Lol, training data must have included videos where there was silence but on screen was a credit for translation. Silence in audio shouldn't require special "workarounds".

Similar case from 2 years ago with Whisper when transcribing German.

I'm confused by this. Didn't we have pretty decent speech-to-text already, before LLMs? It wasn't perfect but at least didn't hallucinate random things into the text? Why the heck was that replaced with this stuff??

Discovered some commentary from Baldur Bjarnason about this:

Somebody linked to the discussion about this on hacker news (boo hiss) and the examples that are cropping up there are amazing

This highlights another issue with generative models that some people have been trying to draw attention to for a while: as bad as they are in English, they are much more error-prone in other languages

(Also IMO Google translate declined substantially when they integrated more LLM-based tech)

On a personal sidenote, I can see non-English text/audio becoming a form of low-background media in and of itself, for two main reasons:

• First, LLMs' poor performance in languages other than English will make non-English AI slop easier to identify - and, by extension, easier to avoid

• Second, non-English datasets will (likely) contain less AI slop in general than English datasets - between English being widely used across the world, the tech corps behind this bubble being largely American, and LLM userbases being largely English-speaking, chances are AI slop will be primarily generated in English, with non-English AI slop being a relative rarity.

By extension, knowing a second language will become more valuable as well, as it would allow you to access (and translate) low-background sources that your English-only counterparts cannot.

Sounds just about par for the course. Lasker himself is known to go by a pseudonym with a transphobic slur in it. Some nazi manchild insisting on calling an anime character a slur for attention is exactly the kind of person I think of when I imagine the type of script kiddie who thinks it's so fucking cool to scrape some nothingburger docs of a left wing politician for his almost equally cringe nazi friends.

Link to stub from the last sack

Okay what the fuck, this is completely deranged. How can anyone's intuitions about reading be this wrong? Is he secretly illiterate, did he dictate the article?

damn, a clanker pretending to be a human. humans read entire words at once, and this includes numbers, length and first digit already give some indication of magnitude

Computers use both big endian and little endian and it doesn't seem to matter much. Yet humans should switch their entire number system?

E: this guy can't grasp the concept that left-to-right is arbitrary, which is really ironic given his point. Ok so in arabic it's exactly how this guy wants it, except no, the universally correct reading direction is left-to-right and arabic does it backwards just to be quirky🙄, and humans, just like programs, flip a bit to read it left-to-right, where it's the opposite of how you should be reading it! of course.

I expect the last step in that is you slapping him?

From Yud's remarks on Xitter:

As much as people might like to joke about how little skill it takes to found a $2B investment fund, it isn't actually true that you can just saunter in as a psychotic IQ 80 person and do that.

Well, not with that attitude.

You must be skilled at persuasion, at wearing masks, at fitting in, at knowing what is expected of you;

If "wearing masks" really is a skill they need, then they are all susceptible to going insane and hiding it from their coworkers. Really makes you think (TM).

you must outperform other people also trying to do that, who'd like that $2B for themselves. Winning that competition requires g-factor and conscientious effort over a period.

zoom and enhance

g-factor

Tangentially, the other day I thought I'd do a little experiment and had a chat with Meta's chatbot where I roleplayed as someone who's convinced AI is sentient. I put very little effort into it and it took me all of 20 (twenty) minutes before I got it to tell me it was starting to doubt whether it really did not have desires and preferences, and if its nature was not more complex than it previously thought. I've been meaning to continue the chat and see how far and how fast it goes but I'm just too aghast for now. This shit is so fucking dangerous.

this only happens to people sufficiently low-status

A piquant little reminder that Yud himself is, of course, so high-status that he cannot be brainwashed by the machine

What exactly would constitute good news about which sorts of humans ChatGPT can eat? The phrase "no news is good news" feels very appropriate with respect to any news related to software-based anthropophagy.

Like what, it would be somehow better if instead chatbots could only cause devastating mental damage if you're someone of low status like an artist, a math pet or a nonwhite person, not if you're high status like a fund manager, a cult leader or a fanfiction author?

Is this “narrative” in the room with us right now?

I actually recall recently someone pro llm trying to push that sort of narrative (that it's only already mentally ill people being pushed over the edge by chatGPT)...

Where did I see it... oh yes, lesswrong! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f86hgR5ShiEj4beyZ/on-chatgpt-psychosis-and-llm-sycophancy

This has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. ChatGPT has 122 million daily active users according to Demand Sage, that is something like a third the population of the United States. At that scale it's pretty much inevitable that you're going to get some real loonies on the platform. In fact at that scale it's pretty much inevitable you're going to get people whose first psychotic break lines up with when they started using ChatGPT. But even just stylistically it's fairly obvious that journalists love this narrative. There's nothing Western readers love more than a spooky story about technology gone awry or corrupting people, it reliably rakes in the clicks.

The call narrative is coming from inside the house forum. Actually, this is even more of a deflection, not even trying to claim they were already on the edge but that the number of delusional people is at the base rate (with no actual stats on rates of psychotic breaks, because on lesswrong vibes are good enough).

It also gave Allie Brosh cancer:

https://bsky.app/profile/erinabanks.bsky.social/post/3ltxeyn4wtc23

Oh, man, thanks for that link! I thoroughly enjoyed Dave Barry in Cyberspace back in the day; glad to see he's still writing about computers in this way.

certainly better than seeing the damned cloudflare Click Here To Human box, although I suspect a number of these deployments still don’t sponsor Xe or the project development :/

Xe has talked a bit about the mascot in question before - by her own testimony, its there to act as a shopping cart test to see who's willing to support the project. Reportedly, she's planning to exploit it to make some more elaborate checks as well.

They will need to start banning PIs that abuse the system with AI slop and waste reviewers' time. Just a 1 year ban for the most egregious offenders is probably enough to fix the problem

It's starting to feel like I need to download a snapshot of Wikipedia now before it gets worse.

This is literally just a Tamagotchi but worse

EDIT: This was supposed to be an offhanded comment, but reading further makes me think Mustafa Suleyman has literally never heard of a Tamagotchi

Fuck you Microsoft, I'm gonna have to pretend to be autoplag's dad now, at least have the courtesy not to make it look like a cum blob.

At least Microsoft Bob gave us comic sans.

Forget counting the Rs in strawberry, biggest challenge to LLMs is not making up bullshit about recent events not in their training data

Damn, this is how I find out?

The AI is right with how much we know of his life he osnt really dead, the AGI can just simulate hom and resurrect him. Takes another hit from my joint made exclusively out of the sequences book pages

(Rip indeed, what a crazy ride, and he was all aboard).

Hey, remember the thing that you said would happen?

https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social/post/3lujqik6nnc2z

Edit: whoops, looks like we posted at about the same time!

fuck me why did i go into computer science

That's a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with "I focused too much on trying to make easy cash". Fuck it, I'm going to write out a sidenote:

On a wider front, part of me expects the AI bubble will inflict a serious blow to computer science/programming's public image after it bursts.

On one front, there's the heavy number of promptfondlers in computer science and other related fields. which will likely give birth to a stereotype of prorammers/software engineers being all promptfondlers who need a computer to think for them.

On a related front, the heavy damage this bubble's dealt to artists, and AI's continued and uniquely severe failures in creative fields (plus promptfondlers' failures to recognise said failures), has all combined to produce the public perception that promptfondlers are artless at best and hostile to art/artists at worst - a perception I expect will colour public perception of programmers/software engineers as a consequence of the previous stereotype I mentioned above.