When you believe AI can do anything, you don’t worry about what sorts of access it’ll break things with. When you rely on AI to do work, you’re too interested in half-assing your job to consider what might go wrong. When capitalism never promotes people for their skill, understanding or caution, the former two issues proliferate.

Voilà, disaster.

This right here. Just about everything in here is awful, and implies decision making and thought processes that straight up do not and have never existed in any AI model whatsoever.

What happened was they threw an awfully-scoped statistics model at problems the program couldn’t possibly generate good outputs for, and surprise surprise, it generated bad outputs. The part that’s of interest is just how bad the output was, and even then, only in a schadenfreude-filled “it was bound to happen eventually” manner.

“This technology is the most dangerous and powerful thing in the world, and everyone should be paying attention to it,” says company directly profiting off adoption of said technology. Quelle surprise! Surely they can be trusted to be telling the unvarnished truth!

In short, it’s fine. Take a breath.

Ehhhhh, that depends on how you take it. Personally, no, I’m not very worried about the legal aspect. But,

It’s still LLMs. FOSS communities have been better than average, but that bar is a low one considering coders generally have been using LLMs most of all. And LLM usage is reckless, not to mention presently harmful in numerous ways. (And yes, this means the latest models too. “Looks good” doesn’t mean it is good.) I’d just as soon FOSS not use the tech at all.

passed in California, where Democrats control the entire legislative process.

I think that’s the “with the help of tech bros” part. Rather high population of those in California, and boy do they have lobbying money.

Wasn’t Kaplan doing pretty well with regards to Overwatch? My understanding of that was that it got turned to shit despite him, not because of him.

I wouldn’t know. But I know there’s already a lot of open world multiplayer survival games competing for this space, and so it being in a different setting isn’t going to do it a lot of good. For that matter, neither will it being pretty, since that describes loads of games these days, and gameplay is almost always more important.

But personally, I only care about this sort of thing when it starts getting treated as the metaphorical golden goose egg, which this isn’t. It’s fine. I’m not so concerned with the game so much as the disconnected appearance of someone being surprised at lukewarm reactions to oversaturated concepts.

Were it that Kaplan’s comments had not happened, this is likely exactly what I would have done. Not really a concept deserving of a lot of attention, if you ask me.

Oh Lord, no.

Look, he’s not really wrong per se. The internet does run disproportionately on outrage, and plenty of people judge shit that they’ve got no right to be judging because they don’t actually spend time thinking about what makes good art. And not listening to people who’re determined to hate you is always healthy.

But another open-world multiplayer survival game? Really? At some point, this becomes like complaining you’ve got a coyote problem after you left a bunch of roadkill out in your yard. You can’t just make yet another entry into an incredibly overdone genre (seemingly without a USP, no less!) and not expect people to get tired of it.

Last I checked, Jeff Kaplan – a game designer – doesn’t really represent the tech industry? So this comment kinda comes off as an unhinged non-sequitur.

Considering the negative impacts LLMs have on so many facets of life today, that’s kinda the problem. Running it locally only solves some of those.

Fundamentally though, I just don’t want the tech involved in my life at all anymore. I don’t care if it has a niche use here or not. It can just fuck off.

No AI is a nice feature; Chromium is not. For those who feel like I do, LibreWolf is a version of Firefox that appears to strip most if not all AI, and being a Firefox fork means that it’s also not Chromium. It also uses more privacy-conscious settings by default.

You are aware translation services are available that are neither a local LLM nor Google-owned, yes? We had machine translation before ChatGPT existed, and I don’t think that tech evaporated in a sudden fire just because a more harmful option appeared.

The appropriate option for Mozilla would’ve been to not include AI at all. If they really, really couldn’t have swung that (they could’ve), then the second best option would be having all AI features set to off-by-default. Instead, we’ve got on-by-default. That is unambiguously a terrible idea.

This is a good way to handle the situation and an understandable and believable scenario, so I’m perfectly willing to forgive this. I’m a little less okay with an apparent “work in spite of illness” policy, however.

But still, it’s a serious blunder, and it needs to be said that any repeat of this at all would be very damning. I can’t forgive this level of fuckup twice. Any AI use is a risk, folks; treat it like one.

I don’t believe him.

I know the internet is full of untrustworthy charlatans, so I can’t blame you, but I’m as anti-AI as they come and I do believe him. Mistakes happen, especially in the context of rushed work done while sick. Remember that a lie by a grifter and the truth from an innocent sometimes look exactly the same; effective lies are made off of what was once a truth, after all.

Just to clarify, we’re only talking about mainstream social media here, right?

Yes, most discussions of infinite scroll center around this use, and it’s what this topic’s focused on. I’m aware that other uses exist, but frankly I’m not terribly worried about that. Pagination is a perfectly viable alternative for most every case I can think of that infinite scroll is used in, especially when paired with a half-decent search system, so even if a clumsy blanket ban were applied I think we’d be fine.

I mean hey, by some definitions it’ll work! “I didn’t check/care that the AI output bullshit” is technically different!

Were it only that we didn’t need to put carets on both sides of every word for one, haha! Ah well, Lemmy issue.

So, sans much context (short of a quick read on Wikipedia on the Telecommunications Act of 1996), this honestly looks like naive libertarianism, and reads like an obnoxious manifesto. Feels appropriate for the attitude of the 90s, I suppose – from what I know, there was a lot more belief in the internet as a frontier of freedom and justice, then – but it’s not so fitting these days. Many of the internet’s ills have spawned from an environment of shockingly little regulation, and I’d argue the all-too-common “move fast and break things” paradigm devolved into existence from that, too. Yet this appears to be rebuffing regulation writ large, in some misguided belief that the internet was perfectly fine how it was, would continue to be so forever, and that no positive government intervention was possible — rather than the reality that the internet was flawed, at risk, and that good law was possible if only a state had been willing to pursue such a thing. ¹

Which isn’t to say that a low- or even zero-regulation environment can’t work. But it needs specific alternatives; you can’t just not fix something. And infinite scroll is definitely a something, here. It absolutely contributes to creating an addictive environment while rarely being used for anything good. Personally, even if this letter had aged well, I don’t think this would be an appropriate time to reference it.

^{1. Some of which was passed in the very law this article so hates! Section 230 comes from the TCA!}

That’s still a separate issue. Infinite scroll is scarcely ever used in a good way, and is almost always used to encourage addictive behavior; something which affects adults just as much as children. Even on the rare occasion that it isn’t being implemented as an engagement tool, it still often ends up being one anyway. It’s a dark pattern and little else.

As far as I’m concerned, banning infinite scroll could easily be a very good thing, and I’m in favor.