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andyman wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2024 3:43 pm (Also, I wouldn't associate file transfer - which you can do with Soulseek - with the cloud; the cloud was/is about scalability and redundancy, and geographic optimisation).

Mostly true, but wasn't that peer-to-peer? (I never used Soulseek) So there's still a safety/redundancy component as well. Also there are cloud DAWs which is pretty mind boggling though I haven't had a good reason to use one. Back and forth mixing perhaps..

penningtron wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2024 3:52 pm

andyman wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2024 3:43 pm (Also, I wouldn't associate file transfer - which you can do with Soulseek - with the cloud; the cloud was/is about scalability and redundancy, and geographic optimisation).

Mostly true, but wasn't that peer-to-peer? (I never used Soulseek) So there's still a safety/redundancy component as well.

Yep, I meant that you could still avoid sending stuff in the post even back then.
Cloud computing made Dropbox more or less possible, so made online storage accessible, feasible and low hassle, which I guess is what you were saying.

Anyway, I see every product marketed "with AI" now and all I can wonder is "Where? Why?".

eephus wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 3:08 pm At the moment, in most implementations, AI doesn't know what it doesn't know. Which is a pretty big problem.

And what it does know (or what it presents as if it knows) is just fancy auto-complete. Sometimes very fancy, as in the case with some of the image work it can do.

Not that surprised by it so far. I have no doubt it can do plenty now and more in the future. It will chew up a lot of basic work that is mundane for humans and shorten cycles on a lot of fronts. Most of that is probably good. It will cost jobs, but then you just have to become the guy who knows how to use the AI real good.

I am pretty sure it's being used right now for tech support chat by some very large tech companies. I haven't bothered to check to see if that's verifiably either a known thing or just me being paranoid.

I'm kind of whatever on it. I don't give a shit because caring one way or another isn't going to stop it from being developed.

If it's a tool, it's going to come in and change things like every tool, proportional to its utility and how much it can be exploited.

We have yet to adapt to the internet, but we will do so over the next generation or so, and we'll adapt to AI as well, if we survive as a species long enough.

It's far more likely our disregard for climate destroys us than it is that AI does the job. I mean, AI might help us fix things like that if we use it right.

I have grown to despise AI as it is presently constituted. Basically across the board.
I'm not totally sure if it's the tools or the implementations of the tools, but that's not all that relevant to me right now.

It's destroying search, particularly on Google, where they have this massive investment in it and every reason to want to exploit it as much as possible.

Google started out saying "hey you said you want to know about [query here], and here's some links to relevant information about that."
Then they went to "hey you asked about [query here], and here's The Answer to your question, with some other stuff below it in case that's not enough."
Now, they're at "hey you asked about [query here], but surely you meant to ask [new query that probably isn't what you wanted to know]."

Google's is pretty horrible--just legendarily bad and wrong about certain things, the whole eating rocks and putting glue in pasta sauce and cleaning your washing machine with a solution of bleach and vinegar. Meta's actually worse. I haven't used Microsoft's that much.

It's the more subtle stuff that concerns me more. Just blithely passing on incorrect/misleading information as if it must be true because the AI "read it on the internet." At least a human doing that has to tell you "I read it on the internet." With an AI, that is a given. And you know from experience how reliable that kind of info processing is, when there's zero bullshit detector involved.

I know it's supposed to make these massive leaps into usefulness and everyone is assuming that will happen.

The thing we have to remember is that right now people can make money from it, so the incentive to make it better is shrinking.

The incentive, overall, is always going to be to make more and more money with the tools--not improve them unless it's necessary to do so to make more money.
Critically, the tools being bad in particular ways will be beneficial financially to the companies who make them.
Making certain more-or-less compulsory things (like paid advertising if you have an e-comm business) more expensive is good for Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple et al.


it's degraded human discourse already and it's not gonna get better soon.

I said this on Bluesky:

Indifference and a coarsening of expression will be the legacy of AI-generated text.

Most people prefer good writing to shitty writing but have not thought about aesthetics enough to care that a text is garbage.

They will just lose interest instead of thinking "this sucks and here's why."

I'm positive this is happening now and will accelerate in coming months.

The Meat World is your friend.

Glad to see this sentiment gain some mainstream traction, though 'keeping AI out of art' is only the lowest rung.

penningtron wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2024 8:43 am Glad to see this sentiment gain some mainstream traction, though 'keeping AI out of art' is only the lowest rung.

The knots these cunts will tie themselves in rather than face the truth that it's AI vs capitalism.

Abject CRAP.

It's utterly loathsome and we seem to be stuck with it.

CRAP (because)

AI is using the internet to learn, with the assumption that the most amount of things will eventually lead to the right answer about said things. That would be fine if the internet was a direct looking glass into the world, but for over a decade the economy online has been driven by view, clicks and impressions, which are completely detached from quality and review. Specifically industry peer review, and industry journal is behind paywalls.

I have a friend that is a popular online personality (yay), she works with professionals, does her homework, does fantastic work online and off. She simply cannot keep up with 'competition' (my words) if she does a quality job because it takes up front work instead of just turning on your phone and making shit up. It's the latter that exists online far, far more than the former.

I take music/'gear' forums as an example. The amount of people that barely play the stuff they buy and write about online is staggering - let alone the people that actually take that gear out into the world. It's why I come to this forum, because I know people here are 'real'. Yet this is 1 in 1000.

I asked ChatGPT what a 'Garnet BTO' sounds like. The first sentence:

A Garnet BTO (short for "Built to Order") is a vintage guitar amplifier known for its distinctive sound characteristics.

That was the FIRST thing I thought of, and the acronym was wrong.


But I know it's wrong.

The assumption is that the AI is intended to extract truthful statements from its data, when it's actually being asked to synthesise new data. It's not an encyclopaedia or a search engine.

It's not remarkable that it says things that aren't true. I would expect it to say things that aren't true all day long. I find it extraordinary that it says anything halfway sensible and coherent at all, given that it has no logical understanding of anything. It is just a glorified auto-complete... but look what comes out of it, as mindless as it is.

It does make me wonder how much of human cognition is post-hoc rationalisation.

TylerDeadPine wrote: CRAP (because)

AI is using the internet to learn, with the assumption that the most amount of things will eventually lead to the right answer about said things. That would be fine if the internet was a direct looking glass into the world, but for over a decade the economy online has been driven by view, clicks and impressions, which are completely detached from quality and review. Specifically industry peer review, and industry journal is behind paywalls.

I imagine most of y'all would be ahead of me on hearing the 'Dead Internet Theory' (roughly that bots, ads, and algorithm driven content make the once bustling internet a place filled with content where one may have very limited interactions with actual humans). I think AI is another step in that direction. The lights are on and nobody is home. This chatty little message board is so two decades ago. I'm going to go write a blog and comment on my friend's vacation photos.

penningtron wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2024 3:35 pm

andyman wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2024 8:14 am AI is the new Cloud

Maybe regarding hype? But otherwise I don't see much in common. Cloud computing is actually useful (it's pretty awesome being able to upload a multitrack session to an engineer thousands of miles away without having to send a hard drive in the mail) and as far as energy consumption I don't see why remote servers would be worse than On Prem ones. Perhaps it has lead to an out of sight, out of mind effect as far as mindless media and energy consumption goes but that seems like another issue..

Same with Agile. Maybe it's annoying to hear about but I don't see how it's actively harming the world like AI.

Cloud was stupid because everyone in the tech world was already doing exactly what people called "cloud computing" or "cloud storage" or "cloud infrasructure" and we just called it "normal work." Offloading processing and cycles and data distribution was a thing we were doing when grandpa was yelling at cartoon clouds in the Simpsons. All they did was rebrand what was already happening with the word cloud and then sold it like it was something new in the enterprise and consumer spaces.

AI is similar in that this is really just a logical extension of the abilities for CPU's to process more complicated information quicker and (hopefully at some point) use more sophisticated means to extract meaning from that data much faster than we can today. And it can't even really do that yet, so....I dunno man. Feels like a fools gold rush to me.