Can I add 4. the integrated video downloader actually downloads videos, in whatever format you would want, and with no internet connection required to watch them. This to me is still the biggest scam ‘feature’ of Youtube Premium. You can ‘’‘download’‘’ videos, but not as eg. an mp4, but as an encrypted file only playable inside the Youtube app, and only if you connected to the internet in the last couple of days can you play it.

That’s not downloading, that’s just jacking my disk space to avoid buffering the video from Youtube’s servers. That’s not a feature, that’s me paying for Youtube’s benefit.

I cancelled and haven’t paid for Premium in years because of it. When someone scams me out of features I paid for, I don’t reward that shit until they either stop lying in their feature list, or actually start delivering.

It can’t simultaneously be super easy and bad, yet also a massive propaganda tool. You can definitely dislike it for legitimate reasons though. I’m not trying to anger you or something, but if you know about #1, you should also know why it’s a good tool for misinformation. Or you might, as I proposed, be part of the group that incorrectly assumed they already know all about it and will be more likely to fall for AI propaganda in the future.

eg. Trump posting pictures of him as the pope, with Gaza as a paradise, etc. These still have some AI tells, and Trump is a grifting moron with no morals or ethics, so even if it wasn’t AI you would still be skeptical. But one of these days someone like him that you don’t know ahead of time is going to make an image or a video that’s just plausible enough to spread virally. And it will be used to manufacture legitimacy for something horrible, as other propaganda has in the past.

but why do we want it? What does it do for us?

You yourself might not want it, and that’s totally fine.

It’s a very helpful tool for creatives such as vfx artists and game developers, who are kind of masters of making things not real, seem real. The difference is, that they don’t want to lie or obfuscate what tools they use, but #2 gives them a huge incentive to do just that, not because they don’t want to disclose it, but because chronically overworked and underpaid people don’t also have time to deal with a hate mob on the side.

And I don’t mean they use it as a replacement for their normal work, or just to sit around and do nothing, but they integrate it into their processes to enhance either the quality, or to reduce time spent on tasks with little creative input.

If you don’t believe me that’s what they use it for, here’s a list of games on Steam with at least an 75% rating, 10000 reviews, and an AI disclosure.

And that’s a self perpetuating cycle. People hide their AI usage to avoid hate -> making less people aware of the depths of what it can be used for, making them only think AI slop or other obviously AI generated material is all it can do -> which makes them biased towards any kind of AI usage because they think it’s easy to use well or just lazy to use -> giving people hate for it -> in turn making people hide their AI usage more.

By giving creatives the room to teach others about what AI helped them do, regardless of wanting to like or dislike it, such as through behind the scenes, artbooks, guides, etc. We increase the awareness in the general population about what it can actually do, and that it is being used. Just imagine a world where you never knew about the existence of VFX, or just thought it was used for that one stock explosion and nothing else.

PS. Bitcoin is still around and decently big, I’m not a fan of that myself, but that’s just objective reality. NFTs have always been mostly good for scams. But really, these technologies have little to no bearing on the debate around AI, history is littered with technologies that didn’t end up panning out, but it’s the ones that do that cause shifts. AI is such a technology in my eyes.

I didn’t say AI would solve that, but I’ll re-iterate the point I’m making differently:

1. Spreading awareness of how AI operates, what it does, what it doesn’t, what it’s good at, what it’s bad at, how it’s changing, (Such as knowing there are hundreds if not thousands of regularly used AI models out there, some owned by corporations, others open source, and even others somewhere in between), reduces misconceptions and makes people more skeptical when they see material that might have been AI generated or AI assisted being passed off as real. This is especially important to teach during transition periods such as now when AI material is still more easily distinguishable from real material.

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2. People creating a hostile environment where AI isn’t allowed to be discussed, analyzed, or used in ethical and good faith manners, make it more likely some people who desperately need to be aware of #1 stay ignorant. They will just see AI as a boogeyman, failing to realize that eg. AI slop isn’t the only type of material that AI can produce. This makes them more susceptible to seeing something made by AI and believing or misjudging the reality of the material.

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3. Corporations, and those without the incentive to use AI ethically, will not be bothered by #2, and will even rejoice people aren’t spending time on #1. It will make it easier for them to claw AI technology for themselves through obscurity, legislation, and walled gardens, and the less knowledge there is in the general population, the more easily it can be used to influence people. Propaganda works, and the propagandist is always looking for technology that allows them to reach more people, and ill informed people are easier to manipulate.

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4. And lastly, we must reward those that try to achieve #1 and avoid #2, while punishing those in #3. We must reward those that use the technology as ethically and responsibly as possible, as any prospect of completely ridding the world of AI are just futile at this point, and a lot of care will be needed to avoid the pitfalls where #3 will gain the upper hand.

Did you respond to the wrong person? The article nor my comment was about one specific AI model.

This is the inevitable end game of some groups of people trying to make AI usage taboo using anger and intimidation without room for reasonable disagreement. The ones devoid of morals and ethics will use it to their hearts content and would never interact with your objections anyways, and when the general public is ignorant of what it is and what it can really do, people get taken advantage off.

Support open source and ethical usage of AI, where artists, creatives, and those with good intentions are not caught in your legitimate grievances with corporate greed, totalitarians, and the like. We can’t reasonably make it go away, but we can reduce harmful use of it.

While there are spaces that are luckily still looking at it neutrally and objectively, there are definitely leftist spaces where AI hatred has snuck in, even to a reality-denying degree where lies about what AI is or isn’t has taken hold, and where providing facts to refute such things are rejected and met with hate and shunning purely because it goes against the norm.

And I can’t help but agree that they are being played so that the only AI technology that will eventually be feasible will not be open source, and in control of the very companies left learning folks have dislike or hatred for.

The absolute irony

I never claimed anything besides that breakthroughs did happen since you claimed, which is objectively true. You claimed very concretely that AI was the same for over a decade, aka it was the same in at least 2015 if I’m being charitable, all of these things were researched in the last 7-8 years and only became the products as we know them in the last 5 years. (Aka 2020)

Breakthroughs are not a myth. They still happen even when the process is iterative. That page even explains it. The advent of the GAN (2014-2018), which got overtaken by transformers in around 2017 for which GPTs and Diffusion models later got developed on. More hardware is what allowed those technologies to work better and bigger but without those breakthroughs you still wouldnt have the AI boom of today.

ML technology has existed for a while, but it’s wild to claim that the technology pre-2020 is the same. A breakthrough happened.

Yeah I agree that’s a fair enough assumption 😄

Never assumed you did :), but yes, as little assumptions is the best. But as you can already tell, it’s hard to communicate when you take no assumptions when people make explicit statements crafted to dispel assumptions, that are entirely plausible for a hypothetical real person to have.

In fact, your original statement of “They have no doubts. Never occurred to them it might be a joke…”, is in itself a pretty big assumption. Unless, of course. I assume that statement to be a hyperbole, or even satire. But if we want to have fun talking about a shitpost we do kind of have to decide on an assumptive position on the meme that can’t talk back.

People making assumptions is the issue.

There’s assumptions involved in detecting satire from just text as well. You would just have a Reverse Poe’s law where “any extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for satire of those views without clear indicator of the author’s intent”.

Normally when people say or type things we (justifiably) assume that to be what they mean, which is why satire works much better when spoken because intonation can make the satire explicit without changing the words or saying it out loud.

One likely reason the backlash has been so strong is because, on a platform as close-knit as Reddit, betrayal cuts deep.

Another laughable quote after the APIcalypse, at least for the people that remained on Reddit after being totally ok with being betrayed.

Except as you demonstrated, it requires quite a few leaps of interpretation, assuming the worst interpretations of OP’s statement, which is why it’s silly. OP clearly limited their statement to themselves and AI.

Now if OP said, “everyone should use a calculator or die”, maybe then it would have been a valid response.

You’re correct on your analysis, older governments and the farming industry alike essentially ignored the problem hoping it would go away (spoiler: it didnt).

Luckily that farmer party is not big anymore. They do still hold quite some seats in the Dutch senate from the 1-2 elections they were big (which they will lose in a couple of years), but not in the house anymore, where they are essentially only a small party now and hold / are projected no more than 2-4 seats of 150 seats in total. (Sadly most of their voters jumped ship to the next group of populists, the anti immigration party 🥲)

but if you had infinite usable desk space then what, exactly, would be the argument against it?

So I guess we agree then. Circumstances make something more or less optimal, meaning they are not objectively more optimal in every situation. That was my entire point, nothing more.

That’s true, and if that’s the case then that definitely changes the choice. Although, afaik these smaller keyboards often come with software to remap keys or add macro’s at the driver level. (And for this choice specifically, 75% keyboard and higher do seem to mostly have both F keys and home/end). But yeah, some people’s use consist of just writing emails and streaming video, in which case they won’t care about any of that.

If a full-sized keyboard provides all the keys you reasonably need to do your tasks efficiently, then yes a full-sized keyboard is superior. But that is just not the use case for everyone, hence why it can’t be objectively so. Unless you want to imply that more keys even if you don’t need them is better anyways.

If so, you could argue this monstrosity of a keyboard (or something even bigger) is what everyone should be using if they have the space, since it has way more buttons than a full-sized keyboard, making it even more objectively superior. In reality you would not use more than 30% of the buttons on that keyboard, so the rest might as well not exist. But if you are, I don’t know, some macro-wizard playing 4 instances of WoW at the same time, maybe it is objectively superior for your needs, but for me a normal sized keyboard would do.

But to try and sense where you’re coming from, it should also be said that someone telling you their choice is better and disregarding that your criteria aren’t the same as theirs is being silly as well. And sometimes they can be stubborn and agitated about that as well - exactly the kind of hostility I meant in my initial comment. But someone’s got to step up and swallow their pride and accept it really is just all subjective at the end of the day.