Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers
A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google’s AI Overview.
Anyways, personal sidenote:
Beyond putting another blow to AI’s reliability, this will probably also make the public more wary of user-generated material - its hard to trust something if you know the masses could be actively manipulating you.
there used to be a shitposting fb page called “places in warsaw you had no idea about because they don’t exist”. glad that somebody weaponised that concept
OpenAI’s business model:
Star Citizen, but for billionaires.
has the era of active sabotage of the autoplag inputs begun? let’s hope so
They added sleeps to training jobs? Sounds like they deserve a raise for improving energy efficiency instead…
Considering Glaze and Nightshade have been around for a while, and I talked about sabotaging scrapers back in July, arguably, it already has.
Hell, I ran across a much smaller scale case of this a couple days ago:
Not sure how effective it is, but if Elon’s stealing your data for his autoplag no matter what, you might as well try to force-feed it as much poison as you can.
I saw people say they would add 10% opaque layers of the musk with Epstein’s accomplice (whos name i forgot for a second and too lazy to look her up) photo. Would be nice if there was a tool to do so automatically. (Not that i post on twitter anymore).
tbh that sounds like a pretty easy script to write! Too bad I am not near a computer rn
Wouldn’t really need a script, though. Just open up photoshop or GIMP and add a layer after everything is finished.
But that doesn’t scale properly, you want ideally some sort of browser extension that just automatically does it for you before the data gets send to twitter.
I got nerd sniped into trying to resize
felons_musk_and_maxwell.webpto the same size as some base image before compositing it on top with a 10% dissolve in the samemagickinvocation but I need to sleep so I’m giving up for now.
It’s almost completely ineffective, sorry. It’s certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.
On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasn’t yet been invalidated and there’s no upcoming mathematics which tilt the scales in favor of anti-training techniques. In general, scrapers for training sets are now augmented with alignment models, which test inputs to see how well the tags line up; your example might be rejected as insufficiently normal-cat-like.
I think that “force-feeding” is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that “forced” input is destined to be discarded or retagged.
yeah this is the thing I’ve been thinking a lot about
fucking reCaptcha is literally mass-weaponising users for data filtration, and there is no good counter besides just not using reCaptcha (which is something one can’t easily pull off without things like regulatory action, massive reputational problems that make people gtfo, etc)
I have similar worries about cloudflare being such a massive chokepoint and using that position to enable “ai bot filter” services. feels extremely monopolistic, but ianal and I’m not entirely sure what the case grounds/structure on that would be (if any)
the only other viable strategy at the moment is fully breaking contact with any potential bad traffic systems, and that’s extremely fucking dire because that’s yet another nail in the coffin of the increasingly less open internet
The whole Cloudflare bot detection is so weird and eerie. I’ve had issues where I can’t get past it presumably just because I’m using some in-application browser just to get a login cookie, but other times it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked.
it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked
Fucking what. I’ve heard of sites blocking curl and I’ve been able to get around it by copying user agent and sometimes cookies from the browser. Now I’m cursed with the knowledge that I could probably just scrape stuff from everywhere
I thought they were gonna do that themselves by feeding on their own outputs littered all over the www. Maybe they can use some help.
that’s also happening, but yeah it’s going to have to be a team effort
we call it clogging, folks, we put a little clog in the machine
ooh I like that
I’m sorry Mr. Musk, grok’s a bit constipated today. Someone fed it too much cheese. Then it started hallucinating.
It would be funny if someone was literally beating up servers with a wooden shoe.
“percussive maintenance”
momty python style giant sabot descends on Microsoft data centre
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I keep wanting to give zed a serious go (even just to try it out because it looks interesting) but there’s some design decisions that are raisedeyebrow.gif and feel like a very telling thing about the mindset of the devs
fresh install:
- at start, it immediately attempts to start making connections to github copilot and a couple of other network sources. no user prompt, no indication that it’s going to be doing this, no indication that it is doing it
- figuring out how to turn said undesired features off was not documented and just by the by semi answered elsewhere (also: I applied those settings and it still did a bunch of shit, so I had to pull the repo and scratch through it myself…)
while I’m certainly from the older guard of crotchety, I still think it’s fucking reasonable to ask the user before your software goes off and does shit. you don’t even have to overload them with requests, you can make it granular with a customize button. this shit has been solved in fucking windows application installers since the goddamn 00s
christ I’m gonna stay angry at the last decade for a long time
tangentially, I think about this thread every so often too. this just made me think of it again.
curser
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Character.ai is getting sued thanks to one of their users killing himself, and The New York Times is talking about it (there’s also a piece by Gary Marcus talking about a previous incident if you’re interested).
Like the copyright situation I previously mentioned, I suspect this is also gonna make potential investors wary of investing in AI post-bubble. Even if you manage to convince investors that you won’t get DMCA’d into oblivion, they’re still gonna be wary of the potential for a Dasani-level PR nightmare.
Of course, that’s assuming that Section 230 protects you from being held liable for what your autoplag does - if Ms. Garcia, whose son’s suicide prompted this entire mess, succeeds in court, the legal precedent set means you’re likely gonna have to worry about being sued if/when someone ends up injured/killed/defamed/otherwise fucked up because of its output…
Skimming the reddit thread in search of general public sentiment about this, but unfortunately mostly just found a greatest hits compilation of very gross comments.
According to these very smart people, parents should expect your teenager to die as an outcome of not being perfect people 24/7, technology can never be at fault even when it literally tells you to commit suicide in coded language, and it’s actually impossible to understand which parts of society are causing kids to be depressed, so we must take it as a given that we can’t do anything about it. I regret having done this to myself.
This is nothing, The characterAi subreddit was in full meltdown earlier.
The age of book shovelware has arrived: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2024/10/ai-audiobook-narrators-in-overdrive-and-the-issue-of-library-ai-circulation-policy/
Edit: TIL about the US copyright office website’s ai generation info on works. That’s a thing we will be making a bunch of use of, I imagine.
who does this? I love audiobooks, but I’ve put them down when the narrator didn’t work for me. Who wants everything to sound like it’s being read by a serial killer?
It looks like an AI-powered fiction version of this scam. On one hand being fiction means that it’s less likely to actively risk killing people with phony medical advice. But being AI powered means that the grifters can now cut the underpaid gig workers out of the loop entirely, which is probably the most concrete example of AI displacing human workers I’ve yet seen.
this is peak AI. you might not like it, but it’s how top of the bubble looks like
Radio station uses AI to interview the ghost of a dead Nobel-winner with 3 quirky zoomers who don’t exist, seems baffled people don’t like it starring three bots and deepfake of Wisława Szymborska
related notesfrompoland and onet article they probably referenced (in polish) and another. would you guess that they fired a dozen or so* people just before? (and somehow had money for whatever horseshit they were sold) small radio stations aren’t probably bringing serious money either way now
homepage of that radio boasts about their “almost entirely created by AI” content. it looks like they tried to convince zoomers to get an FM radio and listen to it somehow. it’s gonna go great
apparently this radio is in liquidation since january however this might be related to dislodging previous govt’s propagandists from public media
*original report used very handy word that does not appear in english that one could translate as “fewteen” and can mean any number from 11 to 19 inclusive
What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don’t sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I’ve come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT’s attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it’s trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.
you gotta admit one thing: this cures imposter syndrome
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If your Wikipedia page contains as many random arXiv preprints for references as the “prompt engineering” article, consult your physician.
I was expecting a spicier Talk page :(
I just tagged the article and added a talk page note
More AI generated shite from Ireland: Transport for Ireland decided, for some reason, to use AI for its Hallowe’en themed ads. This was roundly complained about online. Then someone decided, for genius reasons, to ring Liveline and complain about it.
For those who are unfamiliar, Liveline is a national phone-in show presented by JOEEEE DUFFY, who could start a fight with a brick wall. Every episode is about either a petty grievance or a real horror story. It’s like a national whinge-in. I am going to listen to the episode (available here) and see if there are any highlights.
The gist of Liveline
Joe is complaining about TFI putting up the taxi fares in Dublin.
The ad is for a TFI competition.
Ciarán works in advertising and thought that the TFI ad must be a scam first because of the use of AI.
Ciarán points out that TFI has plenty of money and could afford to pay a graphic designer or an illustrator.
Joe is furious that TFI won’t say whether the ad was AI-generated or not. Ciarán points out that they didn’t even mark the image as AI-generated.
Gerry O’Brien from Actors Equity is on the line. He’s explaining the issues faced by background actors and voiceover actors who are being pressured into signing over their image/voice rights
Hannah Lockhead from Lucan is on the line. “I don’t disagree with what anyone is saying, but personally I think the most offensive thing about this ad is just that it’s ugly”.
Gerry O’Brien is talking about fair compensation and clear consent for actors whose images are being used.
Hannah says that “Frankenstein’s Wife is Margot Robbie”
Ciarán says that the AI art is “quite tacky” and compares poorly with the iconic London Underground logo.
Joe Duffy has seized the opportunity of having Gerry O’Brien on the line to complain that the Abbey Theatre has been closed for a year.
Joe Duffy has asked Hannah Lockhead (who is an actress) “are you working Hannah or are you resting”. She’s just finished filming a horror film in Wales called Esoteric.
That’s pretty much it.
TFI have now apologised.
Bad feelings today. Google announced that an artist I like, Jacob Collier, has been working with them to develop an LLM based tool for music autoplag.
A little context: Collier has like 5 grammies, and is an incredibly creative artist that is able to take ideas and influence from disparate sources and synthesise something interesting (it’s not always good though…). Likely the greatest musician of his generation!
I don’t want to catastrophise too much here but I’m not looking forward to this being used as a cudgel from the promptfondlers.
The only open question I think is: to what extent is the music generation autoplag? (My guess, 100%)
There’s been a moderate tsunami of “AI EVERYTHING” in a bunch of production tools lately too. Most I’ve seen have looked like just rebranding the further development of previously existing algorithmic tools, but there have also been a couple principally from the “we trained on everything possible!” camp
unsurprising that someone’s fallen over themselves to integrate the llm-style synthesis into the pipeline too, although it’s still extremely exhausting
the cultural fallout of this is going to suuuuuck. it’s going to be so much worse than receiving the dancing baby from your weird relatives in 2008
Jacob Collier to me is the archetype of the rich kid with enormous talent and not an ounce of taste or integrity, so I can’t say I’m very surprised by this.
See also this nonsense, though now it looks rather innocent compared to the google news.
He’s such a waste of musical ability it makes me angry and his face is annoying!
I have seen that, and in terms of the cringy stuff he does, it’s definitely up there.
Here are my primarily unfiltered feelings about his music and persona:
I think at his worst, he’s cringe, overly-self-indulgent, and pretentious. He needs a stylist because his hair sucks, his clothes are stupid, and he wears this fucking bear hat all the time that I hate. I hate hate hate people when people wear hats and it doesn’t seem to serve a purpose beyond looking quirky. Take the fucking hat off, Jacob! He’s the type that uses obscure words that you suspect he doesn’t know the meaning of.
He also tends to be inappropriately maximalist—I’d point to his cover of Here Comes the Sun, Blackbird, Moon River (for which he won a Grammy!), and actually pretty much all of DJesse, a series of four (four!) albums. I don’t really like the timbre of his voice; it’s weird. I suspect he has like a perfect vocal technique or something, but as a result, it sounds completely removed from anything natural.
Unlike every other failed rich kid, he is legitimately talented, which you’ve acknowledged. I like some of his songs but wouldn’t recommend them to anyone. His music feels like a technical demo in that many interesting, complex, and impressive things happen, which I like! But at my lowest points, I feel stupid when I listen to his stuff, even though he is musically speaking in a made-up language, and it’s not my fault I don’t understand it.
At his best, he seems genuinely open-hearted, with room to accept anything that comes his way. I do find some of his stuff inspiring! I like that a person like him exists and that many people look to him for inspiration and influence.
his face is annoying!
Specific to this point: I saw him live in concert for his Djesse Vol 1. tour and managed to meet him after the show. He seemed chill and it was a good chat. I took a picture with him, which I later put on my dating profile. Not seeing much success, I showed the profile to my friend to solicit feedback, and she said: “You should take that picture off because your friend is more attractive than you.” I told her who he was but deleted the picture anyway.
He’s not a monster (or not as much of one) like the rest of the people we look at over here. He’s sheltered, and either there’s someone in his camp pushing this kind of stuff, or there’s no one to tell him that this tech is awful. Again, bad feelings!
Yes whatever I think of his aesthetic priorities and the way his image is cultivated he does seem genuinely passionate about music and I do respect that. I’m sure I’d actually forgive him a lot more if only he didn’t sound so ludicrously posh.
I think he can compose some really neat vocal harmonies but yes as you said his singing voice is grating and uh, honestly sometimes it’s like vocal blackface
like vocal blackface
I totally get that! At least 10% of my motivation of following him is to see when he’ll drop his mask and be a huge appropriator, but so far that hasn’t seemed to have happened, except for this whole AI thing.
Veering completely off topic, if we’re talking privileged young men with enormous musical ability coming out of nowhere and networking themselves into releasing crazy music, I’m rather into Hermann Szobel myself.
It’s a pretty fascinating bit of history too if you’re into this sort of thing.
Update on the character.ai lawsuit:
Gizmodo just reported on the story - in addition to the suicide that kicked this litigation off, they’ve also discovered an hour-long screen recording where a test account (self-reported as thirteen years old) gets sexted relentlessly by the site’s chatbots.
So, in addition to driving one specific teen to suicide, character.ai is also facing accusations that their bots are sexually harassing children.
I have something that I want to post to MoreWrite and this is very convenient for my story
Glad I could be of help.
US forest service cuts thousands of jobs. Not to worry, the bright hackernews are on it! just install an AI data center in the forest!. Seriously though, I can’t tell if this is brilliant satire or not.
My read: sounds like a teenager that knows the touted functionality of the scam tech they are referencing, but is not wise enough to the ways of the world to know they are scams.
Fuck, I didn’t need to be reminded that they named the robot Optimus. Was “Bender” or “Wall-E” too much of a deep cut? Or is it just that Disney’s trademark lawyers are scarier than Hasbro and Nvidia combined?
Forget Gladwell
All nonfiction writers can end up writing incorrect or controversial things, but why does every Gladwell book push half-formed and inaccurate theories? For years, my loose feeling about Gladwell was that he writes like someone who doesn’t care about being correct, which is not a way I would describe any other author I’ve encountered. There is something uniquely odd about his work.
Obligatory IBCK ep on gladwell
Update on the state of AI drug discovery companies: AI Does Not Make It Easy by Derek Lowe
lmao incredible
Then there’s BenevolentAI. I first wrote about them in 2018, as the company stated that it had “created a bioscience machine brain, purpose-built to discover new medicines and cures for disease.” How’s the machine brain doing these days? Well, the company’s lead program failed in the clinic last year, and in April announced major layoffs.
just who buys this shit? this reads like refined crypto nonsense
People who don’t get much tech/overdose on hype and heard of alphafold. Imagine how much worse things could be now after the Nobel.
i mean how many these people are out there that also have money of this kind, other than softbank i mean
too fucking many
Given the past several decades of trickle-up economics, I think we haven’t seen anything close to the bottom of the well of basically-idle capital seeking unrealistic returns.
I’d go so far as to say that the current crop of bubbles possibly represents the greatest downards wealth transfer (albeit from billionaires to millionaires rather than, y’know, working people) since the second world war, but I haven’t done anything near the amount of research necessary for that to be more than exciting rhetoric.
