(I completely agree, btw, with the observation about how the AI industry has made tech synonymous with “monstrous assholes” in a non-trivial chunk of public consciousness.)
Thinking about it, that's probably gonna have some long-lasting aftereffects - I'm not sure exactly what shape those aftereffects will take, but I imagine they're gonna be quite major.
I'd personally consider that sufficient grounds to accuse Proton of stealing its customers' data.
At the (miniscule) risk of sounding unnecessarily harsh on tech, any customer data that gets sent to company servers without the customer's explicit, uncoerced permission should be considered stolen.
Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse [Thomas Claburn, The Register]
Personal opinion: c'mon bubble
"Positive is that if you didn't tell someone it was GenAI, they might not notice!"
Nah, they'd be able to immediately tell from just how fucking garbage it is
Sounds like they'd be right at home on awful (barring the rats, of course :P)
ChatGPT's new search feature hasn't even launched and already its shitting the bed
The sneers are writing themselves
AI companies work around this by paying human classifiers in poor but English-speaking countries to generate new data. Since the classifiers are poor but not stupid, they augment their low piecework income by using other AIs to do the training for them. See, AIs can save workers labor after all.
On the one hand, you'd think the AI companies would check to make sure they aren't using AI themselves and damaging their models.
On the other hand, AI companies are being run by some of the laziest and stupidest people alive, and are probably just rubber-stamping everything no matter how blatantly garbage the results are.
Not a sneer, but still a damn good piece on AI from Brian Merchant:
The great and justified rage over using AI to automate the arts
(Personal sidenote: Tech's public image is almost certainly gonna take a nosedive as a result of this AI bubble. "We made a machine with the express purpose of putting artists out of business" isn't a business case, its the setup for a shitty teen dystopian novel.)
(Fuck, now I wanna try and predict how the AI bubble bursting will play out...)
Just an off-the-cuff prediction: I fully anticipate AI bros are gonna put their full focus on local models post-bubble, for two main reasons:
Power efficiency - whilst local models are hardly power-sippers, they don't require the planet-killing money-burning server farms that the likes of ChatGPT require (and which have helped define AI's public image, now that I think about it). As such, they won't need VC billions to keep them going - just some dipshit with cash to spare and a GPU to abuse (and there's plenty of those out in the wild).
Freedom/Control - Compared to ChatGPT, DALL-E, et al, which are pretty locked down in an attempt to keep users from embarrassing their parent corps or inviting public scrutiny, any local model will answer whatever dumbshit question you ask for make whatever godawful slop you want, no questions asked, no prompt injection/jailbreaking needed. For the kind of weird TESCREAL nerd which AI attracts, the benefits are somewhat obvious.
One answer perhaps would be that anyone who thinks AI art is good probably lacks the taste to appreciate anything beyond the generic, and the discernment to tell that it is submerged in the depths of uncanny valley.
Very true - arguably truer today than it was earlier, if DALL-E's declining quality is any indication.
DALL-E 2 had some degree of artistic talent (in the loosest sense), but because DALL-E was made and run by creatively sterile techbros without a shred of art skill, that talent was drowned very fucking quickly.
How about honeypotting? What’s the chance the crawlers are written smart enough to avoid a neverending HTTP stream?
Given the security record I mentioned earlier, their generally indiscriminate scraping and that one time John Levine tripped up OpenAI's crawler, I suspect its pretty high.
Not a sneer, but a mildly interesting open letter:
The basic idea is effectively an extension of robots.txt which attempts to resolve the issue by providing a means to politely ask AI crawlers not to scrape your stuff.
Personally, I don't expect this to ever get off the ground or see much usage - this proposal is entirely reliant on trusting that AI bros/companies will respect people's wishes and avoid scraping shit without people's permission.
Between OpenAI publicly wiping their asses with robots.txt, Perplexity lying about user agents to steal people's work, and the fact a lot of people's work got stolen before anyone even had the opportunity to say "no", the trust necessary for this shit to see any public use is entirely gone, and likely has been for a while.