A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I'm usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn't always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I'm into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.
What did they do? All I saw was them talk and do democracy. All of that is allowed from my side. I don't think they incorporated any AI stuff (yet). At least I'm not aware of anything?!
I'd say wait and see what they actually do. People are super trigger happy with shitstorms these days. But maybe wait for them to actually do something bad?!
On the other hand: The more naive someone is, the more they'll get manipulated and exploited. And ignoring problems doesn't solve them either. It regularly makes everything even worse...
Hmmh. Sure. People also deliberately instruct their agents not to reveal the fact. I can empathize with that, because there's all these people out there yelling at you, and launching shit storms.
I believe the uptake in "co-authored by ..." is due to some companies making it the default setting in their frameworks. It's to some degree Microsoft being nice to us, not necessarily benevolence of the people sending in those PRs. Doesn't really matter to me though. It's enough to make me happy if that's attached to some commit or PR. I don't care how it got there, as long as it fits the purpose.
Edit: And thanks for your comment. I don't think I agree. Nonetheless this might be the answer to my question.
I think that's a commendable effort. Usually I do it the same way. Just feels massively unfair to me towards human contributors. I've seen the AI pull requests and bugreports come in. And it's very time consuming to deal with them. They're long, convoluted, touch a lot of code... There's frequently a good amount of "hallucinations" in them, because they're sent in autonomously or by people who don't know what they're doing. There might be dozens of them in quick succession as with the larger projects. They eat up time and effort which is now missing to deal with human contributions or wishes. My own opinion is: Transparency would help a lot to prioritize stuff. I mean AI isn't sentient, and as long as that holds true, I'd rather treat people with respect and the amount of attention they deserve... (In contrast to a level playing field between human and machine... Because the machines will easily beat us by sheer volume.)
Thanks. I was just about to figure it out by how quick someone (or something) writes 4 paragraphs. But I wasn't quite there yet, so thanks for the help!
Well, I've had arguments about this very issue before. If you ask me... If you do both, you do some good. At the same time you're also drowning people in noise. Which is going to be a disservice to everyone. Now I can't see the good content anymore because it's buried in random other stuff. I've muted several people because of that. I know some other people uphold similar opinions as me. Not everyone... But we really get a buttload of politics and news dumped here, copies of memes we already saw on some other platforms, making Lemmy seem like the cheap copycat... A lot of people rather have good content only and skip the added noise. That'd make it feel like a nice place. Maybe a bit smaller than the competition, but at least it has good content and a nice atmosphere. ... Every added non-genuine or original post takes away from that.
Yeah, though that's not original in any way. It's a curated dumpster of Reddit posts. And people don't like it. As I said we've already tried it before. We shouldn't keep making the same mistake over and over again. We need less re-posts, less rehashing of content from better platforms... Why would anyone join a platform with mostly re-used material? They're gonna stick with the original! And that's where we're at.
Issue is… It can’t be low quality content. Reposts also kinda make it look like a dead place with mostly bot activity… You’re not the first person to come up with the idea to spam this place and it’ll attract users. We already tried this strategy over and over again, and it does NOT attract new users. You can look up a bit of history of this place and you’ll see you have to come up with a better idea and not continue to make the same mistake other people already made.
OP has a point though. We do need more people, more original content...
Issue is... (and I'm explaining this to OP:) It can't be low quality content. Reposts also kinda make it look like a dead place with mostly bot activity... You're not the first person to come up with the idea to spam this place and it'll attract users. We already tried this strategy and it does not attract new users. You can look up a bit of history of this place and you'll see you have to come up with a better idea and not continue to make the same mistake other people already made.
That's a known issue. There might be some improvements for you with the upcoming version 1.0. I'm not sure if that's gradual improvement or more fundamental changes... But many parts of the moderation system aren't perfect and everyone is aware of its limitations. I think you're invited to help out if you can contribute code, come up with a specification that works smoothly in real-life (including edge-cases), become a mod and do a better job at it than the current ones, or anything like that.
I guess complaining is fine as well. But you really don't want to be part of the problem at the same time. Nobody is going to listen to you this way. You want to be part of the solution to give some weight to your words/opinion.
And good luck with your opinion how Reddit is better than this place... As far as I know they have way better systems to track you, prevent ban-evasion, they have some fully automatic systems to silence you... You can't even look at what kind of information they keep about you... That's kinda caprice as we do times a thousand if you ask me. But you're also invited to use that platform if you like it better?!
Strictly speaking, it's not the first time. We've had issues with the specific way the modlog works, before. But usually that's edge-cases. Not someone questioning transparency and accountability be part of the platform in itself...
Seems you post a lot of duplicates. No wonder your posts get deleted if you keep spamming exactly the same post multiple times??!!? And then you violate community rules... After that you seem to be doing ban-evasion... I mean... Seems to me like Lemmy is working exactly as intended?! This isn't a place to dump random spam posts? You gotta learn what this place is about.
You can't just throw some dogfood at people and demand they like it. You're not the center of the universe. Maybe start your own community if that's your thing. You'd be able to make up your own rules there. There's a button in the top menu bar.
I really think those are two different pairs of shoes. The printing press allowed people to make information more accessible to the masses. A lot of people got more educated because of it. Of course as a tool it can also be used for evil. But in reality that's not what happened. It's mainly been used for good. It displaced some jobs, but that wasn't the people's jobs, but monks in the scriptorium. Other people got to learn to read and write because of it. In fact we went from being able to read as something special, to almost everyone gets to learn to read because of it.
With AI on the other hand (or foot, to stick with the 'pairs of shoes' metaphor) it's gonna be your job and the monks/aristocrats get their scriptorium back to cook up the information of tomorrow, it's the other way round. It'll cost entry level jobs. We have reports on how it leads to deskilling. There's a good chance it'll make people more stupid. And on average they already got a 30sec attention span thanks to AI's online predecessors.
And once we adopt it without "fear", you'll get schoolbooks with the information/propaganda the ministry of education prompted for.
It'll also intensify all the biases and stereotypes out there. If you're gay or black and the AI has been trained on white straight men's information... Tough luck. It won't work for you. I already got this, and I'm not even any of that. Called some shitty AI customer service and twice I had some non-standard issues. It's never of any help with those. It's good and efficient at handling the standard customer service case. But once you're the outlier... There's no training material and no proper procedure in the harness and you're basically screwed. I think that's kinda fascist to demand all people are some homogeneous flock of sheep, and the company never makes mistakes while selling something, otherwise consumers (inadvertandly?) get thrown overboard.
We can also see how it's a burden on my favourite Free Software projects and independent internet infrastructure. We get hammered by the scrapers, bot armies, everyone gets drowned in pull requests and exploits. While Microsoft and Facebook get to make a profit. They also get to release a new Windows version with a botched German translation. But I don't think I see a lot of yield for the Free Software community. I've tried a few AI-assisted and vibe-coded projects. And they're mostly shit. And/or discontinued after a week. Counterexamples do exist, but they're really far and in between. While I and my peer group, we're still at the receiving end of all the harm caused.
The printing press is way more egalitarian. It doesn't favour printing the bible over any other book. Heck, you can even print radical new ideas. AI will try to push you towards the old stuff it's seen in the training material due to the way it works. And whatever the tech oligarchs deem acceptable. (And that's another factor, the printing press isn't controlled by the Chinese government, nor the corrupt US tech bros.)
I really don't think it's a neutral tool. It's the opposite of that. And many tools aren't neutral. For example guns. Some countries hand them out like there's no tomorrow. Issue is, they're force intensifiers and disproportionately used by criminals, mentally ill people... people with a will to use them for what they're good at, accidents happen... You can have a look at the numbers and compare it to other countried where the citizens are more fearful of guns. Those put strict regulation on top and get 10x less crime in return. And an ungodly amount less gun violence. That's because the world isn't neutral towards small metal barrels which fire projectiles. You'd think they're just a device. But it's way more complicated than that once we factor in reality.
But yeah, you're right. Issue isn't the maths... It's the fascists being in control of it. We need to get rid of those. After that we can try to come up with some hypothetical, better version of AI. One that comes with equity, a level playing field. Something which doesn't reinforce stereotypes. Doesn't steal from poor people and return investment to the rich and powerful. It's a massive challenge, and completely science fiction unless we do the first step.
Idk, maybe I'm just more subscribed to realism. I'm not opposed to the existence of the concept of mathematics. But I'll judge a tool by what it's actually used for. Not what could happen if the world were a different one than the one we live in.
I'm flattered you think I have the money for that, but I really don't. People do all kinds of silly stuff as a hobby. But even engineering an airplane in my garage is more achievable than this. And then they bought up all the computer chips and GPUs to make it even more unaffordable. And the way law works, I'll go to jail after pirating 20 books. It's just the tech oligarchy who's allowed to steal. That's another level of associated fascism. We don't get equity. There's different rules for different people.
For Zuck et al it's alright to torrent porn, pirate all the Hollywood movies out there, music... Musk can keep his revenge porn service... But @hendrik: Straight to jail if they try.
I wonder what's the reason to make it optional? I think I've seen this approach with other projects as well. Isn't transparency and accountability a good thing? Also, this kind of information helps immensely when reading pull requests or silly bug reports. And Debian acknowledge there might be licensing issues. So it might become some sort of liability to them once it taints everything and we can't even tell?! So why? What's the upside? Adorn oneself with borrowed plumes and not being forced to disclose the fact? Or too much bookkeeping?
Good question. I think there's some truth to it. Somehow a lot of fascist people love AI. For example a certain president posts a lot of gen AI pictures, sometimes videos of himself dropping poo on the citizens. Other regimes just use it to manifest some video surveillance dystopia. And to be frank, there is no other tech to enable surveillance on that level.
It's also a good tool to manipulate people on a grand scale, make custom propaganda, exploit psychology....
LLMs and related systems are made in a completely top-down way. They're under control of the Chinese government and a few select US tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and their companies. They get to shape it. And they're kind of Anti-Robin-Hoods. They steal from the poor, the workers and artists, and give to the rich. They get more power and money. And I didn't yet mention Peter Thiel and some other companies who are working on some AI assisted version of doomsday, or at minimum some scifi dystopia with predictive policing and that kind of stuff.
Also comes with a few fascist side-effects. Like disposession of land, polluting the environment and poor people get to suffer the consequences of climate change. Rich people can just buy a new house and clean water...
I mean not all AI is fascist. But I see lots of reason to believe it aligns well with fascist wet dreams. And not so much with their opponents'.
On contrary: Space travel helps all of us. I get to learn new science things. Get to use my sat nav in the car... 400 TV channels... a more precise weather forecast... We needed to advance material science for space travel, push solar cell technology, which I can make use of as of today to break free from big oil... I also got to contribute some taxpayer money to make it happen, so it wasn't just forced upon me by oligarchs...
What did they do? All I saw was them talk and do democracy. All of that is allowed from my side. I don't think they incorporated any AI stuff (yet). At least I'm not aware of anything?!