Spyke

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Well, AI made our search unusable dogshit. But AI *also* made us miss our climate goals, so

there’s this type of reply guy on fedi lately who does the “well actually querying LLMs only happens in bursts and training is much more efficient than you’d think and nvidia says their gpus are energy-efficient” thing whenever the topic comes up

and meanwhile a bunch of major companies have violated their climate pledges and say it’s due to AI, they’re planning power plants specifically for data centers expanded for the push into AI, and large GPUs are notoriously the part of a computer that consumes the most power and emits a ton of heat (which notoriously has to be cooled in a way that wastes and pollutes a fuckton of clean water)

but the companies don’t publish smoking gun energy usage statistics on LLMs and generative AI specifically so who can say

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Copilot AI calls journalist a child abuser, Microsoft tries to launder responsibility

Copilot then listed a string of crimes Bernklau had supposedly committed — saying that he was an abusive undertaker exploiting widows, a child abuser, an escaped criminal mental patient. [SWR, in German]

These were stories Bernklau had written about. Copilot produced text as if he was the subject. Then Copilot returned Bernklau’s phone number and address!

and there’s fucking nothing in place to prevent this utterly obvious failure case, other than if you complain Microsoft will just lazily regex for your name in the result and refuse to return anything if it appears

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Moderators Across Social Media Struggle to Contain Celebrations of UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Assassination

this is a gentle reminder to posters in this thread that the fediverse in general is nowhere near secure from an opsec perspective; don’t post anything that compromises yourself or us.

with that said, happy December 4th to those who celebrate. post commemorative cocktail recipes here.

e: remember, they call it the fediverse cause it’s full of feds

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Firefox browser falls to AI. What do we do now?

if you’re here to recommend ladybird, tell us why you’re doing advocacy for that trash fire in spite of the well-sourced, ah, downsides pointed out in article and video linked from the OP.

same for brave. I don’t give a fuck if privacyguides told you it was the goodest browser.

if you’re here to advocate for ladybird or brave and haven’t read the article in the OP, fuck off. don’t come here pretending to discuss something you haven’t read.

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Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results

But don’t worry! Google’s AI summaries will soon have ads!

dear fuck, pasting ads onto the part of Google search that’s already known to be unreliable and annoying at best seems like a terrible idea. for a laugh, let’s see if there’s any justification for this awful shit in the linked citation

Ads have always been an important part of consumers’ information journeys.

oh these people are on the expensive drugs huh

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Card game developer says it paid an 'AI artist' $90,000 to generate card art because 'no one comes close to the quality he delivers'. Can you guess what the "cards" are? In 2024, even

"We pay our AI artist 15,000 USD per month for exactly 10 hours of work," reads an X post from the official Champions TCG account. "Why? In that time, he still makes HUNDREDS of AMAZING bits of artwork—ASTRONOMICALLY FASTER than ANY team of traditional artists.

[…]

The anonymous artist "has 15 years of digital art experience" and doesn't use social media, he says.

"For us to get this with a team of traditional artists it would cost us a lot more money, and time," said Malec. "The guy's a pro and he charges what he's worth. We are well connected in the space and no one comes close to the quality he delivers."

I’m convinced this is money laundering, and pcgamer is negligent for not putting “NFT card game” anywhere in the title for this one so people have sufficient warning of that before they read half the article

"His art is 100% AI generated, yet it has no extra fingers, no generic designs, no mistakes... It has consistent evolutions, skins, alt art styles—literally no one is on his level. We don't care how he makes it, we only care that the end user enjoys our game."

extreme disagree on these not being generic — they look like shit, to be honest, and most of them seem to be poorly framed on the card at the very least. according to the article, a bunch of them also have extra fingers and mistakes, so there’s that too.

Instead, the company challenged artists to complete a series of "art tests" in 48 hours, claiming that anyone who can match the quality of its AI prompt writer will be considered for a job as their assistant.

aaaand there it is. do unpaid labor for us to prove your worth in this ridiculously unfair competition, and if you’re lucky you’ll get the chance to make less than minimum wage photoshopping the extra fingers out of thousands of shitty AI generated card images

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Framework goes full fash, supports Hyprland and Omarchy

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oh yeah totally, open transphobia and fascism is just as bad as being

known for being a tankie with biases of his own

the fuck is wrong with you. this is what centrism does to a motherfucker.

(and for the record, devault’s firmly wedged in my brain as a particularly dramatic neoliberal with a checkered past, but the fucker brings receipts (yes this is the same link in the OP that our guest decided to complain about, go read it because it’s fucking damning))

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OpenAI next model Orion by December, it's 100x cooler bro trust me bro no we're not releasing to the public bro it's just too dangerous and cool bro

really stretching the meaning of the word release past breaking if it’s only going to be available to companies friendly with OpenAI

Orion has been teased by an OpenAI executive as potentially up to 100 times more powerful than GPT-4; it’s separate from the o1 reasoning model OpenAI released in September. The company’s goal is to combine its LLMs over time to create an even more capable model that could eventually be called artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

so I’m calling it now, this absolute horseshit’s only purpose is desperate critihype. as with previous rounds of this exact same thing, it’ll only exist to give AI influencers a way to feel superior in conversation and grift more research funds. oh of course Strawberry fucks up that prompt but look, my advance access to Orion does so well I’m sure you’ll agree with me it’s AGI! no you can’t prompt it yourself or know how many times I ran the prompt why would I let you do that

That timing lines up with a cryptic post on X by OpenAI Altman, in which he said he was “excited for the winter constellations to rise soon.” If you ask ChatGPT o1-preview what Altman’s post is hiding, it will tell you that he’s hinting at the word Orion, which is the winter constellation that’s most visible in the night sky from November to February (but it also hallucinates that you can rearrange the letters to spell “ORION”).

there’s something incredibly embarrassing about the fact that Sammy announced the name like a lazy ARG based on a GPT response, which GPT proceeded to absolutely fuck up when asked about. a lot like Strawberry really — there’s so much Binance energy in naming the new version of your product after the stupid shit the last version fucked up, especially if the new version doesn’t fix the problem

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the hackernewses whining that linus is so unfair in enacting legal sanctions against the russian who works in development for bomb components are comedy gold

I’m slowly feasting on this awful shit but I gotta jump in and say it, these posts are the most Russian thing I’ve ever seen:

Just to be clear, I'm not saying good words to any regime. I mean both the US sanction and the Russian invasion suck. I don't want another country bossing over what you can do, and I don't want another country pointing guns on your head either.

Russia is bad, but that doesn't mean I'm in support of bans like this without a reason. Just because you "have the reason to commit crimes" is not strong enough a reason to exclude you! How child's bully it is!

a bunch of these posts are literally the exact documented template that the Internet Research Agency used. so many of them degrade into weird broken English as the poster tries and fails to modify the script for the situation.

this is fucking amazing, seriously. if you want to sharpen your instincts for what foreign state trolling looks like, these are the posts that’ll do it.

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That tracing woodgrains peice on David Gerard is out

In April 2014, Gerard created a RationalWiki article about Effective Altruism, framing the subculture as “well-off libertarians congratulating each other on what wonderful human beings they are for working rapacious [s---]weasel jobs but choosing their charities well, but never in any way questioning the system that the problems are in the context of,” “a mechanism to push the libertarian idea that charity is superior to government action or funding,” and people who “will frequently be seen excusing their choice to work completely [f---]ing evil jobs because they're so charitable.”

it's fucking amazing how accurate this is, and almost a decade before SBF started explaining himself and never stopped

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Sam Altman is full of shit (and totally has a thing for Scarlett Johansson)

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given how fucking embarrassing this has been for OpenAI, I’m expecting a lot of variants of the current “uhh I listened to the voice and it didn’t sound like her to me” shit take from the peanut gallery, which really falls apart given there’s enough of a resemblance that OpenAI had to take down the voice and refuses to give a straight answer on the sources used to create it

also both altman and a fuckton of breathless journalists compared the fucking thing with one of Johansson’s performances? like I said, fucking embarrassing shit for OpenAI

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Copilot AI calls journalist a child abuser, Microsoft tries to launder responsibility

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god, so this is actually the best the AI researchers can do with the tools they’ve shit out into the world without giving any thought to failure cases or legal liability (beyond their manager on slackTeams claiming it’s been taken care of)

so fuck it, let’s make the defamation machine a non-optional component of windows. we’ll just make it a P0 when someone who could actually get us in legal trouble complains! everyone else is a P2 that never gets assigned.