You know, that’s an interesting point and I’m not totally sure how to read into people’s dislikes…

I’m probably amongst the most vocally anti-AI people I know. I fully understand that basically all of the biggest AI models today have been built on the exploitation of other people’s (be it writers, artists, musicians, programmers, etc.) stolen intellectual labor. And that’s not just my gut feeling either, it’s been well documented at this point by higher ups at the tech companies themselves. I can’t stand the AI industry, and I would argue it’s pretty much morally indefensible as things are right now. The AI bubble and the way the technology is being used, I think, is truly terrible for society and culture.

But it’s that exact understanding–that the AI industry has been built on a foundation of theft–that makes me wonder if anyone out there is trying to do this in a less brazenly unethical way. I can’t help but be curious what all of this stuff might look like if people took a more fair approach to building datasets and training models from them. Is it even possible?

To me, part of criticizing the way things are is considering the alternatives so that we can make an informed decision on the way things should be. I’d love to know if someone out there is doing AI “the right way” and leading by example when it comes to ethical datasets.

I don’t really mind if it’s LLMs or other “AI” models for things like image or audio processing. My question is really about whether there are any noteworthy models that have been trained off an more ethical dataset than the big ones that have been trained on massive troves of scraped data.

The more recent one was a person who made a tiny one just for one off bash scripts based on his own massive 20+ years of dot files.

That’s interesting.

The training sets ate usually public sources.

Does “public sources” mean public domain, or just like visible on the internet?

Fair. I guess I’m curious if any people who exist outside of the profit-driven investment hype “AI” bubble are trying to see what can be done with more legitimate sources of data.

It’s possible that nobody is even trying it…

Yeah, sadly I think the word “public” is often stretched to mean “anything I can get access to regardless of ownership or license”.

I’m really mainly interested in any efforts that are trying to do things in a more legitimate way with regard to consent and licensing.

Like, I suppose the question I’m trying to answer is, if one were try train a model on public domain or at least fair use, how useful would it be and what could it do?

Uh, how so…?

PC is an open platform, and Valve have done more for that platform in the last 10 years than Epic ever will.

This guy is such a clown.

Finally, we know.

I didn’t want to spend money on games that exploit the labor of others, so at the very least I want the ability to make informed purchases.

You take the marketing of “intelligence” and “learning” far too literally if you think those two concepts are in any way the same.

Only if you have a boner.

Man there is nothing we love more than counting our chickens before they hatch, huh?

I was literally about to do it when that one Proton exec started sucking off Trump on Twitter, and then I changed my mind.

That very well may be so, but even still I would argue that the primaries are really the time to hash out policy and candidate positions.

I’m not from Iowa, luckily, but Turek beat his main primary opponent by more than 25%, which suggests he is more tapped into Iowa political leanings than the average online commentator. I’m from Oregon, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that whoever Iowa elects is going to be much more “moderate” than the people who represent me and my state.

Regardless, the choice right now (and it very much is a binary one) is whether Iowa wants to send a Democrat, Turek, or a Republican, Hinton, to the Senate. Come January, it’ll either be Turek or Hinton–a de facto binary outcome. And that singular choice may mean the difference between a slim Democratic majority or a slim Republican one.

What will a Democratic Senate mean for the next two years? It’s hard to be sure, since Trump can be more than a little bit unpredictable. But at the very least it means Democratic control of Senate committees, which will go a long way towards holding the Trump admin at least a little bit accountable for their words and actions. Speaking personally, I would always rather have the Democrats in power than the Republicans, easily.

So again, people should vote with their hearts, without a doubt, but they should also understand the strategies at play and vote with their brains, too.

To be honest, whether it’s FPTP elections or the power dynamics in Washington DC, it is a little bit exhausting to have to explain this stuff every 2 years… But people should be informed about how the system works and vote accordingly.

No election is a binary choice

This is, as a matter of political science, incorrect.

Currently, almost every election in the United States ultimately boils down to a binary choice, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger’s_law

You can certainly disagree with the candidates, the platforms and the messaging all you want, but the truth is that (in almost every first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all election in the United States) one of two people (usually a Democrat or a Republican) will ultimately win–and to the winner go all of the spoils. That’s the system we currently have, and as someone who agrees that it sucks, I highly recommend advocating for state and local reforms to make elections laws more democratic.

What does candidate A represent? How does it compare to candidate B? Fundamentally, the question absolutely boils down to “which one of these two people do I want to win, and which one of the two do I want to lose?” And that is the basic question by which the informed and politically-aware voter ultimately ought to make a strategic decision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_voting

Vote with your heart AND with your brain.

A slow and miserable death would be acceptable too.

Dementia.

Can someone ask this dumb fuck if he’s also this upset about ingredient labels on food?

News flash, Timmy: people want to know at least a little bit about how the sausage is made, otherwise we’d all be forced to eat Soylent Green by greedy, unethical capitalist billionaires like you.

Valve understands what the customer wants, Epic simply does not.

I just want to say that this is artistic ability that people who make AI “art” can only dream of.

The good thing about midterm is that a new Congress is coming whether team pedo likes it or not. I just hope it’s a new Congress that isn’t controlled by Republicans.

Please vote everyone. We simply have to put some checks on Trump’s power.

I really can’t blame people for getting burned out–hardware costs are expensive as fuck right now, software exploits are more urgent than ever, the entire Internet is endless sea of bots, and there is no mechanism in place to offset any of the associated costs or work to the community. As things are right now, a small minority of fediverse users are shouldering all of the burden of various costs so that the rest of us can use this infrastructure for free.

From a money and time standpoint, it seems mostly unsustainable, and it’s not something that can go on forever or scale up and up.

I think there are ways to make it more sustainable, like quotas, subscriptions and ads… But they are pretty unpopular.

Unlike corporate social media, we can’t rely on leveraging other people’s money in the form of VC or stocks, and so we are left mainly with voluntary donations.

But in the end, the health of the fediverse is arguably in the breadth and diversity of its servers. While it’s good to have some newbie friendly flagship servers, it’s probably better if everybody isn’t concentrated on the same few mega servers.

And it’s a shame when a server goes down because the person running it burns out or can’t afford it. But this usually ends up being a social problem moreso than a technical one. And social problems can be mitigated (or avoided) by improving communicating and making sure that we aren’t putting all of the load on any one person. There are cultural changes that we can make to improve the health of specific communities and instances.