Reminds me of this:
I think atproto is a good protocol, but god bluesky-the-company is dogshit.
this thread has broken containment, and the median quality of the discussion has dropped to the point where some rando decided to start a subthread about how it’s not ok to celebrate hitler’s death and also two regulars had an extremely heated fight about who was the most not-mad about the word chat as a noun/pronoun/whatever in English of all fucking things so uhhhh that’s all folks
I’m so confused reading all this.
Their argument is something like this:
People might say something like “ai is incapable of thinking” or “ai is stupid”, but if you replace the word “ai” with something like “women”, you’re saying something unacceptable.
“If you said something different you would’ve said something different” what brilliant rhetoric, your mom must be proud
OP isn’t saying that, they’re showing someone else’s opinion.
What brilliant observation, your mom must be proud
So they’re attributing personhood to AI.
Before it has come anywhere close to meaningfully mimicking conciousness.
Are they stupid?
I always assume people like this are suburban white boys with nothing better to bitch about. I would love to see them explain how clanker is a racist term to people that actually experience racism.
I’m a middle-aged white guy and one of my only friends is the young black guy down the street. Having a giggle because I can see the look on his face while I explain all this. “I’m listening and trying to take you seriously while not laughing my ass off in your face.”
There is some examples out there of people making racist skits, with the dialog barely shifted to give it the veneer of being about robots. A month back there was an infamous tick tok telling “Rosa Sparks” to “get to the back of the bus”.
It’s pretty awful. It also doesn’t really have anything to do with AI criticisms. Racists telling the same “jokes” they’ve always told one another. But people who’ve bought into the AI hype don’t really have a response to the AI criticisms, so its in their interest to build up what is a pretty tenuous connection, lest the cognitive dissonance set in.
AI believers believe that stringing random words together is equal to consciousness, they absolutely are stupid.
Perhaps because it reflects their level of consciousness.
Yeah that was my biggest takeaway is these posts seem to assume sentience in what’s little more than a sophisticated “most likely next word” generator. There’s tons of cool things that can be done with these new machine learning tools, but they are not sentient, they are not close to sentience and we may never invent artificial sentience.
The one thing we now know for sure is we can damn well convince people of sentience artificially far more easily than I ever suspected
We’ll get true AI one day, but the timeline and methods are up in the air. I’m not even sure LLMs will be a piece of the puzzle. Guess we’ll learn something from the exercise.
the post: https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3m2f66lgh2c2v .
The person is a bluesky engineer.
Not only that, she introduced mass surveillance to Bluesky and is brainstorming further methods of such in response to getting clowned on so hard.
Yeah, I’m not touching bluesky’s servers after this.
Migration luckily works pretty well on atproto.
Rainbow painted fascist.
Scratch the surface too hard, oops, its another shitlib.
God I am so tired of idiots confusing identity politics and virtue signalling with being left wing, but apparently, most people really are just skin deep.
I love how this is so close to a cogent critique of people literally just repeating racist jokes but using a word swap to make them acceptable, and then the “(whatever that means)” hits and it all falls into place.
https://youtube.com/shorts/aHoUPEhjbN4
The only good take I’ve seen on this matter.
I think everyone can agree on “this is a slur that we took from StarWars to be derogatory and justify our distaste and opposition to genAI”, it’s just that some people think that’s a bad thing?
Like it appears some people think using the n-word is bad because it’s Bad™, not because there’s an actual dehumanising effect on a group of people. What’s your argument, that we’re dehumanising Grok? Ye because it’s not a human! “But if it was about the Jews it’d be bad” ye and if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike, what the fuck is your point?
As for the origins I also think it is very important that the word is “clanker” from StarWars, since their droids are not sentient, whereas both “toaster” and “skinjob” are actually used as a hateful term towards sentient beings. BSG goes out of its way to drive in the fact that genociding Cylons would also be bad, actually. The sentience of “skinjobs” is like the whole point of Blade Runner.
Just to play Devil’s Advocate, since I am a huge fan of Filoni’s Clone Wars series, Clanker feels the most weird because it was created to be used as a slur in the same way the Allied forces had slurs for Germans and Japanese in WW2. I can understand why some people might have moral grounds against using what is ultimately a proxy of real life slurs, especially if they were ever a recipient of that kinda discrimination. Sure, it’s a fantasy, and I think from a standpoint of “The Republic is experiencing moral decay” it’s interesting for the story, but it was always a lil fucked up that the kids show thought hurling slurs was such a fundamental part of war that they needed to invent a new one. It’d probably be better if we didn’t teach children that.
It’s also kinda a weird slur to use against AI. The droids are called clankers because they clank, it’s like an onomotopeia. LLMs don’t clank at all.
They clank when you hit the gpu with a big hammer
The word isn’t the issue it’s the way people use it. It’s often used as a thinly veiled excuse to be racist… Like making youtube shorts where it perfectly depicts very racist stereotypes but i’ts about ai so ti’s okay. This is inevitably how words like this end up. Especially if they ever get mainstream. Your intentions can be whatever, but like. Sociologically speaking this is how a term like this would always end up bieng used by some people as an exucse to perform racism but under the tehin guise of it acutally beinga buot rovbots not black people.
Oh, hey, that’s the “Mikhail Gorbachev Caused Skibidi Toilet” guy
I refuse to click that link and instead choose to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev caused Skibidi Toilet unironically.
It’s also the guy who insists “chat” is a fourth person pronoun. Frankly I now go out of my way to avoid his stuff because that take was so ludicrously stupid I no longer trust anything he has to say.
Based solely on the source this man doesn’t seem to deserve any ire. In fact he breaks down the statement “chat is a 4th person pronoun” quite well. What’s stuck in your craw, old fruit?
Well, folks, it deserves ire because it’s a ridiculously incorrect statement delivered in an authoritative tone. Chat is a noun and it’s used the exact same way as many other nouns. To claim it’s grammatically a pronoun you have to either misunderstand what pronouns are or misunderstand how it’s being used.
The entire thing boils down to a rhetorical trick: “here are the ways chat is not like other pronouns, so it’s reasonable to say it’s in a fourth category of pronoun.” It entices you to accept the incorrect premise that it’s a pronoun and then try to come up with flaws in the inarguable part, which is that this noun doesn’t function the same way any pronoun would.
Yeah nah, that’s not what he says at all. In that video, he says: “there is no accepted definition of a fourth person pronoun, here are some concepts that are sometimes referred to as the fourth person, does the modern usage of “chat” fit any of these?” and the answer is: “in some specific ways yes, in other ways no.”
I don’t think he’s the one that started the idea of chat being a fourth person pronoun, I think he’s just discussing the statement and using it as an opportunity to communicate some linguistic concepts, which is cool and good. Also, what’s in your craw, different person?
It’s not a pronoun, so if one is pretending to talk about linguistics authoritatively one should know that and clearly state it to your audience so that they’re not misled into thinking that calling it a fourth-person pronoun is in any way reasonable.
One of the replies talking about someone celebrating Hitler’s death regularly, even if they’re a survivor of the camps, is mentally ill?
I woudln’t think that’s healthy or okay behaviour either. Because a. like what are you even celebrating that hitler got to escape from justice for his crimes? that he got to go out on his own terms instead of on trial that seems liek a weird thing to celebrate if anything it makes you seem a like you sympathize with hitler. Hilter killed himself to evade capture because he knew he lost. The only reaosn youo’d celebrate that is becuase you wnat hitler to evade capture. Not to mention, being that obssessed over the deaht of smoeone who died 80 years ago is extremely unhealthy.
Counterpoint: Celebrating Hitler’s death is good, actually. Celebrate Hitler’s death on the train, on the boat, wherever good times are had!
I’m glad to see that another mod has already pushed the fuck off with you button.
haha nah time for you to fucking leave
If we’re going to focus on form instead of content, it’s amusing that “if you say mean things about ai then you’re a bigot” is the exact same form as “if you say mean things about Trump then you’re a terrorist.”
Related chain in the sack: https://awful.systems/post/5776862/8965566
“chain in the sack” is one of my new favourite semi-nonsense phrases
bonus points because it sounds like a CBT term (not cognitive behavioral therapy, the other CBT)
This is called rationalizing because any relationship with reality it has is strictly rationed
Fuckin’ clanker lovers.
It’s only bigotry if you believe machines incapable of thought or feeling deserve human rights. In which case, you have bigger problems than people being “racist” against bullshit-ass generative AI.
I feel certain this person could come up with even one example of someone attacking an LLM for having the wrong “bits”.
Meanwhile I’ve seen people justifying the power use of genAI with “but people also consume as much if not more energy through their lives”.
idk, I’ve seen enough people call ai users
CW: racist bullshit but with words swapped
“clanker-loving species traitors”
to know that some anti-ai stuff is steeped in bigotry (and yes, it’s still bigotry if it’s ironic btw)
i don’t think most anti-ai people are like this. but some absolutely are and denying it helps no one, and it harms marginalized people
from what i see, white people simply clamor for a context in which they’re “allowed” to finally call someone the n-word, and are willing to accept substitute targets for their racism
add in a protective cloak of “it’s ironic and a joke and YOU’RE the real racist for pointing this out” and you get a whole lot of people who are extremely okay slinging around barely modified racial slurs
right???
in retrospect, me making this about ai was a mistake, cause it is not the only place this shows up!
and people get very defensive about this one too. like i’m pretty confident that coolboy004 on reddit is not giving a nuanced delivery on the ethics of a company running an ai-powered call center when he types “screws will not replace us” in all caps on /r/fuckai, and yet
i think it sucks that we’re stuck with, say, bluesky engineers genuinely trying to pull the most moronic variant of “but what if the stochastic text generator might have feelings in the future too”, but we still need to be able to talk about why people feel the need to make “clanka with the hard r” jokes (answer it’s racism)
Any minimally competent critique of AI would make such bigotry ipso facto meaningless. Note that the cited phrase implicitly accepts the premise of “AIs” as being in the same category of sentient beings as humans by virtue of it being possible to betray the latter for the former, and hence for any genuinely AI-critical person, it makes about as much sense as talking about ‘anti-table bigotry’; it’s just a meaningless configuration of words if one understands what they mean.
I’m really sorry to say this, I’m sure you’re a lovely person, but fuck out of here with all that bullshit.
you’ve never posted on our instance before as far as I can tell and I’m pretty sure I didn’t ask you to fucking gatekeep one of our threads and start a shitty little fight that I have to clean up
in every serious (ie not TikTok or any other right-wing or unmoderated hellhole) anti-AI community I know, bigotry gets you banned even if you’re trying to hide it behind nonsense words like a 12 year old
meanwhile the people who seem to have dreamt up the idea that AI critical spaces are full of masked bigotry appear to be mostly
Neil GaimanWarren Ellis (see replies), who has several credible sexual assault allegations leveled against him, and Jay Graber, bluesky’s CEO who deserves no introduction (search mastodon or take a look at bluesky right now if the name’s unfamiliar). I don’t trust either of those people’s judgement as to what harms marginalized people.Gaiman? I thought it was Warren Ellis, the other “into the trebuchet with you” guy of comics.
you’re right, I even had Ellis’ Wikipedia page open to re-confirm the allegations but my fingers wanted it to be Gaiman for whatever reason
oh absolutely, fuck graber and fuck, fuuuuuuck gaiman to hell. i don’t have an inch of trust for either of them.
tho I will say that even here on lemmy, even if it didn’t reach the awfulness of what i quoted, i’ve seen a bunch of clanker memes that were seriously iffy… I wouldn’t qualify those of “serious discussions” but they still matter in the broader ai discourse
and I’d like to clarify on my stance: fuck ai. it can have it’s uses sometimes but the dominant (and promoted) uses are awful for all the reasons everyone knows about. just wanted to make it clear that I am not an ai supporter
oh absolutely, fuck graber and fuck, fuuuuuuck gaiman to hell. i don’t have an inch of trust for either of them.
tho I will say that even here on lemmy, even if it didn’t reach the awfulness of what i quoted, i’ve seen a bunch of clanker memes that were seriously iffy… I wouldn’t qualify those of “serious discussions”
I agree with all of this
but they still matter in the broader ai discourse
and disagree strongly with this. part of the mission of TechTakes and SneerClub is that they must remain a space where marginalized people are welcome, and we know from prior experience that the only way to guarantee that is to ensure that bigots and boosters (and sometimes they’re absolutely the same person — LLMs are fashtech after all) can’t ever control the discourse. I know through association that a lot of moderated AI-critical spaces, writers, and researchers follow a similar mission.
now, unmoderated and ineffectively moderated spaces are absolutely vulnerable to being tuned into fascist pipelines, and inventing slurs is one way they do it (see also “waffles” quickly being picked up as an anti-trans slur on bluesky, which has moderation that’s hostile to its marginalized userbase). if that’s something that’s happening in a popular community and there’s enough examples to show a pattern, then I’d love to have it as a post in TechTakes or as a blog link we can share around the AI-critical community as a warning.
Hoo boy. The original person being reposted continues on their original post that they believe we cannot be certain that genAI does not have feelings.
How do we have people wasting their time arguing about software having feelings when we haven’t even managed to convince the majority of people that fish and crabs and stuff can feel pain even though they don’t make a frowny face when you hurt them.
That’s easy, it’s because LLM output is a reasonable simulation of sounding like a person. Fooling people’s consciousness detector is just about their whole thing at this point.
Crabs should look into learning to recite the pledge of allegiance in the style of Lady GaGa.
Just complete the delusional circuit and tell them you can’t be sure they aren’t an AI, ask them how they would prove they aren’t.
How online do you have to be where “people dunking on AI “artists” is like Kristallnacht” doesn’t sound completely fucking deranged?
