Who better to resurrect a dead computer?

LOL! I was making a joke.

At least they’re being honest about it. 99% of the companies training AI or selling people’s data to AI companies are doing so without telling anyone.

Having said that, Twitch streams are public almost all of the time so complaining that they’re being used in ways the creator never intended is a bit like complaining that someone caught you picking your nose in public.

We learned this lesson in the 90s: Once something goes public on the Internet, it is no longer under the creator’s/publisher’s control. People can and will do whatever TF they want with it. As long as they’re not redistributing it without permission, that is legal.

It’s everyone’s right to do whatever TF they want with the stuff that’s literally sent to their computer on purpose. That includes using that thing to train AI.

Yet another comment that says they solved the problem without saying how.

In my writing, if I’m going to refer to someone as “female” it’s usually because I’m also going to refer to someone else as “male” in that same context.

This new trend is kind of annoying because I wrote a book about sapient magical sugar gliders and since they’re not humans, I referred to them as “male” and “female”. That made the writing feel way too parochial and, well, awful so I came up with special words for male and female children and adults for the species instead.

Young females were called “kaydees” and the males were “keedos”. The species as a whole was named “kads”.

I actually had a reader say it was “a bad smell” that I used the word “female” too often (they did a search for that but not “male”, sigh).

It’s beyond “an arms race.” AI has become a commodity that’s everywhere and it’s being used and developed by zillions of completely different groups all over the world with wildly varying use cases and completely different goals.

At this point, trying to ban it would be like trying to ban dandelions from growing.

ColoGuard does sound like an infosec tool 🤔

Don’t call it theft. Theft is what happens when the original owner doesn’t have that thing anymore.

Nothing was “stolen”. AI just lowered the value of generic “thumbnail artists” and probably increased their value as artisans for those willing to pay for a premium service.

That’s what generative AI does: It makes stuff of mediocre quality that’s “good enough” for the masses. However, if you want something better than that, you have to pay a professional.

My hypothesis is that Baumol’s Cost Disease combined with AI is going to result in the collapse of capitalism. Where bespoke service work (e.g. hiring a thumbnail artist) is going to become more expensive over time while generic stuff that doesn’t need to be high quality is going to become cheaper and cheaper, to the point where it’s basically free. We’re almost there, actually.

For shore, you pelican’t fish with them around.

What does “AI-pilled” mean? Complaining about a generated wallpaper/cover image seems rather nitpicky to me when YouTube does that for everyone now. As in, that war has been lost.

In fact, complaining about AI-generated cover images in general seems rather nitpicky. The actual content wasn’t AI generated, just a tiny little advertising detail.

I dunno: It’s like people complaining about “kids these days.” “Instead of spending a few hours working on a proper clickbait cover image, kids these days are using AI!”

You are the problem!

You know what you are, actually? You’re like someone with an abusive spouse. “Yes, they beat me bloody from time to time—at the gas pump—but they make me feel good from time to time too. I love them.”

Yes. This is how real estate markets work (or don’t).

In other news, people who bought gas guzzlers when gas was cheap are now taking devastating pump receipts.

No doubt about tit, they’re not just good, they’re the breast in Texas.

No. LLMs and AI image models are fundamentally, a different technology. They use completely different mathematical models, data models, and target different platform spaces.

As a simple example, to train an LLM you need to feed it lots of text and not much else. To train an image model, you need to feed it billions of tagged images. That is, images that have every stupid little thing in the image “tagged” with a bounding box and text describing what’s inside said bounding box.

Also, these terms might not mean anything to you, but LLMs use transformer decoders (autoregressive causal retention) while image models use diffusion networks. The way they work is different at a fundamental level. Text is 1-dimensional and an LLM acts as a word prediction machine whereas image models start with chaos (random garbage pixels) and refine it over and over again in n steps until the chaos starts looking like the prompt.

The way prompting works is also different.

Someone cut above the rest‽

You are correct! Absolutely 100% accurate!

That is not how LLMs learn anatomy!

What does that have to do with AI image generation models though?

AI image generation is such a weird thing. When you self-host it (run it on your own GPU), you get vastly superior capabilities but at the same time you get all the awful results too.

Example: When you use ChatGPT or Gemini or similar “Big AI” service to generate an image, you get one image. However, in the background, those services were actually generating a whole bunch of images and at the end, using AI to pick the best one.

When you DIY, you tell it to generate say, 50 images, hoping you get lucky (haha) and that’s when you see the weird shit. Sure, 10 out of those 50 will be OK-ish—something to work with (using additional tools to say, fix those wonky hands), but in “the bad 40”, there will be a random naked person.

Like… Why‽ I mean, I actually know why (AI image models only work well if they’re trained on nude people! Why? Because that’s how they learn proper human anatomy/ratios! Just like a doctor, actually), but it’s mildly disturbing when I’m trying to visualize a scene in a novel where a girl is holding a doll and it mixes up the doll and the girl and somehow the girl ends up naked (looking like a doll). Ugh! W T F! I didn’t ask for that!

Can’t delete shit like that fast enough!

Note that “Big AI” has that problem on occasion too! It’s basically impossible to fix with 100% accuracy, which is why AI companies are fighting laws like this tooth and nail.

Also, the detection algorithms/AI don’t work very well! They know this. I know this. We all know this. That’s why these public Big AI models are regularly generating nudity despite having system prompts that are supposed to stop it.

So what can we do? Many people would say, “just ban AI image generators” or “make it so they can only generate cartoon/non-realistic images”. That’s called “banning a core technology” and it never works if said tech doesn’t have some sort of rare supply chain ingredient (e.g. uranium).

I don’t know. On the one hand, Big AI and smaller AI companies are definitely offering a depraved service. On the other hand, it’s all fake!

All these “nudify” tools and apps are generating 100% totally made up bullshit. Why do we need to ban fake, digital things?

Think about it from a tech standpoint: Let’s say we ban using AI to “generate nudes of people without their permission.” All that users of these services will do is generate generic nudes and then use a different model to place the person’s face on the body. There’s nothing at all you can do to stop that because the user could just crop the image so that only the face and neck are showing and then just paste the result back into the original image.

This is a people problem. That is: People are using tools in ways we don’t want them used.

You can’t solve people problems with technology. It’s one of those “laws” as old as tech.

IMHO, the best we can probably do is to hold people accountable when they behave inappropriately, but the anonymous nature of the Internet makes that extremely hard to do. So… 🤷

Removed by mod

Massive overkill!

That’s a great Home Theater PC. Hook it up to your TV and install KDE Plasma (distro of your choice 👍) then just crank up the global desktop zoom to like 225% and get:

• A real wireless mouse that has a long range (e.g. $10 TEKNET cheapo deal with 10% off coupon today, LOL! https://a.co/d/02qG1oHO )
• A wireless keyboard/trackpad combo that’s made for that kind of thing (they’re all terrible keyboards—it’s only purpose is to get you through the boot menu/rescue process if something horrible goes wrong). Use SSH for doing any real work on the thing.

Now install Docker and all the containers/servers you want!

I have a ~14yo HTPC with a mostly modern GPU (8GB) that only has 8GB of RAM and four cores on some old AMD CPU. It’s running four separate servers for my self-host purposes and it doesn’t break a sweat.

I did the math and these are the approximate real numbers:

• US: ~30 million
• World: ~105 million

That’s active Linux desktops. That is, they’re being used to browse the Internet regularly enough to make it into StatCounter.