RickRussell_CA @ RickRussell_CA @kbin.social

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Joined

2 yr. ago

To be clear, I don't think the fundamental issue is whether humans have a training dataset. We do. And it includes copyrighted work. It also includes our unique sensory perceptions and lots of stuff that is definitely NOT the result of someone else's work. I don't think anyone would dispute that copyrighted text, pictures, sounds are integrated into human consciousness.

The question is whether it is ethical, and should it be legal, to feed copyrighted works into an AI training dataset and use that AI to produce material that replaces, displaces, or competes with the copyrighted work used to train it. Should it be legal to distribute or publish that AI-produced material at all if the copyright holder objects to the use of their work in an AI training dataset? (I concede that these may be two separate, but closely related, questions.)

I hesitate to call it a problem because, by the way it's defined, subjective experience is innately personal.

I've gotten into this question with others, and when I began to propose thought problems (like, what if we could replicate sensory inputs? If you saw/heard/felt everything the same as someone else, would you have the same subjective conscious experience?), I'd get pushback: "that's not subjective experience, subjective experience is part of the MIND, you can't create it or observe it or measure it...".

When push comes to shove, people define consciousness or subjective experience as that aspect of experience that CANNOT be shown or demonstrated to others. It's baked into the definition. As soon as you venture into what can be shown or demonstrated, you're out of bounds.

So it's not a "problem", as such. It's a limitation of our ability to self-observe the operating state of our own minds. An interesting question, perhaps, but not a problem. Just a feature of the system.

There is a so-called "hard problem of consciousness", although I take exception with calling it a problem.

The general problem is that you can't really prove that you have subjective experience to others, and neither can you determine if others have it, or whether they merely act like they have it.

But, a somewhat obvious difference between AIs and humans is that AIs will never give you an answer that is not statistically derivable from their training dataset. You can give a human a book on a topic, and ask them about the topic, and they can give you answers that seem to be "their own conclusions" that are not explicitly from the book. Whether this is because humans have randomness injected into their reason, or they have imperfect reasoning, or some genuine animus of "free will" and consciousness, we cannot rightly say. But it is a consistent difference between the humans and the AIs.

The Monty Hall problem discussed in the article -- in which AIs are asked to answer the Monty Hall problem, but they are given explicit information that violate the assumptions of the Monty Hall problem -- is a good example of something where a human will tend to get it right, through creativity, while an AI will tend to get it wrong, due to statistical regression to the mean.

beehaw.org -- a lemmy instance specifically geared toward quality discussion and keeping everybody nice to each other -- has basically been told by Lemmy devs that the moderation tools they want and need just aren't in the roadmap, and they'll need to fork and develop their own version.

That's an incredibly disheartening attitude.

I think the big challenge right now is sustaining growth. I don't think many reddit refugees are paying for their fediverse services.

I support dessalines on Patreon, but I don't really know what else I should be doing. I think that folks who want to run these services need to figure out how to charge money for it, or they won't be able to buy infrastructure or network bandwidth.

EDIT: OK I just bought 5 coffees for ernest: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin

Those are versions of the characters from the 1978 Ralph Bakshi animated version of The Lord of the Rings.

Yeah, I use the regular Youtube client more frequently, because my senses aren't assaulted by a crapass load of thumbnails of dumb stuff.

Please roll D100 on the Hurl Chunks subtable.

He's rich. First rule of being rich is never pay when you can borrow.

Oh goody. There's a RickRussellCA@lemm.ee and it's not me. And it's using one of my older profile pictures.

EDIT: 2023/8/29 update -- I posted to the lemm.ee support community and the admins decided to disable the account. Well done!

I like pixelfed.social, but I'm an admittedly "lite" user of Instagram, don't really post my own stuff, just use it to find interesting photos. It's been good for that.

On the one hand, I think it's a bit ridiculous to hold LTT's feet to the fire over ShortCircuit/Unboxing/Tech Preview type content, and Steve Burke takes himself a little too seriously sometimes.

On the other hand, LTT set themselves up for that criticism by making explicit product recommendations in those unboxing videos, and invoking claims based on "lab testing". LTT needs to draw a bright line between unboxing content and reviews, and make it super clear that unboxing content is not a review. "I wouldn't recommend" is not the right language for a tech preview.

And really -- letting one of your employees smack-talk the competition in a lab walkthrough? Just cut that part of the video out. LTT waltzed into this with sloppy editing.

US Virgin Islands: nah we're good

I guess they had an epiphany.

As someone who has geeked out on fonts since we were trading bitmap fonts for System 5 on the Mac, I can say that article is fine. Believe it or not, all of that actually matters to graphic design/text design people.

Did you enjoy your core download journey?

I don't quite get the complaints. Sync (non-Pro) was always ad supported. Nothing has changed.

LJ Dawson is charging more for "Ultra" features (understandable, since this whole reddit kerfuffle has upset his business model), but you don't need Ultra to enjoy the Sync client, and you don't even need to pay that higher price to disable ads.

I'm gonna call this intentional satire:

limited by screen width in how many files it could sh...

I still think old shitty statues and stuff should be put in a museum or something

I don't think anyone has a problem with that. But, that's usually not what the regressive types are complaining about.

To use the US example, the overwhelming number of "Confederate Monuments" were erected many decades after the Civil War, and typically funded by white supremacist groups or their close allies in city and state government. They were installed in public parks, on public easements, in front of public buildings, etc. Notably, they are typically not on graves, old battlefields, etc.

Folks quite reasonably think we should remove monuments that were put up as a big "F U" to remind black folks who is really in charge. These statues are certainly shitty, but they also are not "old". They're much younger than the people/conflicts they memorialize, and have no historical significance (except to the white supremacists who put them there).

Of course it's not just the US. I remember in the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain, communist sympathizers complained at the removal of Soviet monuments. I remember college professors complaining at the renaming of Leningrad back to St. Petersburg, calling it a "dangerous right-wing move" and an erasure of Lenin's history and legacy.

So... subscribe to communities you want, and ignore the rest? Isn't that how everything works?