David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

RE: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/117396625341557692

Hey #FreeBSD folks, NetBSD hit more than double their funding target after adopting a strong no-LLMs policy. Something to think about while you draft yours, perhaps?

So, OpenAI admits two things in disclosures presented to the court:

• That their products are utterly dependent on work ingested without compensation.
• That their derived product is directly substituting for this work, removing the economic incentive to perform that work in the first place.

Meanwhile, the EFF filed an amicus brief in the case claiming that this use is exactly what was intended by the ‘To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts’ justification for the existence of copyright in the US Constitution.

The other day, I wanted to see if alcohol-free port existed. The top search link went to a page of the 20 best alcohol-free ports! Except none of them were port, they were all spirits (not even other fortified wines). The ‘AI’ summary described a fictional process for removing alcohol from port and had two citations, neither of which supported the claim. The next 30 pages were all LLM slop that talked about what port is for a long time before saying that there’s no alcohol-free version.

I have been using the web since the mid ‘90s and it has never been this bad. Anyone advocating for ‘AI’ is advocating for a future where this damage is spread to all facets of life.

*All is not well in the Land of Microslop, my goodness what scoldings they're getting

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/github-is-failing-me-every-single-day-and-it-is-personal-after-xbox-and-windows-now-github-is-in-crisis-microsoft-what-are-you-doing

"Two companies, working independently, arrived at the same conclusion: the next step for AI assistants is watching what you do on screen, all the time, and building memory from it. Both built it. Both shipped it dormant. Both are waiting." #unsurprising

https://medium.com/autocomplete-real-world-ai/openai-telepathy-the-secret-screen-observer-fbe3405bbc26

@EUCommission

I don’t know if this account is actually monitored, or just a publishing place, but you may have noticed that this post has received almost overwhelmingly negative responses.

You could disregard this as Mastodon bias, but keep in mind that the biggest bias on Mastodon is that people who understand and built core parts of the information technology that you use every day are massively over represented. This is probably the only place you will get a lot of replies from people who both understand technology and do not have a financial incentive to hype things to get large amounts of government funding.

EDIT: I should add, I used machine learning during my PhD and there are a lot of problems for which it is a really good fit. But, in the current climate, it’s generally safe to interpret ‘AI’ as meaning ‘machine learning applied to a problem where machine learning is the wrong solution’. It isn’t a technology, it’s a branding term, and it’s a branding term used almost exclusively for things that have no social benefit.

@EUCommission

Imagine what you could have done if you had ignored a hype wave pushed by grifters and scammers and instead invested that money in things that will actually improve the economy and social wellbeing.