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[–] 63 points 9 months ago (1 child)

These fuckin AI "enthusiasts" are just making the rest of the world hate AI more.

Losers who cant achieve anything without AI are just going to keep doing this shit.

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  • [–] 52 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    I really despise how Claude's creators and users are turning the definition of "skill" from "the ability to use [learned] knowledge to enhance execution" into "a blurb of text that [usefully] constrains a next-token-predictor".

    I guess, if you squint, it's akin to how biologists will talk about species "evolving to fit a niche" amongst themselves or how physicists will talk about nature "abhorring a vacuum". At least they aren't talking about a fucking product that benefits from hype to get sold.

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  • [–] 40 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    I can't help but get secondhand embarrassment whenever I see someone unironically call themselves a "prompt engineer". 🤮

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  • [–] 22 points 9 months ago

    Isn't this a thing that authoritarians do. They co-opt language. It's the same thing conservatives do. The venn diagram of tech bros and the far right is too close to being a circle.

    You can pretty put any word out of the dictionary into a search engine and the first results are some tech company that took the word either as their company name or redefined it into some buzzword.

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  • [–] 34 points 9 months ago

    Congrats on inventing what high school students figured out a year ago to skirt AI homework detectors.

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  • [–] 33 points 9 months ago* (8 children)

    "just tell your LLM not to do that"

    You ever ask an LLM to modify a picture and "don't change anything else"? It's going to change other things.

    Case in point: https://youtu.be/XnWOVQ7Gtzw

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    You are mixing two kind of AI, LLM and diffusion.
    It's way harder for a diffusion model to not change the rest, the first step of a diffusion model is to use a lossy compression to transform the picture into a soup of digits that the diffusion model can understand.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    And an LLM will convert a prompt into a bunch of tokens the model can understand.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Tokens are a lossless conversion, you can convert it back to the original text.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    This isn't about saying "return the original text" this is about assuming LLMs understand language, and they don't. Telling an LLM "don't do these things" will be as effective as telling it "don't hallucinate" or asking it "how many 'r's in 'strawberry'.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago

    In order to make such affirmation or infirmation we'll need to define understanding.
    The example you gave can be explained by other way than "it doesn't understand".

    For example, the "how many 'r' in strawberry", LLMs see tokens, and the dataset they use, doesn't contain a lot of data about the letters that are present in a token.

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  • [–] 55 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Download an offline copy while you still can.

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  • [+] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    Here's a link to the Kiwix library download for all of Wikipedia. It's 111GB though, so you'll need a lot of space and also a lot of time to wait for it to download.

    Note, you'll also need Kiwix in some manner to read the zim file once it's downloaded.

    Kiwix library - All of Wikipedia - direct download link

    Kiwix app download page

    But this'll let you have a local copy you can reference should actual Wikipedia ever get ruined by GenAI, or worse, get taken down by hostile governments.

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    [–] 26 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    From the repo:

    Have opinions. Don't just report facts - react to them. "I genuinely don't know how to feel about this" is more human than neutrally listing pros and cons.

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  • [–] 50 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    If these "signs of AI writing" are merely linguistic, good for them. This is as accurate as a lie detector (i.e., not accurate) and nobody should use this for any real world decision-making.

    The real signs of AI writing are not as easy to fix as just instructing an LLM to "read" an article to avoid them.

    As a teacher, all of my grading is now based on in person performances, no tech allowed. Good luck faking that with an LLM. I do not mind if students use an LLM to better prepare for class and exams. But my impression so far is that any other medium (e.g., books, youtube explanation videos) leads to better results.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    I sucked in oral exams and therefore hated them. Then again, if they had been mixed into regular school, it might not have sucked so much.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Doesn't need to be oral, I remember occasionally having exams that were essay questions that needed to be answered in class.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    I do both of these as well as smaller but more frequent tests, group work, project work over several sessions etc... The only things I stopped doing are reports to write at home, paper summaries etc. Doesn't make sense anymore.

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  • [–] 23 points 9 months ago

    I am so goddamned tired of AI being shoved into every collective orifice of our society.

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  • [–] 41 points 9 months ago

    Fuck you, Siqi Chen.

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  • [–] 20 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    So they are using AI to make it so AI can't detect that they are using AI?

    What kind of technological ouroborous of nonsense is this?

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  • [–] 18 points 9 months ago

    It can't avoid doing those things. That's the reason for the article.

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  • [–] 33 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    In French, one of the way to spot AI writing is that sentences will often miss articles or have bad grammar. Can this dude also ask the LLM to include more articles and make complete sentences in the language it's trying to imitate?

    I was using the Discover feed on my phone but Google started to insert rewritten stories & headlines by AI and they were so annoyingly bad at making simple sentences in French that it made me stop using that thing.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Weird, in Italian they usually have impeccable grammar

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    The most recent one I saw was "Neige cause ralentissement de REM". It works translated in English, giving something like "Snow causes slowing down of REM", but in French it's missing enough articles to sound wrong. The cromulent sentence would have been "La neige cause le/un ralentissement du REM". Back into English this would add "The snow causes the/a slowing down of the REM". A missing "le/la", or using "de" instead of "du" doesn't change the meaning of a sentence, but it makes it obvious that it wasn't from a native speaker.

    Maybe it depends on the model and the source but so far, in French, for news, most of what I've read becomes uncanny after a few sentences. They often read like something passed through a translation program but just a tad better. You can understand it fine but it's missing an article there, reversing the word order in another sentence, uses vocabulary that is just slightly off, and often ends up like something written by someone that learned French as a second language for most of their life. A very good learner, nearly native level, but not quite there yet and still a bit off.

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  • [+] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 72 points 9 months ago (13 children)

    Wikipedia is one of the last genuine places on the Internet, and these rat bastards are trying to contaminate that, too

    Wikipedia just sold the rights to use Wikipedia for AI training to Microsoft and openai....

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  • [–] 14 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    How exactly does that work? Wikipedia does not "own" the content on the website, it's all CC-BY licensed.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    Why? Wikipedia has like a decade of operating expenses on hand, so they don't need the money

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  • [–] 39 points 9 months ago

    This number inflates every time I read it. First it was ten years of hosting cost. Then it's operating costs. Soon it will be ten years of the entire US GDP.

    I'd believe they have ten years of hosting costs on hand.

    My quick googling says they have 170m in assets and all 180m in annual operating costs. Give or take.

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  • [–] -1 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    Greed? It’s probably greed.

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  • [+] 19 points 9 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    OK then why sell data right to m$?

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  • [+] 11 points 9 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] -1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Is wiki in the red? Unclear, omi mean they ask for money donations, but someone in this thread claims they are set for a decade, I’ve seen people post something about how they are fine, and even donate a bunch themselves. I don’t know, and I guess it doesn’t matter.

    Not sure where you are going with your second comment, and uninterested in engaging with your comparison as I don’t think it’s very good

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  • [+] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    On the traffic front, other than donations, if they don’t show ads, isn’t more traffic just more cost? So, I guess if copilot instead just shows info without the user going to wiki that might be good in a sense? But if they drove more traffic there, not so much? Unless they are donating….

    I mean, I guess it’s better than ahem…. Grok with its fictitious information, but, I don’t think this of the ai_lovers community either…

    You for maybe have an argument that at least the ai will be fed dates with some basis in reality, which could be good.

    Many conflicting feelings

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  • [+] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    I mean you’re right, it doesn’t, but it does feel a bit bad considering all that data is mostly the work of volunteers, who now get the intense privilege of becoming AI feed.

    I hate this derivative AI slop fest we are driving towards, so I guess I’m a little sensitive to news like this.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago*

    If microsoft is "buying access to training data" it makes what Open AI is doing look illegal. I would encourage every data broker to sell 'AI training data rights" because it undermines the only real advantage AI has and it helps pave the way to forcing AI companies to comply with open source licenses.

    Essentially selling ai data rights is a trojan horse for the AI companies. Obviously it would be better to pass laws but until that happens this is imo a better strategy than doing nothing.

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  • [–] 15 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Bro isnt even gonna check its output anyway.

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  • [+] 15 points 9 months ago* (1 child)
  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago

    Jesus Christ what a wretched twit of a man.

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  • [–] 81 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    You do understand this is more akin to white hat testing, right?

    Those who want to exploit this will do it anyway, except they won't publish the result. By making the exploit public, the risk will be known if not mitigated.

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  • [–] 24 points 9 months ago* (3 children)

    I'm admittedly not knowledgeable in White Hat Hacking, but are you supposed to publicize the vulnerability, release a shortcut to exploit it telling people to 'enjoy', or even call the vulnerability handy ?

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Responsible disclosure is what a white hat does. You report the bug to whomever is the party responsible for patching and give them time to fix it.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago

    That sort of depends on the situation. Responsible disclosure is for if there is some relevant security hole that is an actual risk to businesses and people, while this here is just "haha look LLMs can now better pretend to write good text if you tell it to". That's not really responsible disclosurable. It's not even specific to one singular product.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago

    Finally! Now all of the "Scientology" histories will be safe! /s

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Wikipedia has already partnered with AIbcompanies to help train their LLMs.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Stuff like that doesn't always work though, at least on free versions in my experience. I use Ai to write flowery emails to people to sound nice when I normally wouldn't bother and I used it to negotiate buying my car. I would continually tell it not to use - dashes while writing emails. And inevitably after 1 answer it would go back to using them.

    Maybe paid versions are different but on free ones you have to continually correct it.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Even the paid models I've tried do that. The style LLMs use seems deeply ingrained. Either companies do it on purpose, or it's just the result of all the companies using similar training data and techniques.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    And it's the same reason this guy's solution to not sound like an LLM isn't a real solution, because no amount of prompting can fix the inherent issue that they don't actually know anything.

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  • [–] 14 points 9 months ago (7 children)

    And now you know how and why so many programmers are just fucking awful and literally responsible for the hell we’re living in

    Kinda surprised how they don’t get more hate programmers fucking suck

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  • [–] 24 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

    Wow, such programmer.

    Especially that "investor" in twitter bio and all his posts about finance.

    Hell even if he was a programmer, disney hires artists as well. Entire art community is transphobic now?

    (I am sorry if comment was meant to be satirical)

    Edit : He is apparently a CEO too.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Like how FB is VERY maliciously coded to make you comply. My friends wont believe me when I try to explain how fucking evil these corps are and they do not care about you or user experience.

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  • [–] -1 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    Well yeah AIs learn stuff. This is a neverending fight 

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  • [–] 19 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    llms do not learn, they are a spicy keyboard autocomplete

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (4 children)

    Even my keyboard autocomplete learns from my typing

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  • [+] -6 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Wikipedia is astroturfed BS for anything remotely politically related.
    Useful if you want to learn about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker or a closed-cycle regenerative heat engine, etc..
    So no politics and subjects with political implications such as history.

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    [+] -18 points 9 months ago (3 children)
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