Just noticing: there's 0 evidence in article that anyone is doing this. I just don't buy that this is happening enough to matter. Interesting as interpretability research at best
Precedent is, in effect, new law and it absolutely does change who gets taken to court and the costs of defending your case. So, depending on which arguments the court accepts, I won't need fancy lawyer. And it won't require nearly the risk, creativity, or time that it requires of Meta's legal reps today. Look at civil rights or environmental protections case law; big profile early cases were horrifically costly, and now compliance by company's is largely by default.
Horrible people and companies can set good precedent, often without intending to. For example, plenty of criminals set and clarified due process law. So we absolutely could all benefit from Meta's bad intentions.
We benefit from institutions that will be training their own AI, hosting data publicly, and have the resources to mirror a precedent. Care to cite sources that the arguments being accepted are going to carve out Mark Zuckerberg by name as the one person who can ignore copyright? I haven't read the fillings, but this should be easy.
Claiming some old public figure was a newly discovered pedo, and including a quote of them saying terrible things.
Except the quote was 5 years old, not from the Epstein files, the figure had apologized and been publicly forgiven by the victim, and the files revealed nothing new.
The ratio is a vibe, and I kinda regret posting a precise one. The case I checked carefully is this one:
everything this guy posts
which I noted in November, and blocked very shortly thereafter. I vaguely recall finding a handful more examples of 'too good to be true' headlines, which were in fact not true, but I did not save links.
What made me sad is that even bereft of the algorithm and bad incentives in system, if the headline is 'directionally correct' still seems like the most important thing. Very interested in a social media where correct is ranked over good feels.
(and then there's the regular examples like this, which are not slop but are heavily disputed/recontextualized by the top comment. Correction highly upvoted, yet the OP itself is still doing well))
Communities split over instances make it pretty hard to know where to post things, what with defederation and such.
I didn't miss much "news"; lemmy was functional for reporting what people were talking about.
No notification of moderation actions taken against you is a choice.
Those who post small websites that do cool things: thank you! I did discover several other cool places and tools.
I found that about 1/10 of the top lemmy posts (after filtering out jokes and sports) are links to AI slop that nobody bothered to check, comments just take the headline as real if they affirm. Pointing this out in the comments did not reduce engagement or drop the posts.
Cutting it out of my routine, at last for awhile.
One thing I really hoped for from the social Internet was access to people and data that could correct me/fill in gaps. But lemmy doesn't do this, as people see what is upvoted and upvotes are used for affirmations to the reader.
The people who have made that category error aren't reading this discussion, so literally reaching them isn't on the table and doesn't make sense for this discussion. Presumably we're concerned about people who will soon make that jump? I also don't think that making this distinction helps them very much.
If I'm already having the 'this is a person' reaction, I think the takes in this thread are much too shallow (and, if I squint, patterned after school-yard bullying) to help update in the other way. Almost all of them are themselves lazy metaphors. "An LLM is a person because its an agent" and "An LLM isn't a person because it repeats things others have said" seem equally shallow and unconvincing to me. If anything, you'll get folks being defensive about it, downvoted, and then leaving this community of mostly people for a more bot filled one.
I don't get think this is good strategy. People falling for bots are unlikely to have interactions with people here, and if they are the ugliness is likely to increase bot use imo.
I think this confuses the 'it's a person' metaphor with the 'it wants something' metaphor, and the two are meaningfully distinct. The use of agent here in this thread is not in the sense of "it is my friend and deserves a luxury bath", it's in the sense of "this is a hard to predict system performing tasks to optimize something".
It's the kind of metaphor we've allowed in scientific teaching and discourse for centuries (think: "gravity wants all master smashed together"). I think it's use is correct here.
We attribute agency to many many systems that are not intelligent. In this metaphorical sense, agency just requires taking actions to achieve a goal. It was given a goal: raise money for charity via doing acts of kindness. It chose an (unexpected!) action to do it.
Overactive agency metaphors really aren't the problem here. Surely we can do better than backlash at the backlash.
Taken broadly; literal management might be correctly optimizing shareholder returns for next quarter (cut costs at all costs), as the incentives encourage. The goal is no longer to keep having a business next year.
Directionally correct, but it does require self hosted agentic models that can compete with the automation running on corporate side. This is not obvious. It will be a new equilibria; maybe just a few more hours of poorly done work by a handful of consumers is enough to break some monopolies. Or maybe everyone will be attached to OpenAI compute, and we've just gained a new middleman for most interactions.
Note these methods are enough to support/detect effects of other safety practices.
Science isn't certain. We make mistakes. The rule 'doubt all who hedge' is how we get the republican party.