bad,” is kind of irrelevant to the actual harm being done.

It’s that they’re devouring the contents of people’s brains for the ability to replace them that’s concerning. If they chose to do this in a completely different way that preserved the books, I would not say it changes the moral valence of their actions.

By centering the argument on the destruction of the books, it shifts it away from the actual concern.

Your empathy is in a good place, but the problem isn’t how humans are broken, it’s what is breaking them.

Western society* is built in a really dumb and alienating way. Humans are reduced to a labor commodity, places where people can mingle socially are being commercialized out of existence, the internet has evolved into a machine that actively profits from outrage and alienation, our governmental institutions are primarily driven by forces no regular person has any power over and we can’t even feel pride in our work because it’s profitable to convince us that we are replaceable and disposable.

Where’s the social incentive to connect to other people? The powers that be benefit from a disorganized and isolated population, so they will do nothing to change that. Market incentives mean that media which focused on things that provoke fear, rage and anxiety are more profitable than ones that promote community, happiness or hope.

It’s permeated so deeply into our culture that some older kids movies seem completely insane now. Like, think about ET and consider how wild it would be nowadays for you to just let your children vanish for hours doing whatever and wandering around wherever.

The fear and anxiety determines our actions, and there are multiple incentives on a macro-social level for that to continue.

Hell, I have watched this happen in real time during my 10+ year time on the web, where the communities of excited weirdos sharing their thoughts and feelings have been so thoroughly dominated by this that it is hard to engage with any social media without someone shoving a headline into your face that is intended to upset you.

On Tumblr, for example, the trend was so strong that the idea that you weren’t constantly upset was a sign of being a bad person. You know, on the Superwholock site? Yeah, the one that wanted to fuck the Onceler.

If you want to reverse this trend, it’s going to require changing how our political, economic and media environments act by changing their incentives. Otherwise, any change will be superficial and fail to produce meaningful results.

It’s pretty depressing, but that’s the situation as I see it.

*I’m not qualified to comment on other cultural spheres.

This reminds me of when I shadowed a librarian in high school and they talked to me about how people got really upset with them throwing away books that had multiple reprintings and were in awful condition.

Because people as a whole lack the capacity for nuance, I guess.

Bad focus on the news article.

Preach. I’m so bad at selling myself!

I just want a job with a living wage now, and it’s agonizingly, dehumanizingly hard to look online. Especially if you have the extreme rejection sensitivity aspect of ADHD.

I wholeheartedly agree.

…so what about the minorities in those red states who are stuck there because of their financial or familial situations, and who lack the power to influence politics?

Wouldn’t work out. World’s too complicated for simple answers like that.

Leaving, even if it would produce a viable nation, would involve leaving a lot of people in the lurch. There’s people in conservative states who need the counter balance of blue states to slow down their government’s trend to self destruction and fascism.

Even though it’s increasingly frustrating with how feeble that resistance is, it does keep things like banning gay marriage in the “difficult to pass” territory and not the “a few compromises” one.

It’s increasingly hard to find things that are like that for everyone. It’s an unfortunate trend that means I have to very aggressively curate my feeds to keep from being dragged into it.

This situation is really rough. I wish I could offer you financial support, but I can’t right now.

I want you to at least know that I’m thinking about you and I care.

You should check out the policies for your local libraries, if there’s a conveniently placed one you may still be able to get intermittent access?

Yeah, typo on my part 😅 Pasdechance has it right, I meant news company.

Europol’s Deputy Executive Director of Operations Jean-Philippe Lecouffe said in a statement. “By dismantling its infrastructure and arresting its key players, we are sending a clear message: there is no safe haven for those who profit from harm.”

(Looks at the camera)

Just as an aside, the person who owns this new company donated millions to the Trump campaign.

Do you have any idea how deeply it undermines your argument when you just openly say, “You’re writing oo much for me to read, please write less.”

Don’t respond if you don’t have the common courtesy to read what the person person wrote.