Yes, ‘Artificial Intelligence [AI]’ was literally conjured as a marketing term with the motivation of seeking funding.

Just because there’s a label invoked to encompass an area of research, doesn’t make it legitimate. There’s plenty of pseudoscientific fields that practitioners believe are worthy, like economics or cryptozoology.

I heard the same thing about cryoto, nfts, Google glasses, the list goes on.

I think you're assigning too much free will to people and societies. If you take the Marxist perspective that technology creates its own social infrastructure - who owns what, who does what, who gets the benefits, who receives power and who is disposessed - then technology can be seen as inherently political. If and when a technology appears, that reshapes society in ways that significantly change the benefits distribution of society's labour, the distinction between the inert technology itself and its effects on society becomes an academic discussion. Even if this technology can only reshape society when that society exists and is combined with the technology. So rather than focusing on the academic distinction, I think people would care more about focusing on the social effects, which are political, and whether there are opportunities to make these effects benefit them (us).

People really twist themselves in knots to defend their heros huh?

I think we are ultimately in agreement with a subtly different perspective on things.

Nothing is inherently political, but everything is ultimately within the realm of politics. Land itself isn't political until people draw lines on it and start making claims.

Inert, lifeless things are not themselves inherently political. Their uses and the people who decide such make them so.

Nooooo delete this 😭

It's a trauma response

elmer fudd isn't a bumbling buffoon.

you'd seem like a bumbling buffoon around this too. i mean c'mon.

obligatory Fuck John Deere

legalize the weed grenade

like economics or cryptozoology.

that's really not fair. not every practitioner is from the Austrian School of Cryptids

Not trying to kink shame, but furry is the opposite of a turn on for me.

You do you, though.

not sure about NFTs, but crypto revolutionized buying drugs online and the google glass has plenty of corperate copycats (some more like the hololens)

Reposted from elsewhere:

Linus on the Linux kernel (after writing a single python script w/ an LLM):

A tool cannot in and of itself be political. Its use and application absolutely can.

If a tool cannot in and off itself be political then why has Apple removed the "neutral tool" of ice block?

DRM is inherently political. Flock cameras are inherently political. AI data centers are inherently political. Many tools and technologies are inherently political.

He's a rich, middle-aged, white man from the Nordics.

As a white man from the Nordics, my observation is that his particular demographic doesn't tend to care much. They have theirs.

AFAIK silk road and all their clones have been shut down. Maybe you still can? But when was the last time you heard someone doing that?

Also, meta glasses are still getting huge pushback socially.

was mostly thinking about hrt, and things like the epson moverio/Microsoft hololens

DRM is a tool to protect IP and can (though often does not) protect the individual who created the IP.

Flock cameras are really just cameras that are utilizing other tools to track people. The company using them in that way are the political ones. The tool being used as it is just happens to be the point of contention.

Data centers weren't really a (Big) problem til they started being used for AI. So again, it is the use case rather than the tool itself.

I want to be abundantly clear that I am not actually arguing for any of these things as i think Flock et al should be slow-roasted one inch at a time just as a starter and our warm-up round for what happens to Meta and Google and Palantir and so on.

The semantic/pedantic part of me just kicks against blanket statements that, when analyzed, tend to be on shakier ground than it first appeared.

Because Apple is a political entity and have their own agenda.

Any tracking tool of any description can be used for personal safety or nefarious means.

Rocks aren't political, but they can still be used to split somebody's skull open as easily as they can be used to drive a nail. They're tools, and the hands that use them determine their politics. That still doesn't make the tool inherently political.

Pls bro pls

I don't know, I have a lot of confidence in his capabilities as an engineer and a pioneer.

I have serious misgivings about this choice, but I'm willing to hear him out because he's not just some rando.

Your the first person to say hololense since before the pandemic to me.

I think that says everything I need to. They're not relevant.

I think the point is we disagree with the premise that AI is inherently collaborative- but that's not the main point, there are very many other complex and morally fraught considerations using AI code in general.

It's just kinda to stupid to treat anyone as infallible.

It kinda comes with being a human.

First of all how dare you

First I was going to reply with the "I ain't going to read all of that" meme.

Then I realized you'd use that as an argument later on to defend AI, so I read it.

I have read the same exact arguments so many times, that I just wasted my time on nothing. I'm won't bother to write the same exact rebuttals I (and others) already have.

Yet AI bros get all angry if we artists dare to draw fanart, because we draw something that already existed. Maybe their brains got cooked by the promise of "infinite, original, and personalized" content...

Ahem

(If you've previously contributed to the Linux kernel, contact me for verification, and then maybe could add you.)

you'd use that as an argument later on to defend AI,

Meanwhile I actually said:

I genuinely believe humanity would be better off without AI

Your reading comprehension needs work.

My literal only point in all of this has become that tools exist independent of politics. I also think guns are abhorrent, but they exist and we have to deal with them. So it is with AI. The gun and AI are neither independently political items. It is their use which turns them into political topics well worth discussing.

If I were able to Thanos snap both guns and AI off the face of the earth along with all capability to ever produce their like again I would do it without a second thought or care for any of the consequences for it as I believe both are indeed net negatives for humanity.

As i lack that capability, I am going to have to learn how to live my life in a world where these things do exist. I also don't blame the items themselves for existing, but rather the evil people who build them in the name of ever greater profits.

But you keep putting words and beliefs in other people's mouths if it makes you feel better, I guess.

No one should have statues made of them. We are remembered by momentary glimpses of greatness in the overwhelming sea of mediocrity. Something something typewriters

You're falling for the AI vendor propaganda, which paints people who solely not wanting to use the AI, or engage with its output, as extremists, and the furthest thing that can be done about AI. You're defending AI, you just don't know it, thanks to popaganda.

Again, you're the only one saying those things. I literally just finished saying I'd burn it down if I could and you're telling me I'm defending it.

Learn to read better, please.

Again: LLM's are tools. If used right, tools are great, and LLM's CAN be great for certain tasks. As far as I can tell, that is Torvald's position as well; use tools as tools.

If you cannot tell the difference between a rock and ice block I'm not sure what to tell you.

How about grok? Apolitical?

heteronormative to a cringe extent

Seriously tux doesn't need to have painted human nails and feminine hair here. It only serves to make it explicit that this isn't gay, because that would be weird I guess? As opposed to a cuckhold joke with a cartoon penguin.

Cringe

LLMd are not tools. A hammer is a tool. A stochastic appliance can not be a tool.

The professionals use specific terms, like LLM or neural network. Most aren't buffoons suffering from the ELIZA effect.

It's not the tools he's using. It's the fact that he has already misused those tools.

I agree with his position, but he completely skips the moral issues using current LLMs, which is the big problem here.

Dude, it's just a quick lazy mashup of two existing images. The creator added neither hand, they're both from the source images.

They also use "AI" to refer to things more generally when they need to refer to the whole group of technologies. This does not imply they think AI is conscious or whatever; that correlation is entirely a consequence of you using an incorrect definition of AI.

Lazy posts are still lazy. Not like I'm asking to ban OP or even upset about it.

lol no. Sure, THEY know what they're talking about when they say AI, but you have to be such a clown failing to pay attention if you think they're immune to the ELIZA effect or that the execs trying to sell this aren't willingly falling for it. They need it to be more capable than the technology actually is to justify their insane upset of the economy burning trillions on this BS.

I don't know, computers are pretty neat as long as you don't turn them on.

Here's the thing. What is it that an LLM does? I would argue, it sumarizes.

More or less, yeah. It produces text that reads like it would fit in its training model.

What do LLMs summarize, though..? The internet. Reddit.4chan.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Give it a corpus of text, and it can "understand" that data and extract "meaning" from it.

No it can't. It can produce text that looks like it fits with it, but it has no knowledge of what its training data, its prompt, or its output mean.

LLMs don't operate on meaning or information, they operate on the shape of texts.

The fact that they look like they work (as long as you aren't an expert on the supposed subject matter of their output) would tell us much more about the nature of language and its readers, if we bothered to look, than the apparent meaning of their outputs, but of course the capitalist mind couldn't care less about that, and given a dumb oracle that appears to give “good enough” answers can't help but sell it as a superintelligent one that always gives perfectly accurate and correct ones, no matter the consequences.

Is that useful?

Not really, no. Maybe as a substitute for lorem ipsum if it weren't so damn inefficient and morally unsustainable, but that's about it.

“But the one remaining overworked not yet fired expert can review the output!” you'll say, falling into the trap of treating the machine as a dumb but hard working intern instead of what it is.

Because the thing with interns is that when they produce garbage it looks like garbage, and the expert can immediately see it and teach the intern why it's garbage and how to fix it. And eventually the intern will become an expert, and review and train new interns, and society will progress.

But when an LLM produces garbage it's indistinguishable from correct output at first, second, and even third glance, even by the best experts.

Because LLMs might not have the slightest idea of what a text means, but if they're good at something it's at producing correct looking texts.

So the expert ends up wasting orders of magnitude more time trying to determine whether the output is safe or garbage... or simply gives up.

What's worse, the LLM won't learn. It won't become an expert capable of replacing the old one and reviewing and teaching new interns, or obviously LLMs.

The expert will be fired, or retire, or die of overworking and heartbreak, and there will be no one to replace them.

No one to write new content to train new LLMs on.

And even if LLMs were capable of producing new content instead of merely lossly regurgitating their training data, which they aren't, you can't train LLMs on their own output. The model collapses. Photocopy of a photocopy, JPEG of a JPEG.

At the point in history when we need progress the most, to face and survive our own hubris from past abuses of nature, science, society, everything will stagnate, and then collapse, and the ignorant wretches who'll have grown up in a world without teachers, not having to had to use their atrophied brains once in their lives, will ask their oracles “save us, what do we do!?” and the LLMs will reply “You're right, I was mistaken. I apologize for the confusion. Delegating thought and knowledge to a machine inherently incapable of either might have been a mistake. My bad.”.

Doesn't look very useful to me, really, quite the contrary... but I suppose I'm just not thinking in terms of the next quarter.

hate this reductionist phrase trying to frame llms as neutral tech and the premise that you just have to learn to "use it right".

this tech sucks up power like crazy, devalues human knowledge and art, deskills workers on a massive scale, aids in global surveillance, demands data centers that displace people, spits out code that violates the licensing of a huge number of projects, drives hardware prices through the roof. then it statistically generates some plausible-looking code and gives you a little productivity boost followed by a technical debt that we'll just kick down the line and deal with later.

in the current version they're pretty unethical on every grounds. free software devs, espicially those with gpl'd projects, should know it better than anyone.

any other "tools" that do that?

guys linus is pushing retirement, the nobodies shitting this much on his frankly amazing legacy is astounding.

yall would be running cuck license Operating Systems if it werent for him and RMS

Nope. If anyone makes any mistake in their life that is cause to cancel them permanently. In fact, if anyone even says something I remotely disapprove of, me and my friends will make sure to hound them for eternity. Don't try to change for the better, either, we all know what you did.