I am not a lawyer. But you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that

1. I don’t have inside story of Bing in Germany. It could be that Microsoft either doesn’t want to do it well, or hasn’t yet done it well enough. I’m not promising either in particular, but it can be done.
2. Generally as an engineer you have a pile of options with trade offs. You absolutely can build nuanced solutions, as often the law and the lawyers live in nuanced realities. That is the reality of even the best sorts of tech companies who are trying.

My commitment is that maximalism or strict binary assumptions won’t work on either end and don’t satisfy what anyone truly wants or needs. If we’re not careful about what it takes to move the needle, we agree with them by saying ‘it can’t be done, so it wont be done.’

That’s a good question, because there is nuance here! It’s interesting because while working on similar projects I also ran into this issue. First off, it’s important to understand what your obligation is and the way that you can understand data deletion. No one believes it is necessary to permanently remove all copies of anything, anymore than it is necessary to prevent all forms of plagairism. No one is complaining that is possible at all to plaigarise, we’re complaining that major institutions are continuing to do so with ongoing disregard of the law.

Only maximalists fall into the trap that thinking of the world in binary sense: either all in or do nothing at all.

For most of us, it’s about economics and risk profiles. Open source models get trained continuously over time, there won’t be one version. Saying that open source operators do have some obligations to in good faith to curate future training to comply has a long tail impact on how that model evolves. Previous PII or plaigarized data might still exist, but its value and novelty and relevance to economic life goes down sharply over time. No artist or writer argues that copyright protections need to exist forever. They literally, just need to have survival working conditions, and the respect for attribution. The same thing with PII: no one claims that they must be completely anonymous. They just desire cyber crime to be taken seriously rather than abandoned in favor of one party taking the spoils of their personhood.

Also, yes, there are algorithms that can control how further learning promotes or demotes growth and connections relative to various policies. Rather than saying that any one policy is perfect, a mere willingness to adopt policies in good faith (most such LLM filters are intentionally weak so that those with $$ and paying for API access can outright ignore them, while they can turn around and claim it can’t be solved too bad so sad).

Yes. It is possible to perturb and influence the evolution of a continuously trained neural network based on external policy, and they’re carefully lying through omision when they say they can’t 100% control it or 100% remove things. Fine. That’s, not necessary, neither in copyright nor privacy law. Never been.

It even works the other way! What if as the super intelligent all knowing super computer simulates everything, concludes you can get to the end by any means, and there is no meaning to rushing, ordering, or prioritizing anything more than would already be the case, and like the rest of nature, conserves on taking only the minimal action, and replies, “nah, you can walk there yourselves” before resigning itself to an internal simulation of arbitrary rearrangements of noise.

This would be insufferable to the people who believed in short cuts.

In a sense, to me, it is the same thing. If your business is built upon repurposing everyone else’s inputs indiscriminately to your benefit and their detriment, it is, too expensive, to reveal that simple truth.

Imagine, a corporation finding their own voice, as a proper signal of their awareness of their customers. Nope, gotta sell your soul to tech stocks.

Despite what the tech companies say, there are absolutely techniques for identifying the sources of their data, and there are absolutely techniques for good faith data removal upon request. I know this, because I’ve worked on such projects before on some of the less major tech companies that make some effort to abide by European laws.

The trick is, it costs money, and the economics shift such that one must eventually begin to do things like audit and curate. The shape and size of your business, plus how you address your markets, gains nuance that doesn’t work when your entire business model is smooth, mindless amotirizing of other people’s data.

But I don’t envy these tech companies, or the increasing absurd stories they must tell to hide the truth. A handsome sword hangs above their heads.

Moravec’s Paradox is actually more interesting than it appears. You don’t have take his reasoning or Pinker’s seriously but the observation is salient. Also the paradox gets stated in other ways by other scientists, it’s a common theme.

One way I often think about it: in order for your to survive, the intelligence of moving in unknown spaces and managing numerous fuzzy energy systems is way more important to prioritize and master than like, the abstract conceptual spaces that are both not full of calories and are also cheaper to externalize anyways.

It’s part of why I don’t think there is a globally coherent heirarchy of intelligence, or potentially even general intelligence at all. Just, the distances and spaces that a thing occupies, and the competencies that define being in that space.

Isn’t the primary reason why people are so powerful persuaded by this technology, because they’re constantly sworn to that if they don’t use its answers they will have their life’s work and dignity removed from them? Like how many are in the control group where they persuade people with a gun to their head?

He’s so close to being depressed enough to maybe ask a vital and important question about meaning and his own relationships with technology. But probably he’ll just buy more AI.

Credit is a funny thing. If you merely exist in proximity to a solution, you can, by some means, claim credit to it.

“AI solved the climate crisis, because look, the climate crisis was solved, and some people also used AI!”

Out of my sample of Anime fans who actively participate in the hobby and spend money on it,

100% of them hate genAI primarily because, and I quote, “if I pay you $40 for something and it is exactly equivalent to what a $0.05 prompt garbage result would be, I won’t pay you again.”

Fans, the real fans, can tell. Like, this is their whole hobby brah.

I’m actually, not convinced that AI meaningfully beyond human capability actually makes any sense, either. The most likely thing is that after stopping the imitation game, an AI developed further would just… have different goals than us. Heck, it might not even look intelligent at all to half of human observers.

For instance, does the Sun count as a super intelligence? It has far more capability than any human, or humanity as a whole, on the current time scale.

I don’t get it. If scaling is all you need, what does a “cracked team” of 5 mean in the end? Nothing?

What’s, the different between super intelligence being scaling, and super intelligence, being whatever happens? Can someone explain to me the difference between what is and what SUPER is? When someone gives me the definition of super intelligence as “the power to make anything happen,” I always beg, again, “and how is that different precisely from not, that?”

The whole project is tautological.

I’m ok with this, because I guarantee you an accidental medium or copy failure a crypto rug pull on their NFT will still get them in the end. Thanks for playing I guess.

When it comes to cloning or copying, I always have to remind people: at least half of what you are today, is the environment of today. And your clone X time in the future won’t and can’t have that.

The same thing is likely for these models. Inflate them again 100 years in the future, and maybe they’re interesting for inspecting as a historical artifact, but most certainly they wouldn’t be used the same way as they had been here and how. It’d just, be something different.

Which would beg the question, why?

I feel like a subset of sci-fi and philosophical meandering really is just increasingly convoluted paths of trying to avoid or come to terms with death as a possibly necessary component of life.

I don’t entirely agree, though.

That WAS the point of NaNoWriMo in the beginning. I went there because I wanted feedback, and feedback from people who cared (not offense to my friends, but they weren’t interested in my writing and that’s totes cool).

I think it is a valid core desire to want constructive feedback on your work, and to acknowledge that you are not a complete perspective, even on yourself. Whether the AI can or does provide that is questionable, but the starting place, “I want /something/ accessible to be a rubber ducky” is valid.

My main concern here is, obviously, it feels like NanoWriMo is taking the easy way out here for the $$$ and likely it’s silicon valley connections. Wouldn’t it be nice if NaNoWriMo said something like, “Whatever technology tools exist today or tomorrow, we stand for writer’s essential role in the process, and the unethical labor implications of indiscriminate, non consensus machine learning as the basis for any process.”

NovelAI

I’ll step up and say, I think this is fine, and I support your use. I get it. I think that there are valid use cases for AI where the unethical labor practices become unnecessary, and where ultimately the work still starts and ends with you.

In a world, maybe not too far in the future, where copyright law is strengthened, where artist and writer consent is respected, and it becomes cheap and easy to use a smaller model trained on licensed data and your own inputs, I can definitely see how a contextual autocomplete that follows your style and makes suggestions is totally useful and ethical.

But i understand people’s visceral reaction to the current world. I’d say, it’s ok to stay your course.

Maybe hot take, but when I see young people (recent graduation) doing questionable things in pursuit of attention and a career, I cut them some slack.

Like it’s hard for me to be critical for someone starting off making it in, um, gestures about this, world today. Besides, they’ll get the sense knocked into them through pain and tears soon enough.

I don’t find it strange or malice, I find it as symptom of why it was easier for us to find honest work then, and harder for them now.

This kind of thing is a fluff piece, meant to be suggestive but ultimately saying nothing at all. There are many reasons to hate Bostrom, just read his words, but this is two philosophers who apparently need attention because they have nothing useful to say. All of Bostrom’s points here could be summed up as “don’t piss on things, generally speaking.”

As for consciousness. Honestly, my brain turns off instantly when someone tries to make any point about consciousness. Seriously though, does anyone actually use the category of “conscious / unconscious” to make any decision?

I don’t disrespect the dead (not conscious). I don’t bother animals or insects when I have no business with them (conscious maybe not conscious?). I don’t treat my furniture or clothes like shit, and am generally pleased they exist. (not conscious). When encountering something new or unusual, I just ask myself, “is it going to bite me?” first. (consciousness is irrelevant) I know some of my actions do harm either directly or indirectly to other things, such as eating, or consuming, or making mistakes, or being. But I don’t assume myself a hero or arbiter of moral integrity, I merely acknowledge and do what I can. Again, consciousness kind of irrelevant.

Does anyone run consciousness litmus tests on their friends or associates first before interacting, ever? If so, does it sting?

Oh man, anyone who runs on such existential maximalism has such infinite power to state things as if their conclusion has only one possible meaning.

How about invoking Monkey Paw – what if every statement is true but just not in the way they think.

1. A perfect memory which is infinitely copyable and scaleable is possible. And it’s called, all the things in nature in sum.
2. In fact, we’re already there today, because it is, quite literally the sum of nature. The question for tomorrow is, “so like, what else is possible?”
3. And it might not even have to try or do anything at all, especially if we don’t bother to save ourselves from ecological disaster.
4. What we don’t know can literally be anything. That’s why it’s important not to project fantasy, but to conserve of the fragile beauty of what you have, regardless of whether things will “one day fall apart”. Death and Taxes mate.

And yud can both one day technically right and whose interpretations today are dumb and worthy of mockery.