FaceDeer

That’s not how synthetic data generation generally works. It uses AI to process data sources, generating well-formed training data based on existing data that’s not so useful directly. Not to generate it entirely from its own imagination.

The comments assuming otherwise are ironic because it’s misinformation that people keep telling each other.

The “how will we know if it’s real” question has the same answer as it always has. Check if the source is reputable and find multiple reputable sources to see if they agree.

“Is there a photo of the thing” has never been a particularly great way of judging whether something is accurately described in the news. This is just people finding out something they should have already known.

If the concern is over the verifiability of the photos themselves, there are technical solutions that can be used for that problem.

I’ve found my participation slowly declining here on the Fediverse, and ramping back up again on Reddit. I think I’m never going to stop coming here entirely, there’s plenty of neat links that come along to explore, but the main thing that’s causing decline is that IMO the communities here are a lot “bubblier.” It’s probably inherent in the simple fact that they’re small, and that they’re populated by a very self-selected fragment of social media, but the result is that if I “say the wrong thing” I get pummeled with downvotes and snide comments a lot easier here. Makes it less interesting to comment at all. Some of Reddit’s communities are pretty insular too but at least there are enough of them that I can find ones to my taste.

As a major example that comes to mind, all of the technology communities I’ve found here seem to be quite strongly anti-AI. I have an interest in AI, but when I click through to the comments on stories about AI topics it’s often nothing but rants about how awful it is. And if I say anything - even to correct a factual error - I get piled on. So lately I just sigh and move on.

Not necessarily. If they’re low on cash then cutting unnecessary costs is not unreasonable. What is Mozilla’s core goal? Perhaps the “advocacy” and “global programs” divisions weren’t all that relevant to it, and so their funding is better put elsewhere.

Entertainment.

If you think it’s supposed to be predictive you’re perhaps confusing it with futureology, which is a more scientific field.

Fearing AI because of what you saw in “The Terminator” is like fearing sleeping pills because of what you saw in “Nightmare on Elm Street.”

IMO the best feature of democracy is not that it results in better selection of who gets to lead, because it doesn’t really - the vast majority of the electorate is not educated in the sorts of things they’d need to be educated in to make truly good decisions about this. The best feature is that every few years we “throw the bums out” and put a new batch of people in charge.

I used to be kind of ambivalent about term limits, I figured it was kind of suboptimal to have to get rid of a leader who’s doing well at some point. But with the size of the population of most democracies there’s really no constraint on the pool of perfectly adequate candidates to draw on. I’m starting to think that “one and done” might be an even better approach, at least for the highest levels. Make it so that there’s no motivation whatsoever to cling to power. Do the same with congressmen and senators, perhaps. Let them prove their capabilities with a political career in local politics, where it’s less important if someone ends up with some kind of corrupt fiefdom because the higher levels of government can keep them in check.

There are people who want AI, crypto, and IoT things. If there weren’t then there’d be no money to be made in selling it.

There have been many systems developed over the years for handling decentralized data storage, decentralized user identities, and decentralized decision-making. There are excellent options out there for all this stuff.

IMO the problem is that there’s a huge “not invented here” problem, combined with a popular “ew, I don’t want to be associated with that technology (or more accurately with the group behind that technology)” reflex that has nothing to do with the technology itself. So projects like the Fediverse keep reinventing the wheel over and over, and whenever a project manages to do something right it’s rare for the other projects to abandon their own implementations to borrow from the best.

If it’s not communicating anything, what’s the point?

My point is that if we turn up our gibberish dial now then at least our llms will be learning the wrong thing & we have some control.

We’d be covering ourselves in poop to prevent people from sitting next to us on the train. Sure, people will avoid sitting next to us, but in the meantime we’ll be covered in poop.

And then other people will learn the trick, cover themselves in poop too, and now everyone’s poopy and the trick stops working.

There is still a lot of understanding that we do automatically that an llm will never do.

Are you willing to bet the convenience of comprehensible online discourse on that? “Automatically understanding stuff” is basically the one job of LLMs.

LLMs model language, and coming up with some kind of “gibberish” filter is simply inventing a new language. If there’s semantic meaning in it the LLMs will figure it out just like any other language, and if there isn’t semantic meaning then we’ve lost the ability to communicate entirely. I see no upside.

In my experience the vast majority of posts about Elon Musk are from people who hate him and are tired of hearing about him.

Well, the “at least for now” part is my point - if people start using “gibberish” to communicate or to hide their communication, that provides training material for LLMs to let them figure out how to use it too.

LLMs learn how to communicate based on existing examples of communication. As long as humans are communicating with each other somehow then LLMs will be able to train how to do that too. They have the same communication capabilities that we do at this point, so there’s not really any way we can make a secret clubhouse that they can’t figure out how to infiltrate.

Personally, I think there’s two main routes we can go to deal with this. Either we can simply accept that there’s no way to be 100% sure we’re talking to a human any more and evaluate the value of our conversation based on the content of the words spoken rather than the composition of the entity generating them, or we could come up with some kind of “proof of personhood” system to allow people to label the text the write as coming from them.

The latter is extremely hard to do, of course, both from a technical and cultural perspective. And such a system would likely still allow someone’s “person token” to be sneakily used by AI, either by voluntarily delegating it (I could very well be retyping all of this out of a ChatGPT window) or through hackery.

So I’m inclined toward the former. If I’m chatting with someone and I’m having a good time doing it, and then later I find out it was a bot, why should that change how much fun I had?

I don’t see how that would be practical. People who aren’t “in on the joke”, as it were, will call out the gibberish and downvote it. If enough people are “in on the joke” then the whole forum becomes useless and some other forum will be created to fill the role of the original. The AI will train off of that one.

Basically, if you don’t want an AI training on your content, then don’t post your content in public where an AI will see it. The Fediverse is the last place you should be posting since its very nature is about openly broadcasting your content to whoever wants to see it.

You realize that this is only going to train LLMs how to recognize “gibberish?”

It’s unfortunate that there’s such a powerful knee-jerk prejudice against blockchain technology these days that perfectly good solutions are sitting right there in front of us but can’t be used because they have an association with the dreaded scarlet letters “NFT.”

Not only can AI do that, it probably does it far better than a human would.

I like XKCD’s solution. Aside from the fact that it would heavily reinforce whatever bubble each community lived in, of course.

There is a certain amount of irony when people respond to a comment that mentions AI with a reflexive “AI is just a fancy autocomplete!” Without any relevance to the larger context.

Yeah. A lot of people loudly declaring that they’re switching to Linux, followed by them staying with Windows anyway.

But it’s yet another opportunity to post a comment about how much we hate cybertrucks and the people who own them, so up it goes!