The Ai thread

[Yoused]

All to force it on to a public who mostly doesn't want anything to do with it

Many of us are just damn fucking tired of being marketed to, and that is the number one driver of LLM research.

 

[Eric]

Many of us are just damn fucking tired of being marketed to, and that is the number one driver of LLM research.

I used to respect Zuckerberg but now I loathe him, just a constant drone of "look at this new AI feature" that nobody wants or ever asked for that I am now forced to skirt in order to maintain normal usage where I can make decisions about what I want.

 

[Eric]

Like raising a racist child in the south, it only knows what it's taught.

Meta appoints anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theorist Robby Starbuck as AI bias advisor

Meta has appointed right-wing, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-DEI conspiracy theorist Robby Starbuck to advise them on preventing political bias in AI.

www.thepinknews.com

 

[dada_dave]

Like raising a racist child in the south, it only knows what it's taught.

Meta appoints anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theorist Robby Starbuck as AI bias advisor

Meta has appointed right-wing, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-DEI conspiracy theorist Robby Starbuck to advise them on preventing political bias in AI.

www.thepinknews.com

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chatbot-death/

And the main thrust of the article is somehow worse.

Also speaking of using far right wing politicos for advisors on AI projects:

 

[dada_dave]

 

[Eric]

There was a time when you needed to troubleshoot and use your wit to figure out technical problems, mostly gone now in favor of Google. Most tech jobs by and large are going the way of the dinosaur but this seems like a natural evolution with AI.

The key is seeing what role one can shift into to keep relevant with the trend. I used to architect and build medium to large scale Sharepoint server farms, it would take weeks and months in some cases. Within a year of Azure (and cloud computing in general) you could input some general info and spit out a virtual 10 server farm within an hour.

That's when I asked myself (and colleagues) where you're going to be in a year, because it won't be manually building servers anymore. So I shifted into administration and focused more of my energy into understanding Azure and AWS which kept me valuable in the last couple of years of my career.

 

[throAU]

There was a time when you needed to troubleshoot and use your wit to figure out technical problems, mostly gone now in favor of Google.

There used to be a time when google was actually useful for this, but that time is past.... the clusterfuck of "sponsored links" and other enshittified trash in the search results means that I barely use google these days.

Maybe the niche that I work in (IT sysadmin for Windows enterprise/IP networking/virtualisation/etc.) is different, but search results have been a merry go round of crap for a number of years now.

Unfortunately a lot of the problems I have to deal with lately have little logic behind them, they're related to un-tested shitware rolling out of Redmond causing random "weird" behaviour due to software issues.

 

[Eric]

There used to be a time when google was actually useful for this, but that time is past.... the clusterfuck of "sponsored links" and other enshittified trash in the search results means that I barely use google these days.

Fun fact, I was once passed over for a job because I admitted that I would google for a solution if I couldn't figure it out during an interview. The manager said something like "I don't' want anyone on my team using Google for something they can't figure out". I would've turned it down had they offered anyway so it didn't matter because I found that abhorrent and nearly laughed when he said it.

As a manager in later years I never questioned this from my employees, I expected it from them and the biggest question I had was how good at it were they. I have had some very sharp people who were excellent at digging up solutions and understanding them, that's what matters in the end.

 

[cbum]

digging up solutions and understanding them

Increasingly vital ability in the era of hallucination...

 

[throAU]

Increasingly vital ability in the era of hallucination...

100 percent.

Ai tools without any knowledge of what you’re doing are a recipe for disaster.

 

[dada_dave]

This could also go in the death by AI thread, but what’s being killed is the internet (also AI scrapers killing websites by massively spiking traffic). Google and the rest seem to be under the misapprehension that killing the websites they need to actually search over data mine doesn’t mean they won’t die as well. Since the web barely survived what Google has done to it over the last 10-15 years, Google just doing again, but bigger.

 

[Herdfan]

There used to be a time when google was actually useful for this, but that time is past.... the clusterfuck of "sponsored links" and other enshittified trash in the search results means that I barely use google these days.

Yes, their "AI" results are wrong too often or too generic to be useful.

 

[Huntn]

Whispers From The Star

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3730100/Whispers_from_the_Star/

On sale till 28Aug25.

Holy Crap! This concept is amazing, however, it seems lke your monitored. I wonder if it can be played offline...? There is a demo I'm going to try. I specifically do not like the idea of my participation in a game being sold to advertisers. You know Stella is lonely, I don't think she'll go there, but what about players? I may investigate just to test its limits.

Review from Steam (not mine):
I recommend this game, as it's a really cool and novel experience. I'm excited to play with it more. I'm giving it a Thumbs Down because you really need to read the privacy policy before you play. It's pretty disgusting, and explicitly gives them permission to sell a lot more than just the voice data they're recording to advertisers and whoever else they feel like.

It's a really fascinating game, but you should be aware before playing that it's actually a really grotesque data collection scheme wrapped in the disguise of a cute girl you can talk to. Be extremely careful with whatever information you submit and convey about yourself.

 

[Huntn]

Who needs actors? Tomb Raider AI

 

[Eric]

Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters

The fast food chain is reassessing its use of the tech after a number of errors were shared widely online.

www.bbc.com