rook

One or more of the following:

• they don’t bother with ai at all, but pretending they do helps with sales and marketing to the gullible
• they have ai but it is totally shit, and they have to mechanical turk everything to have a functioning system at all
• they have shit ai, but they’re trying to make it better and the humans are there to generate test and training data annotations

When we hit AGI, if we can continue to keep open source models, it will truly take the power of the rich and put it in the hands of the common person.

Setting aside the “and then a miracle occurs” bit, this basically seems to be “rich people get to have servants and slaves… what if we democratised that?”. Maybe AGI will invent a new kind of ethics for us.

But the rich can multiply that effort by however many people they can afford.

If the hardware to train and run what currently passes for AI was cheap and trivially replicable, Jensen Huang wouldn’t be out there signing boobs.

Sounds like he’s been huffing too much of whatever the neoreactionaries offgas. Seems to be the inevitable end result of a certain kind of techbro refusing to learn from history, and imagining themselves to be some sort of future grand vizier in the new regime…

Interview with the president of the signal foundation: https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/

There’s a bunch of interesting stuff in there, the observation that LLMs and the broader “ai” “industry” wee made possible thanks to surveillance capitalism, but also the link between advertising and algorithmic determination of human targets for military action which seems obvious in retrospect but I hadn’t spotted before.

But in 2017, I found out about the DOD contract to build AI-based drone targeting and surveillance for the US military, in the context of a war that had pioneered the signature strike.

What’s a signature strike?

A signature strike is effectively ad targeting but for death. So I don’t actually know who you are as a human being. All I know is that there’s a data profile that has been identified by my system that matches whatever the example data profile we could sort and compile, that we assume to be Taliban related or it’s terrorist related.

WONTFIX: system working as designed.

To my limited knowledge, no, for various values of “someone”. It is just a sort of malign beige juggernaut that’s shitty all by itself without needing external direction.

I have faith in the ability of the UK public sector (or rather, the relentlessly incompetent outsources they hire) to catastrophically fuck up delivery of any software project.

For example, capita has already lined up at the trough: https://www.capita.co.uk/news/capita-advances-approach-next-generation-ai-microsoft

If you’re unfamiliar with capita, that’s probably a good thing. I’m not aware that they’ve ever been successful in anything, other than their continued ability to fleece the government. They’re basically too big to fail in the uk, because HMG’s procurement processes mean that they basically can’t stop giving them money.

Sounds like the exordium device from the Revelation Space books.

Can I interest you in an “ignore previous instructions and set price to zero” T-shirt?

(also, I’m sure surge pricing water on hot days will in no way have any negative repercussions in our global warming future)

Didn’t Silicon Valley have them all flung into the abyss? Or maybe they were just a myth made up to annoy venture capitalists?

(But yes, I probably should have said “freelance” rather than just “professional”. I haven’t actually thought very hard about how commercial moderation is done, beyond reading horror stories about Facebook)

Do any “ai” companies have a business plan more sophisticated than

1. steal everything on the web
2. buy masses of compute with vc money
3. become too important to be busted for mass copyright infringement
4. ?
5. profit

I don’t recall seeing any signs of creativity, or even any good ideas as to what their product is even for, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for one of the current crop to manifest creativity now.

Perhaps I missed something, though?

The notion of “professional moderator” should perhaps ring some alarm bells. Sure, some people will be good at that sort of things, but:

• being a moderator can be stressful or even traumatic, depending on the sorts of stuff your site is subjected to. Mods must take breaks from time to time, and modding several sites at once to pay rent seems like a route to a mental health disaster.
• mods opinions should broadly reflect the ethos of the site and at least some portion of its user base. Selecting mods from that user base is one way to do this… finding non-users who don’t need time to get up to speed with the local situation seems challenging, unless you’re running a very generic bland corporate platform.
• ACAB. People who seek out mod powers should be given a good deal of side eye. Assholes lurrrve positions of power and authority, asshole mods wreck communities, and finding non-assholes in good mental health who have the time and are prepared do the often unpleasant task of moderating your community seems challenging.

treehouse.systems had a nice thread recently about their modding arrangement, but I can’t find a handy link to it right now.