i think it’s a framing issue, and AI development is catching a lot of flak for the general failures of our current socio-economic hierarchy. also people having been shouting “super intelligence or bust” for decades now. i just keep watching it get better much more quickly than most people’s estimates, and understand the implications of it. i do appreciate discouraging idiot business people from shunting AI into everything that doesn’t need it, because buzzword or they can use it to exploit something. some likely just used it as an excuse to fire people, but again, that’s not actually the AI’s fault. that is this shitty system. i guess my issue is people keep framing this as “AI bad” instead of “corpos bad”

if the loom was never invented, we would still live in an oppressive society sliding towards fascism. people tend to miss the forest for the trees when looking at tech tools politically. also people are blind to the environment, which is often more important than the thing itself. and the loom is still useful.

compression and polysemy growing your dimensions of understanding in a high dimensional environment, which is also changing shape, comprehension growing with the erasure of your blindspots. collective intelligence (and how diversity helps cover more blindspots) predictive processing (and how we should embrace lack of confidence, but understand the strength of proper weighting for predictions, even when a single blindspot can shift the entire landscape, making no framework flawless or perfectly reliable.) and understanding how everything we know is just the best map of the territory we’ve figured out so far. if you want to know judge how subtle but in our face blindspots can be, look up how to test your literal blindspot, you just need 30 seconds a paper with two small dots to see how blind we are to our blindspots. etc.

more than fighting the new tools we can use, we need to claim them, and the rest of the world, away from those who ensure that all tools will only exist to exploit us.

am i shouting to the void? wasting the breath of my digits? will humanity ever learn to stop acting like dumb angry monkeys?

let’s make another article completely misrepresenting opinions/trajectories and the general state of things, because we know it’ll sell and it will get the ignorant fighting with those who actually have an idea of what’s going on, because they saw in an article that AI was eating the pets.

please seek media sources that actually seek to inform rather than provoke or instigate confusion or division through misrepresentation and disinformation.

these days you can’t even try to fix a category error introduced by the media without getting cussed out and blocked from congregate sites because you ‘support the evil thing’ that the article said was evil, and everyone in the group hates, without even an attempt to understand the context, or what part of the thing is even being discussed.

also, can we talk more about breaking up the big companies so they don’t have a hold on the technology, rather than getting mad at everyone who interacts with modern technology?

legit ss bad feels like fighting rightwing misinformation about migrant workers and trans people.

just make people mad, and teach them that communication is a waste of energy.
we need to learn how to tell who is informing rather than obfuscating, through historicity of accuracy, and consensus with other experts from diverse perspectives. not building tribes upon who agrees with us. and don’t blame experts for not also learning how to apply a novel and virtually impossible level of compression when explaining their complex expertise, when you don’t even want to learn a word or concept. it’s like being asked to describe how cameras work, and then getting called an idiot when some analogy used can be imagined in a less useful context that doesn’t apply 1:1 with the complex subject being summarized.

outside of that, find better sources of information. fuck this communication disabling ragebait.

cause now just having a history of rebuking this garbage gets you dismissed, because a history of interacting with the topic on this platform is a good enough vibe check to just not attempt understanding and interaction.

TLDR: the quality of the articles and conversation on this subject are so generally ill-informed that it hurts, and obviously trying to craft environments of angry engagement rather than informing.

also i wonder if anyone will actually engage with this topic rather than get angry, cuss me out, and not hear a single thing being communicated.

could you explain how? or how the examples i gave are not as valid to your current direction of critique?

i’m not saying ‘i’m intelligent’ or ‘the system will not abuse these tools’

are you suggesting my understanding is overfit to a certain niche, and there is a flagrant blindspot that wasn’t addressed by my earlier comment?

also i use uncommon words for specificity, not to obfuscate. if something hasn’t made sense, i would also elaborate. (we also have modern tools to help unravel such things as well, if you don’t have a local tutor for the subject.)

or we can just give inaccurate caricatures of each other, and each-others points of view. surely that will do something other than feed the ignorance and division driven socio-economic paperclip maximizer that we are currently stuck in.

yes you need to read things to understand them, but also going balls deep into a complex concept or topic with no lube can be pretty rough, and deter the attempt, or future attempts.

also do you know what else is corporate slop? the warner/disney designed art world? every non-silicon paperclip maximizing pattern? the software matters more than the substrate.

the pattern matters more than the tool.

people called digital art/3d art ‘slop’ for the same reason.

my argument was the same back then. it’s not the tool, it’s the system.

‘CGI doesn’t help anyone’

attacking the tool of CGI doesn’t help anyone either.

that being said… AI does literally help some people. for many things. google search was my favourite AI tool 25 years ago, but it’s definitely not right now.

the slop algorithms were decided by something else even before that. see: enshittification and planned obsolescence.

aka, overfitting towards an objective function in the style of goodheart’s law.

also you can read a ‘thing’ but if you’re just over-fitting without making any transferable connections, you’re only feeding your understanding of that state-space/specific environment. also other modalities are important. why LLMs aren’t ‘superintelligent’ despite being really good with words. that’s an anthropocentric bias in understanding intelligent systems. i know a lot of people who read self help/business novels, which teach flawed heuristics. which books unlearn flawed heuristics?

early reading can lead to better mental models for interacting with counterfactual representations. can we give mental tools for counterfactual representation some hype?

could you dive into that with no teachers/AI to help you? would you be more likely to engage with the help?

it’s a complicated situation, but overfitting binary representations is not the solution to navigating complexity.

points at literally every other technology or piece of shared socio-economic infrastructure

gestures more heavily

also checks your sources, whether it’s wikipedia, LLMs, or humans! all confabulate!

While LLMs should come with a psychosis exacerbating warning, especially if RLHF sycophancy is bad.

That being said maybe there should be better help for and responses to those prone to psychosis in the first place.

The response (especially in the USA) has long been excessive violence and little chance at deescalating. You can end up with psychosis from a reading of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, if you overfit to enough sparse connections. ( a precision weighting issue if described by friston’s dysconnection hypothesis.)

Anthropocentric bias is a dead end. If AI could recognize and warn for psychosis confirming behaviours, that could help. Not that people with psychosis usually have access to help in the USA. Let’s just keep blaming the nearest thing so that we don’t have to change our whole system.

Thank God we didn’t get help for people in digesting complex topics. Then how would they blame the experts for not making things simple enough that they should have to try learning.

Also, people should learn about complex intelligent systems, and how all of their problems with AI are just problems with capitalism that will still inevitably exist even without AI/the loom.

Or maybe the solution is in dissolving the socio-economic class hierarchy, which can only exist as an epistemic paperclip maximizer. Rather than also kneecapping useful technology.

I feel much of the critique and repulsion comes from people without much knowledge of either art/art history, or AI. Nor even the problems and history of socio-economic policies.

Monkeys just want to be angry and throw poop at the things they don’t understand. No conversation, no nuance, and no understanding of how such behaviours roll out the red carpet for continued ‘elite’ abuses that shape our every aspect of life.

The revulsion is justified, but misdirected. Stop blaming technology for the problems of the system, and start going after the system that is the problem.

As a peasant I know that professional help is not always available or viable. AI could very well have saved some of my friends who felt they had no available help and took their own lives. That being said, public facing language models should come with a warning for exacerbating psychosis. Notably the sycophantic models like chatgpt.

yes absolutely. few things are binary. it’s like people claiming pro-palestine protestors are antisemitic, or trying to take the valid examples of exceptions as an excuse for unrelated bigotry. it adds a lot of noise and makes it hard to navigate, so a lot of people running on low-dimensional heuristic maps of the situation will lash out and cause legitimate grievance between other people who can or can’t contextualize what happened and why. those who can’t repeat the cycle, and socialize it.

why russia has such an easy time causing division and self-segregating behaviour. also why anti-intellectualism and self-serving behaviour is bad. we are too hackable in contextually ‘noisy’ environments, and bad actors love using that to their advantage.

it takes a lot of energy and time to understand how many blindspots we have within our oversimplified prediction of the world, and diverse environments and experiences, both physical and cyberphysical, and how that leads other people to be making different assumptions about what the world actually looks like. this includes our projections and expectations of others, battling our innate predictive modelling and biases/blindspots.

the issue is when an audience is running on those heuristics and making important choices that affect people. being overconfident in your over-binary predictions can cause these damages that cycle a self fulfilling spiral of legitimate grievance. again, an easy fire to stoke.

Is it reasonable to get mad from being called racist because you, as a shop employee, didn’t just let the customer take hundreds of dollars in cigarettes they demanded for free?

If someone calls you a rapist pedophile, are you going to get upset, or ask how you can better reduce your rapist pedophileness?

Would it be unreasonable to be upset if someone is specifically using that because they know in the local eco-niche, it could cost you your job and livelihood if people believe them?

What if you’re autistic and you’ve had a long life of people misrepresenting you intentionally or unintentionally because the double empathy problem is a thing? Like older kids beat the fuck out of you, and when they get in trouble they just claim you were being racist when you were just waiting in silence for the school library to open, and as you cry with eyes bruised and swollen shut, you are told you will be getting the same punishment as the older kids who just assaulted you, and also that the adults in the situation are okay believing you are a racist. Etc.

I definitely agree with the larger sentiment of your statement, especially for the large scale picture of things, and existence of people like MAGA, But the local context and social behaviours can definitely lead to situations that can make the insult and claim hard to internalize, when the claim has only been used against you with stark dishonesty.

Hell, got assaulted by a random drunk driver recently, and im glad they went for ‘pedo’ instead of ‘racist’ because it was much less believable to surrounding people in that context. Still doesn’t make me question what I could have done differently while being assaulted by a drunkard. Nuance exists, and bad actors exist within every group, and frankly it shouldn’t be damning to find fewer insults more insulting, because of your own disdain for racists and abusers.

Why is there nothing about what people were doing with their brains in either state? Is this just correlation? The definition of “sedentary behavior” was even noted as vague in the study. Why are people drawing such strong conclusions? I fucking hate journalism.

People underestimate how much Russian propaganda they eat up. Russia has had great success with their damned propaganda. They are great at getting people to be divisive and fight each other. We need solidarity, not self segregation.

Do wish liberals had done the electoral reform they promised. Without electoral reform, we will just continue down the two party road, so the overton window can go between the robbing the poor party and the ‘you have no choice but to vote for us or the other party wins. We’ll still move the overton window in that direction and serve the rich though,’ party. Hopefully they didn’t also kill the momentum we had for electoral reform as an urge of the populace.

And it gets complicated, because bad actors use this to make spaces for cult behaviour.

Not just nazi specifically, but if you have spammers/bots you can effectively destroy any moderately nuanced progressive space by adding intentional offensive voices in the group, and at reactive voices outside the group calling the original members x/y and pointing at the bots in the group as evidence. Progressive voices will leave to avoid the association, while actual bigots will hear that it is another space for them. By the end, it’s like it was always a bigot space, and the original points and nuance never existed.

Beware divisive propaganda, but also don’t accept actual intentional bigots to invade a space. If they proudly wear their bigotry, let them know it’s not socially tolerated. They are a cancer if enabled.

If someone says they interact with a space to try and stop it from turning into a bigot space, maybe that’s not actually your enemy.

Been fighting cult building propaganda for two decades and now I’m just yelling that the emperor has no clothes. It makes me happy to see people at least engaging with the topic, without calling me a nazi for trying to stop the spread of Nazis.

Also casual reminder that black Americans are Russia’s biggest target. Self segregation is what they want, don’t fall for divisive rhetoric. Be wary of real bigots, especially socially empowered ones. find people you can trust, and find solidarity. Don’t feed the division between those who want to cooperate. Education, exposure, and communication are paramount.

It’s the “you stole my style” artists attacking artists all over again. And digital art isn’t real att/cameras are evil/cgi isn’t real art all over with a more organic and intelligent medium.

The issue is the same as it has always been. Anything and everything is funneled to the rich and the poor blame the poor who use technology, because anthropocentric bias makes it easier to vilify than the assholes building our cage around us.

The apple “ecosystem” has done much more damage than AI artists, but people can’t seem to comprehend how. Also Disney and corpos broke copyright so that its just a way for the rich to own words and names and concepts, so that the poor can’t use them to get ahead.

All art is a remix. Disney only became successful using other artists hard work in the Commons. Now the Commons is a century more out of grasp, so only the rich can own the artists and hoard the growth of art.

Also which artists actually have the time and money to litigate? I guess copyright does help some nepo artists.

Nepotism is the main way to earn your right to invest into becoming an artist that isn’t fatiguing towards collapse of life.

But let’s keep yelling at the technology for being evil.

That argument was to be had with Apple twenty years ago as they built their walled garden, which intentionally frustrates people into going all in apple. Still can’t get anyone to care about dark patters/deceptive design, or disney attacking the creative Commons which it parasitically grew out of. AI isn’t and has never been the real issue. It’s just absorbs all the hate the corpos should be getting as they use it, along with every other tool at their disposal, to slowly fuck us into subservience. Honestly, AI is teaching us the importance of diverse perspectives in intelligent systems, and the dangers of overfitting, which exist in our own brains and social/economic systems.

Same issue, different social ecosystem being hoarded by the wealthy.

Ah yes. I’m glad we can be so confident the current administration would never do something foolish or damaging to themselves or others.

Also it only took them days to stop multi drug resistant tuberculosis treatment half way, and giving countless babies HIV that wouldn’t have had it, if not for the recent actions of this administration. Or blatantly and loudly planning an ethnic genocide. Also following the putin method by the letter, and letting Russian media into the oval office while they try to put down Zelenskyy.

Hmm, what is the Russian ‘go to’ behaviour for shared borders?

I think we need to be developing anti drone tech among other things. I’m not saying it will happen, and it would likely instigate or be included in a civil war. I would usually think all of this sounds crazy, but we live in unprecedented times, full of familiar historical rhymes. I’m sure their preference is to take over without having to actually fight, so they can grow their power, but also things might escalate as they continue to rob and abuse the masses. There are more reasons than i can summize here, but I think pretending there is no danger is wilfully ignorant at this point. I hope for the best, but I don’t trust these people to not be thoughtlessly monstrous.

Can we not block a fascist propaganda tool being used specifically to destroy democratic society? Why are we just imagining that we don’t actually have any choice in society?

We need BIG change all across the board. That one is actually very valuable, as we are fighting a half century info war that people can’t keep pretending isn’t a thing, no matter how much it sucks to think hard and learn about politics, while actively cooperating to enforce severe change from the bottom up. We need to be resistant to manipulation and group takeovers. Study how cults recruit. Study anything on Russian propaganda especially. Collaborate and talk locally, and find other trustable local groups willing to cooperate and continue the collective action.

It actually isn’t impossible to effect real change, even if decades of socialized propaganda tell you otherwise.

That being said, acting towards your local governments and getting local governments to cooperate from the ground up with grassroots movements to protect democracy as it is in peril.

Id like to effect change, election reform, and wealth redistribution, or we all are fucked. If we just give up without fighting, we already lose. And it is the saddest way to lose, to just roll over and watch everything you love be taken from you piecemeal.

Tech guy here. Really wish we could specify the corpo nepobabies from the normal tech enthusiasts. from my personal perspective, the two groups have long been at war. With musk types bluffing their way to a world where everyone believes they are actually capable, rather than just failing upwards like every nepobaby. The best techies are usually doing underappreciated open source work because the world needs it. Anti-intellectualism is not a win against the anti education cult. Just my two cents.