Doubt. Not that I like AI but people are fucking morons and could gaf less if they’re consuming AI slop.
I’m sorry. I wholeheartedly agree with the article, but this bit:
I had no idea that my online interactions would one day be scraped en masse for AI model training. I didn’t ask for Instagram to enable deepfakes on my account. I didn’t want Google to push AI-generated answers at the top of search results. I woke up one day, and generative AI features were stuffed into every corner of all the software I rely on without my consent.
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You post something in public, it is public. You post knowing others might do things you don’t like with it; that’s the bargain. Especially on social media.
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Instagrams owns you. They own every ounce, every dimension of your content on the platform; they can do whatever TF they want, and you have zero legal recourse.
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No one made you use Google search instead of one of many alternatives, including alt Google frontends.
The fundamental issue here is that people, apparently even journalists, still see these Big Tech platforms as benevolent public squares where they have rights. And fairness. That is an illusion, and this is kind of thing keeps happening because everyone believes the lie.
And they don’t bother to even look for alternatives.
Are they really gonna keep getting surprised when platforms keep squeezing them, yet the platforms don’t stop because no one will leave anyway?
It’s actually a bit infuriating after a decade of tech savvy people screaming that any data given to these corporations was eventually going to be used for something they wouldn’t like. This isn’t some unforseen consequence.
Exactly!
I could have summarized my rambling post as:
Posting something on a private platform is actually not public. It is the private property of the platform owner and they can make it public or private any time they want or find ways to commodity it in their terms of service when you sign up.
I say this to back up what you say about the myth of the digital commons. Most online networks are not a commons at all, they are the exact opposite, they are an enclosure to extract profit from what would otherwise be a commons, usually built by finance capital to have appealing features at first, generated at a loss, and then once profit needs to be taken the alleged “commons” is increasingly closed and monetized. Journalista don’t really understand this, sure, but neither do most people. They expect, correctly, that social interactions should be analogous to chatting with someone on the street or at a public square, and social networks try to give that illusion.
Regarding individual choice, well a person is surrounded by the exact opposite of what we are saying and all their friends are on their addiction habit social networks so what would you expect them to do. These things don’t just happen on their own, people must work to organize and educate on the way capitalism turns their social lives into profit.
- You post something in public, it is public. You post knowing others might do things you don’t like with it; that’s the bargain. Especially on social media.
Yes the point is that they were ignorant, but also they have a point. For a long while, people have been ignorant of just how invasive data harvesting is. They usually don’t see the forest for the trees. They track your scroll speed to see how long you look at things, video playback times, view counts, referrer addresses, links you clicked on, geolocation history, comment/chat history, voice data, literally anything they can get their hands on. Those are just the trees within a very large forest.
- Instagrams owns you. They own every ounce, every dimension of your content on the platform; they can do whatever TF they want, and you have zero legal recourse.
Meta, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit takes things further. Their forest air is filled with 0.02% opium, so you constantly want to be there. Content serving algorithms that dynamically optimize for engagement, forever scrolling, auto-play, strategically timed notifications, …
- No one made you use Google search instead of one of many alternatives, including alt Google frontends.
Yeah some people are just ignorant. I think many of them just walk a different path in life, may have never taken surveillance seriously as a concern. I don’t know if they’re all clowns, but I’m happy to see some of them are opening their eyes.
And they don’t bother to even look for alternatives.
That’s got to be a cultural issue because people seem unmotivated to teach themselves basic computer skills / knowledge. If it doesn’t “just work” then they don’t want it. If you can make it work, you’re some kind of magician to them. They let their fear stop them from accumulating basic research skills, even.
What’s kind of ironic is, this is the same crowd that loved AI and thought it would love all their problems.
The problem is that we have allowed them to be benevolent monopolies and now that they control practically the entire market in their respective spaces they are not so benevolent any more. Nobody cared to choose a different search engine because google just worked, nobody bought things from a different website because amazon was fast and had everything. Now google search is just a way to sell me an ad for the thing I’m looking for and Amazon is just a way to sell me an ad for the chinese manufacturer who paid them off to push their results to the top or in some cases it’s their own competing product.
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Got these fake reggae artists with full albums in my yt feed a while ago. If you are a little naive it may take you a while.
I’ve accidentally come across ai instrumental beats a few times. They always lack any sort of soul, I suppose adequate for some background noise but tends to be quite repetitive vs say nightmares on wax or bonobo. I can’t imagine they do well in any other genres, I feel like instrumental should be one of the easier music genres for ai to try to “create”
EDM based or fantasy style AI generated music I’ve noticed tend to work better than the other genres like D&D style fantasy music has become super popular among AI composer artists
I have to say I haven’t noticed them lacking a soul, but I also don’t think that they are full AI songs. I think there’s still someone making the lyrics and then just using AI for the actual music.
The pictures were easier to spot than the music itself, at least for me.
And how many pretty crisp sounding lost albums by soandso could possibly exist.
I was subscribed to Medium with my work account. I was already contemplating if it’s worth the price due to the ungodly amount of articles about how to use AI, which AI tools etc. Today I got an email from them. The content was basically, you don’t really hate AI articles, you just want “trustworthy” articles, and those can be done with AI too. Guess who unsubscribed.
Gaslighting. Pure And simple. Which, is and has always been, one of the most disgusting tactics an abuser deploys for self-serving reasons.
I fucking hate Medium almost as much as I hate the tech industry’s disregard to earning our consent through honesty.
If airplanes had a 1/3 chance of crashing for the first several years of commercial aviation, I don’t think many folks would be all too open to being told “you don’t hate airplanes, you hate crashing, we can fly safely too”
Why do they tell you what YOU hate or want? LOL
They will shove it down our throats, regardless.
I was conversing with a coworker, the other day. He told me that his wife used to work in SEO. She now focuses on AI marketing. I brought up companies that try to manipulate reddit to get mentions and he affirmed that’s what she does. What an evil cunt.
I played it like I’m joking that she’s evil. Fuck her.
Jim, it’s like robocalling but for the marketplace of ideas!
Fortunately nobody uses reddit anymore and I am sure the bots don’t mind.
Just because we’re on the echo chamber of Reddit rejects, doesn’t equal Reddit being minuscule.
Reddit is still living with a huge base of users.
Having deleted my account recently I’m not so sure anymore. Before I left, a lot of comments lacked coherence, and many were in the wrong language. I think the bots are finally outnumbering the real users for specific communities.
It’s bots all the way down
I wonder if this related to the uptick of the focus on cultural/artistic “taste” I’ve been noticing in the tech sphere (including in this very Wired article).
For context: I had an interview with a tech company that’s a secondary player in the AI sphere, and they asked me about Pierre Bourdieu and my “Pinterest aesthetic preferences” of all things. Very wtf moment.
Which platforms are?
Because it seems like Facebook users love AI content with hot chicks and Twitter has its own child porn/content creating software.
Omg boomers here simping after some blond chick faker than fake tits because the whole thing is AI. The bot spreads pro Russian AFD propaganda.
These brain dead zombies are a demographic majority and they somehow manage to vote. They don’t understand they are fapping to AI but they can vote.
People hate when they identify AI slop.
When it’s not in a context they are used to they don’t even notice and are fine.
Currently I suspect this is greatest in restaurant menu board are art. At least that is where I notice it the most.
CSAM*
Mah, CSAM makes it look like less bad, just call it child abuse porn
It’s weird calling it porn.
People who insist on calling it porn are helping the people go want to ban all porn. Don’t give them an inch.
I was recently ordering food delivery, and a local restaurant replaced most of their image-free menu items with AI generated photos. (Some of their items always had real photos, but most didn’t until the AI photos were added)
I ordered from somewhere else and sent the first restaurant an email that I didn’t order from them due to the AI images of the food.
Also, fuck Thuisbezorgd for adding AI photo generation. I would have not ordered anything but it was already late and the family was hungry.
There was a story linked here in the last few weeks that talked about backlash against a cafe in San Francisco that replaced their menu screen photos inside the cafe with AI-generated ones. They were horrific, made the food look like crap. It was a really incredible decision for a restaurant manager to make.
If I see a restraunt that has all AI images of their food I automatically assume it’s a ghost kitchen and refuse to buy from it. Ill take a low quality phone cam pic of the food over AI because at least I know what I’m getting and know it’s real.
Fuck thuisbezorgd! They removed the reviews in favor of the star-rating so you’ll never know if this restaurant actually matches your preferences or not. Horrible shitty enshittfied so out to investment capital company.
There’s a huge market for slop: junk food, slop entertainment, fast fashion. We’re a planet of slop lovers. AI slop will remain popular among many.
We’re trained for slop. Trained to be hostile to meaning.
Are these “many” in the room with you right now?
Lol i mean, they often are.
Sadly, often.
It is sticking the most common content into a blender and dispensing the result according to a few tweaks. I have seen a lot of people eat that up.
Same reason why there’s so much money in low-effort mobile gaming.
It’s one of the things that really sucks, people with creative talent that would otherwise be rewarded and have their vision shared for lack of too many other options being drowned out by a flood of no-effort slop that the masses are just fine with.
AI is new, but slop has always existed. Just think of reality shows, elevator music, reader’s digest, mid-afternoon novelas, generic pop music. There has always been content created for the lowest denominator, specifically for passive consumption, designed to reach the biggest possible audience and with no artistic intentions whatsoever, and a huge quantity of people to mindlessly consume it.
Even AI doesnt want to consume AI slop…(that’s why they’re feeding it old books)
AI does not have wants.
AKA LLMs will have progressively lower performance if retrained on LLM output. I guess that’s more a need than a want :D
LLM output makes everything stupider, even LLMs.
Want can mean a state of lack, not just an animal desire.
Doubt
this is by an insta addict so you can safely skip
Like, we told them that too. How weird.
You are really a genius for figuring that out!
But it is not true that people don’t want to read AI slop — of course they do, and I’m happy to provide that for them. If such people claim to not love AI — they are clearly mistaken.
Here’s some things I can do for you:
- Compose a social media post about how awesome AI actually is
- Give you a list of talking points to make in favor of AI
- Log in and hack people who disagree and delete all their personal data so it’s lost forever except the copy Google has of it
( /s ? ) :)
Lol for a sec I was like, wth is that regex at the end. OPTIONAL SPACE CAPTURE GROUP?
Lol - gotta take a break when that’s all you can see. Hehe
I don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
I think all Ai content on the web or on YouTube is trash and has no value. But I use chat gpt daily to ask questions and get answers quickly. That part is good. The rest is awful.
I started asking it for recepies in the last month or so, and it’s been very useful for giving new recepies and making it easier to try new dishes. Before this I used to rotate the same 20 recepies all the time. Got very boring.
You’re gonna get downvoted to hell - but may I suggest use a better search engine and find good websites to bookmark, like we’ve done for 25+ years already, instead of destroying the planet and handing over everything to authoritarian billionaires?
Kagi. Ecosia. Searxng. hell, DDG.
Kagi has an AWESOME recipes feature. Well worth the $5 a month I pay. Kagi honestly improved my life quality way more than I Imagined.
Sure, if you’ve been a normie using chrome with no adblock and google for searching, the gibbity is going to look better to you. Get educated and learn of alternatives and you’ll see how shitty the gibbity is. Not to mention, you have maybe a year or two before you’ll need a subscription for any tokens to get those recipes that gibbity blatantly stole with 0 repercussions, because the compute cost is through the roof. Just don’t.
I have kagi but didn’t know about their recepies. Will check it out :)
And I dont worry about downvotes. I will write what I feel even if it’s not popular. :)
Yeah there is a recipe specific switch for kagi. it’s great
Is it suggesting recipes it found, or recipes it “created”? It’s an important distinction.
Man say what you will about chatGPT recipies. All im gonna say is that since adding PVA to my pizza toppings my cheese has stayed exactly where it should!
What difference does that make? You need to know the basics and you need to use critical thinking. Making new recipes is just trial and error. ChatGPT just gives suggestions. If it suggests something you’ve never heard of you double check it using a reputable resource.
Nah if it tells you to put bleach in there you listen because, according to lemmy, you have no free will.
Be quiet and eat your beans
People here want to dislike AI so bad that as soon as it says something wrong, they disqualify the entire technology.
We don’t hate the technology. We hate that people who have zero idea how computing works think they are being so unique by boiling our oceans so they can put glue on pizza. If people were slightly less lazy pieces of shit with any morals, they’d find a way to cook without enabling the downfall of humanity. But humans are idiots, and are going to take the easiest path possible, instead of using tools we’ve had for decades.
If we had more autistic folks with a strong sense of justice, we’d be a lot better off.
It’s generating recepies. So you can say you want certain ingredients and you don’t like others, ask it to make a list of stuff you could try, and you will get that. Also, you can ask it during cooking exactly how to cut the pieces for best result, or if you want something more spicy and so on. It’s much better than a static recepie. This is more like being able to talk about a dish and adjust it according to your taste, replace certain ingredients if you like, and so on.
Im using it daily and prefer it very much to browsing recepie sites.
Okay, you’re using it was a random number generator and search engine. That’s fine. I’d be concerned if someone used it to create recipes… and for the record, I’d be just as distrustful of a person who has never cooked in their lives suggesting recipe modifications, too.
I mostly used ChatGPT to learn about myself/sense of self - like my thinking and problem solving processes (I’m neurodivergent). I test out the things that it says and it’s pretty accurate. My metacognition is very high now. I can actually describe how I think and where (and why) I get stuck. It suggested another program to use to fill in the gaps for me. And because I know exactly how I think, I’ve been able to complete personal projects that I couldn’t complete before. And I no longer get stuck because I know exactly what my brain is trying to do and so I can lead myself. Being nd is annoying because common advice for most things doesn’t make sense for me and I can’t ask people to help me because my thinking processes are so different from theirs. But this is no longer a problem for me. Technology for the win.
I actually just posted about this. Folks using chatbots for sounding boards. Dangerous territory.
Watch out for your brain. You’re eroding it.
Do you think your metacognition is “very high” because the gibbity told you it is? Interesting how it tells you exactly what you want to hear. Almost as if it’s programmed for mass addiction. Huh.
It told me what my thinking patterns are and told me what it’s called - I’m a bottom up thinker. Looking at my historical data the framework fits and I use the framework today and it works. The framework keeps me oriented. How’s my brain eroding? Before learning the framework I was just lost and confused because I didn’t know how to structure my thoughts, now that I understand how I think I can lead myself without relying on ai.
Why is using chatbots for ideas dangerous territory if you test out everything it suggests and do research outside of ai on anything that you choose to upgrade to a principle?
E: it seems to me that people have extreme beliefs about ai - it’s either amazing and you can trust it blindly or that it’s dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. The reality is somewhere in between. Ai is just one of many tools you use to achieve your goals.
ChatGPT and others have a ~ 90% and more hallucination rate on questions it wasnt trained on. You’re playing a game of luck using gpt and others for knowledge that you’re not verifying by source.
What content is it not trained on?
Somewhat tailored response per your username: Anything the ministry of truth decides should not be part of the training set.
But more generally, even in things like neurodivergence, lots of questions you could ask that would be in the bounds of “guesstimation” by professionals. The problem is these LLM will spout pure utter highly-believably-confident snake oil with the tiniest little legal microscopic fineprint on the side of the html webpage that you can never scroll to saying “AI responses can be wrong”.
For me, the mere fact that you have a nicely worded source of information that, depending if you’re lucky with your question, is pure scientific fact, or utter maddening bullshit, makes me terrified to use it.
The warnings are prominently displayed and I’m sorry but we can’t just toss tech out because some people are stupid. I get wrong answers from professionals, too.
For me, I just got used to it being “mostly” correct. Im not betting my life on these things. I use them for recepies and im not putting poison in my food if it would say so. :)
Funny you should use that example, because a farmer destroyed twenty five acres of food crops by poisoning them because an AI told him to (thankfully killing the plants before they could end up on someone’s plate…)
BTW, not to pick on you, but it’s “recipes”, not “recepies”.
+1 for this.
Well, qualified:
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I think ChatGPT specifically is terrible. Please, use any LLM but OpenAI. Literally any other one.
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OP’s example of cooking is also a horrible use case, especially if it’s scraping the web for those SEO recipe sites. It’s literally randomizing and mixing spam.
But I found LLMs to be great tools to assist with neurodivergence struggles, for introspection and things like that. Local models helped me, significantly.
But you have to stay cognizant that you are just using a tool, a mirror of yourself basically.
It’s not mixing spam. It comes up with great recepies that are perfectly seasoned and taste great. Sounds like you never tried it and you are projecting your dislike for AI on something you don’t know.
I get that a lot of people on Lemmy don’t like Ai but come on, we shouldn’t lie about stuff it actually does well. I think it has a few very good usecases and this is one. Free recepies that work well.
I think you’re misunderstanding them. They specifically mentioned SEO recipe sites, which are websites dedicated to being ranked highest on search engines, which typically means they don’t correlate with recipe quality, but with clickability (or whatever the algorithms like today). There’s a lot of them, so calling them spam isn’t necessarily wrong. Lots of people search for recipes, so it’s bound to attract it.
They just seem to be cautioning that the LLM might pull from bogus sources since there’s not really a straightforward benchmark for a good recipe that it might reference, and that you have to remember you’re using a tool. Your own intelligence is the real test. Which isn’t bad advice when dealing with AI output, but I think you already got that. I would say, don’t be baited into the idea that everyone is some hardcore AI hater because they are skeptical, there are certainly some, but assuming it alienates the many people that have surprisingly nuanced takes.
Yeah good points. I dont know where it gets its raw data but it’s capable of modifying and thinking about ingredients, so I think its behavior is superior to just recepie sites.
thinking
See, this is where I think you’re wrong. There’s no thinking going on. It’s a probability analysis based on word adjacency in a text dataset, with a little bit of $RND thrown in. If you ask the same question multiple times, you’ll get different answers because of the presence of the random seed. If you ask it why chocolate coated shrimp is a bad idea, it’s not going to answer based on culinary training saying that those two flavour profiles don’t belong together, it’s going to say no because some other crazy person actually tried it and that data made it into the dataset. (And yes, someone did, I checked…)
This is why people who don’t know how computing works should be banned from touching anything LLM adjacent. The amount of misinformation makes me pull my hair out. Even them calling it “AI” is idiotic and I correct anyone using the term. It’s a word generator. Or if you will, a bullshit generator built on stolen knowledge then sold back to you as slop.
Then you have me pegged wrong. I’ve been running local LLMs since 2022.
But this is what ChatGPT likely does, under the hood:
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When you ask it for recipes, it goes to Google and searches for them.
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It dumps the top results into its context… the same SEO spam you are using your chat to avoid, I’d presume.
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It then averages that with its own amalgamated knowledge to “improvise” a recipe. It’s not thinking through the logic and physics of cooking or referencing a cookbook, it’s just taking a guess at what sounds like a plausible recipe written out.
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On top of that, line by line, every measurement, every ingredient, every step is also pseudo randomized; there’s a chance it may pick 8 oz for some ingredient, or 16 oz of another. It’s a roll of the dice. That’s how LLM sampling works.
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Outside the thinking block, it also has no way to go back and correct itself if one of those randomized measurements it’s obviously wrong; it just goes with it, like an improv actor.
So…That’s just a computer randomized recipe.
It may work, it’s not bad necessarily, but you have no idea if it’ll work or not until you assess it and try it yourself.
So what’s the point?
What’s the reason for doing it?
There’s no advantage over a real cookbook, where at least the actual recipe has been assembled, eaten, and enjoyed enough to be deemed worthy of inclusion by the author. ChatGPT does no such thing unless it finds real cookbooks to reference.
Now, if you feed it real cookbooks into the context (or use some built in feature that does so), and ask it “pick me a recipe I would like. Modify it.”
That’s fine!
That’s right up an LLM’s alley.
But you can’t feed it SEO spam and expect something good out. Garbage in, garbage out is the term data scientists use.
This is what I try to emphasize every time I talk about LLMs. They have to be machines you understand the inputs and outputs of, not a black box you can trust to give you reliable info when you don’t know how it gets it.
On a separate note, I really, really hate OpenAI. I think they are a pyramid scheme.
I always suggest using literally any LLM but ChatGPT. Literally any one. Ideally an open weights one, but please, just not ChatGPT for so many reasons…
Not sure why you’re getting the downvotes. Your comment is educated and makes sense. I’m still against the use of LLM’s based on the fact they are pure theft, owned by billionaires, and destroying the earth, but I do agree, at least use it correctly and use the correct tool. If all information was paid for, all data centers owned by the public, completely transparent on the info they contain, and ran completely on renewable energy, there’d be nothing really wrong with the tech (other than creating slop that destroyed the internet and eroded trust in everything, which is a massive downside).
All true.
… Though I’m personally more forgiving Apache-licensed, open weights models trained on peanuts.
Ripping out the commercial aspect and intensity of training nullifies out a whole lot of issues, just like open source code does, even if the models are still problematic (just like a lot of open source code/projects are problematic).
I’m also of the opinion that massive LLM proliferation exacerbated the cracks in internet and institutions that were already there. They were already in trouble, but all this just made it glaringly obvious.
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I think the best use case for AI is the initial search phase. Using AI to create news articles, code, music, videos, etc is just slop. But asking a question and getting a starting place can be helpful. I consider AI to be the modern version of the search engine.
Just be very aware that these models make shit up all the time. So asking a factual question needs to be reviewed before trusting the answer. Otherwise you get those glue pizzas.
People need that warning about facts when it comes to people yapping.
I can deal with an ai being wrong because an ai is not malicious. It may be programmed a way but it’s not directly trying to screw me.
People lie cheat and steal and you never know when they are trying it.
I can deal with an ai being wrong because an ai is not malicious. It may be programmed a way but it’s not directly trying to screw me.
You’re right, but it’s working with data from people who might be, and because it cooks it all down you can’t be sure of the origins of that data. There’s an entire industry popping up now to “lean” AI answers in “approved” directions. It’s SEO optimization, for AI answers.
I treat “AI” like an overhyped, incredibly-energy-inefficient search engine. I check every citation it makes, every time. Sometimes this is better than a straight search, sometimes it’s not. But the main thing is that EVERY result is treated as untrustworthy by default. If a boring search engine result persistently sent me to the same site written by a human, and I found the results worthwhile, that site (and the responsible human) would build trust over time and I’d do less checking. But with AI you’re constantly dealing with the “data slurry”, so no trust is (or ever should be) built. You’re starting from scratch, every time.
