Well, this land should be public land, anyway.

Who the fuck “owns” mountains? I don’t own a fucking mountain. Only nature owns mountains. Give it back to the public, instead of encouraging this nightmare ownership scenario.

Once you’ve traded your principles for proximity to power, do you even run your own company?

No. See also: Shareholder Primacy.

The company’s response was an auto-reply: “Legacy Media Lies.”

Funny, that seems to be the correct answer to the headline.

My point is that xai is making the case for AI regulation for us.

Ha, regulation? With what governing body? Congress is hopeless, because apathy has griped a majority of the voting public, and there’s still a large portion of morons who thought MAGA was a good idea.

Nope, not really. You occasionally find them in some old government building, but only because it’s always existed that way, and they just don’t want to bother replacing it with a modern digital clock.

This line of thinking is the same as saying cursive writing is worth teaching.

So, are we saying we’re still going to be happy with a system that you can bypass with “ignore all previous instructions” or some stupid magic phrase like that?

Nobody is bitching about photoshopping, a thing that exists and almost anybody can do to put some person’s face on a naked body or whatever situation they want. It’s existed for decades. Suddenly, journalists are inventing a new moral panic with LLMs, saying they can do whatever they want with pictures, despite the fact that this technology already existed, it’s just a little bit easier now. It’s not a new problem, so reporting on it is just shifting the blame to a new boogeyman.

See, the magic formula is to slap the word “AI” on a headline and boom, instant attention! It doesn’t matter what it’s about, if it’s a new problem, if it’s only slightly related to the main root cause… As long as you’re talking shit about every angle around AI in the most extreme ways possible, mission accomplished. It is outrage reporting because there is no solutioning or historical context. The sole purpose is the outrage, because outrages generates clicks. It’s too hard for journalists to think outside the outrage box.

Because they are fucking old. Old clocks. Useless clocks. Not a skill worth teaching, except as an anachronism when explaining why Big Ben and similar building clocks work the way they do.

it appears children have fallen out of practice doing so in an increasingly digital world.

Increasingly? Brother, we’re already there. It’s all digital. Have you seen the internet yet?

Schools haven’t adapted solely out of spite, to propagate this self-fulfilling cycle of teaching how they work, so that their own students can read school clocks. As soon as they leave the school zone, that knowledge is practically useless to them.

No, not really.

These people and journalists don’t see to remember celebrity photoshops. Or maybe they do and want to continue to feed the outrage machine.

Pardon me if I duck out of my Two Minutes Hate for today.

unique political reality

In other words, substituting realities and replacing them with his own.

LLM liability is not exactly cut-and-dry, either. It doesn’t really matter how many rules you put on LLMs to not do something, people will find a way to break it to do the thing it said it wasn’t going to do. For fuck’s sake, have we really forgotten the lessons of Asimov’s I, Robot short stories? Almost every one of them was about how the “unbreakable” three laws were very breakable thing, because absolute laws don’t make sense in every context. (While I hate using AI fiction with LLM comparisons, this one fits.)

Ultimately, it’s the person’s responsibility for telling it to do a thing, and getting the thing it was told to get. LLMs are a tool, nothing more. If somebody buys a hammer, and misuses that hammer by bashing somebody’s brains in, we arrest the person who committed murder. If there’s some security hole on a website that a hacker used to steal data, depending on how negligent the company is, there is some liability with that company not providing enough protections against their data. But, the hacker 100% broke the law, and would get convicted, if caught.

Regardless of all of that, LLMs aren’t fucking sentient and these dumbass journalists need to stop personifying them.

Or Photoshop.

This exists, therefore they don’t actually do that.

sounds-like-a-distraction-from-the-epstein-files.png

if she died on the plane (which is what Easyjet says) she still died in spanish territory.

It also makes the headline kind of bullshit.

Download all existing literature to build a library for preservation and you’re called a pirate.

Said library contains petabytes of the exact text of each and every piece of literature.

Download all existing literature from aforementioned library to train an LLM and you’re a tech innovator.

Said model contains gigabytes of a bunch of weights that can never go back to the exact words of the book.

What a strange world we live in.

It’s not strange at all. It’s degrees of compression. You compress a JPEG to the point that it’s unrecognizable, and it’s no longer breaking copyright. It’s essentially like trying to write a book you just read based on memory.

A long time ago, I used to work at a gas station when post-pay was allowed. All of the pumps required the cashier to activate them when somebody picked up the nozzle, but it was just expected that you hit the button to allow them to pump first. Most of the time, it’s just a normal transaction. Sometimes, you realized some asshole stole gas when the next guy was at the pump.

Enough of this happened, especially during periods of high gas prices, that my boss would say “prepay is required now”, and we’d tell them they have to come inside first. Eventually, paying with credit cards was so popular, and cash transactions were so rare, that nobody allowed post-pay anymore. There wasn’t a point, when the risk was people would steal gas, and it’s so easy to just stick a CC in a slot.

So, yeah, there’s locks on the pumps, but if post-pay is the norm, it doesn’t really matter.

You pump the gas, go in, tell the cashier the pump number, pay, go back and leave.

You’ve described post-pay pumps, which is how they used to do it 20-25 years ago. This is how pump theft happens: They pump the gas… aaaand run off.

And yet, she was still sentenced to five years in prison. Legal fees aren’t going to make up for that.