- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.
We do not understand where you’re coming from or why you’re so incredibly angry with us. It’s not justified and does not make sense.
I’d argue that this news is over-blown. The project has more than a solid and honorable track record with insanely talented engineers behind it. AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere. I would put my faith into their decisions to improve this project by whatever means they think are best.
The truth is most commenters are not technically skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions. If GOS team, who again would be at the top % in the field, feel that this can elevate the project, should we not give them the benefit of the doubt?
My thought it was over blown until I saw them claiming that anyone on Mastodon is “not a user” and them saying that any real users are on their Discord and not complaining.
Uh, OK - Discord was semi-excusable up until 2025, but at this point anyone using it to communicate with their users is certainly not considering how bad that channel is for user privacy. Im a Graphene User, I will not use Discord, and I am not going to continue to use an OS thats supporting the rapid expansion of datacenters through the use of AI.
I don’t use Discord myself, but I think their decision to use Discord is defensible even if I find it distasteful. Their support chat isn’t meant to be a private space. (People discussing crimes and whatnot on Discord are using poor judgement.)
I think what they are trying to say there is that there is a lot of negative commentary on the Fediverse coming from people who are not users, and that they are not really beholden to those commentators. And that’s true. They don’t really have a history of smooth PR as far as I can remember.
I also think whether their acceptance AI usage is an overblown issue or not is completely unrelated to that comment, so I’m not sure why it would change your opinion of it.
Matrix is the proper space for a privacy focused community. Discord as an application is privacy invasive and requires ID to be provided. This has nothing to do with a public community not being private. It’s the wrong technology choice for what they claim to be focused on and there is no getting around that.
Discord does not require an ID unless the space you’re trying to access is marked as adult only. This obviously does not apply to a tech support community. But like I said, yeah, it’s not what I would choose. What’s your point? Graphene OS is suspect because they don’t choose your favored chat platform? And like i said, this has nothing to do with whether or not the acceptable use of AI assistance was overblown.
Exactly this. As much as I hate the current AI scenario across the board, the GOS team has shown, time and again, that they are stellar developers and coders, that they genuinely care about security, and that they are the best at countering anti-privacy on the technology front.
If any team can use AI responsibly to improve all this, it’s the GOS team. And if it ends up failing on it’s face, I expect them to move away from it if things go south. Now, if they don’t because of ‘AI addiction’, then I will be looking at what my alternative options are. Until them, I’m 100% with them, as they have not given me any reason yet to doubt their judgement.
Aaaand just like that you disqualified yourself from having an opinion worth listening to on what “insanely talented engineers” are.
I always wonder where this sentiment comes from. Whether or not AI is going anywhere is still very much up in the air
It exclusively comes from either snake oil vendors or people who are less smart than they think they are. Where the former are typically part of the latter group.
Yeah, lots of new tech that vanished because it sucked, wasn’t profitable, destroyed the environment, etc.
You cannot put the evils back into Pandora’s Box when it was already open.
Even if these companies sink, individuals can still use their own hardware for AI. Ai is here to stay whether we like it or not.
So where are all the 3D TVs? Where’s the Nintendo Virtual Boy? Betamax? Google Wave? Google+? NFTs?
Oh not transformational enough?
Ok then how long did it take electric vehicles to come back after The fossil fuel industry killed them in like 1920?
Oh here’s a good one: thalidomide. That one went away for good.
How about the hole in the ozone layer?
Sorry, AI is only a foregone conclusion because apparently everyone’s had their consent beautifully manufactured to an extreme degree.
stop. calling. slop. ai. It’s a shitty subcategory of it. Just like actual dog poo is a subcategory of organic chemical compounds.
Sure you can. Because in this case Pandora’s box is something which exists solely through a sustained, inconceivable amount of money being continuously funneled into it without any guaranteed long term benefit to the people who do so. It’s a technology which isn’t sold as a product as it exists in its current form, but a theoretical future form.
If the bottom were to fall out from under it tomorrow, it couldn’t even continue to exist as it is now, it would disappear entirely as there would be no financial incentive to keep it running. Individuals could still run what we have now offline, but its value and usefulness would degrade rapidly as time went on, because it relies on mass-scale power consumption and data theft to remain up to date, much less improve.
At the very least, you’d have to convince both the US and China to stomp it out. And then there are other countries that would be willing to pick up the slack.
AI is not something self sustaining enough to necessarily require stomping out, at least that we know of at this point. Right now AI’s future relies on its operators continuing to convince people of a theoretical future scenario.
GOS is not part of a theoretical future.
It’s not going anywhere because it’s already been here for a very long time, you just didn’t know about it
What people call “AI” is just Machine Learning.
Chatbots, OCR, Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text, Computer Vision, Web Search, Spam filtering or Fraud detection, Personalized ADs, even your phone’s camera processing algorithm.
It’s all Machine Learning, but now under new and fancy “AI” name. And it’s been here for decades.
The reason it blew up this much only now is because people realized that the more data you feed into it, the better the output becomes. And so they started exploring it more, to the extent of causing valid ethical concerns.
And that’s bullshit. The slop machines have already peaked. More input will not improve the results.
Not compared to models from 00s or 10s…
What’s with the reading comprehension, people? I was talking about pre-AI boom vs. now, not now vs. 1-2 years ago, c’mon.
LLMs use a new way of data processing (focused on language rules) which is what brought the boost. Not more training data. More training data is needed for an LLM to reach “maturity” but it also increases cost due to resource usage. And current LLMs have already absorbed basically all of the internet and most books, and since the internet is now full of slop, more unpoisoned training data does not exist. That’s why more does not help anymore.
Touché
Machine learning isn’t going anywhere. But it’s clear from the context here what we’re referring to when we say AI in this conversation.
As someone who despises the current slop hype with a passion, you’re correct on this. But only when you exclude LLMs. Because they are garbage with a net negative for mankind. Machine learning as a field however has very useful applications. Typically such that complement human assessment of data, e.g. re-viewing radiology images to flag potentially anomalous images for a second doctor to look at - not in place of the first doctor.
Finally, someone gets it!
Instead of going away, the AI will transform. It’s sort of in a bubble state rn. Once it pops, the fields where it’s useful will keep on using it, whilst those applications that have no real grounds for existing will either have their plugs pulled or resources cut.
Apparently, not to me. Explain.
Here’s a starting-point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
Pointing to a wiki page instead of actually explaining stuff isn’t going to change my mind.
Now, if you’re talking specifically about LLMs, however (which you could’ve just said so, ffs). I think their scope of application and resources wasted on them will be significantly reduced. Look at what happened to blockchains and NFT. Basically, I expect the same to happen here.
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That’s the communication problem in these conversations. Whether it’s a useful tool and whether it’s an ethical tool are two different questions. People come in and attack the developers for generating slop, and they respond that they are experienced developers who can use the tool properly to increase the security of the code or whatever. And the conversation here is about that.
And then someone like you comes in talking about ethics, which is what we should be talking about, but we are talking past each other.
You are both correct. But the former is about the engineering, the latter is about ethics. You do need to technically skilled to evaluate whether AI is a useful tool for Graphene. You don’t need to in order to critique it on ethical grounds. These are completely different topics that have nothing to do with each other.
the only people getting a net use out of LLM garbage are sub-par programmers. and I say that partially as a self burn because I have consulted slop chatbots to get some keywords / usage examples for functions I didn’t know yet. Even though I never used any drop-in code, and verified the usage of all that I “learned” from such conversations, the output was incredibly shitty and had to many holes in it that most people wouldn’t even spot because “it just works”. Using slop bots in coding / vibe-coding is offloading your incompetence as work onto future programmers.
no, we are not talking about two different things.
We are talking about one single thing.
the theft of human potential for profit, and the sacrifice of the world for the enrichment of the few due to exploiting that theft.
You are just trying to play word games and split the discussion to defend the indefensible.
Lol you are so argumentative that this is how you respond to someone agreeing with you? Forcibly putting me into the “opposing camp” against my will. All right then, live your delusion while we fight AI without you.
Calling for the murder of other people in a public forum is never wise. At best, you could (should) be permanently banned. At worst, police could show up at your house and lock you away forever (the world would be better place for it!).
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So, username checks out…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯