I guess the value is that at some point you’ll probably hear the core claim - “AI is improving exponentially” - regurgitated by someone making a bad argument, and knowing the original source and context can be very helpful to countering that disinformation.
The key difference being that AI is a much, much more expensive product to deliver than anything else on the web. Even compared to streaming video content, AI is orders of magnitude higher in terms of its cost to deliver.
What this means is that providing AI on the model you’re describing is impossible. You simply cannot pack in enough advertising to make ChatGPT profitable. You can’t make enough from user data to be worth the operating costs.
AI fundamentally does not work as a “free” product. Users need to be willing to pony up serious amounts of money for it. OpenAI have straight up said that even their most expensive subscriber tier operates at a loss.
Maybe that would work, if you could sell it as a boutique product, something for only a very exclusive club of wealthy buyers. Only that model is also an immediate dead end, because the training costs to build a model are the same whether you make that model for 10 people or 10 billion, and those training costs are astronomical. To get any kind of return on investment these companies need to sell a very, very expensive product to a market that is far too narrow to support it.
There’s no way to square this circle. Their bet was that AI would be so vital, so essential to every facet of our lives that everyone would be paying for it. They thought they had the new cellphone here; a $40/month subscription plan from almost every adult in the developed world. What they have instead is a product with zero path to profitability.
What we’ve seen very clearly with fair use is that you end up being forced to defend it, as opposed to it being presumed. That means it’s very easy for a rightsholder with money to go after every use, fair or not, and force the user to spend time and money defending themselves (and also probably face a preliminary injunction that takes the image down until the case is over, which will often be after its newsworthy).
It’s not the standard because it will likely have a LOT of unintended consequences.
How do you share evidence of police brutality if they can use copyright to take down the video? How do newspapers print pictures of people if they have to get the rightsholders permission first? How do we share photos of Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute if he can just sue every site that posts it for unauthorized use of his likeness?
Unless this has some extremely stringent and well written limitations, it has the potential to be a very bad idea.
Nah, Trump doesn’t want this to escalate. Exactly the opposite in fact. He wants to hit Iran, then call a ceasefire, so he can say that he boldly applied a mixture of force and diplomacy to resolve the situation (you know, the one that his constant enabling of Isreal and his pull out from the Iran nuclear deal created). He’s looking for a quick win, not a protracted conflict.
This seems counterintuitive because of the obvious similarities to the George Bush playbook. Start a war in the Middle East, become a wartime president, get re-elected/made president for life. But it’s not 2001 anymore. American attitudes have changed. In particular, the right have really soured on the whole war in the Middle East thing. America regularly cycles between World Police and Total Isolationism, and right now MAGA is leading the charge deep into an Isolationist era. They see foreign wars and foreign aid as the same bucket; money spent on people who aren’t them.
So Trump is trapped between his base, who have no interest in another forever war, and his need to put at least one win on the board for his absolute disaster of a presidency. The optimal out for him here is a quick resolution, which is why he is absolutely losing his shit over Isreal constantly escalating the situation, and Iran having the sheer audacity to strike back despite his oh so clear instructions.
Actually one of the characters in 1984 works in the department that produces computer generated romance novels. Orwell pretty accurately predicted the idea of AI slop as a propaganda tool.
There are, as I understand it, ways that you can train on AI generated material without inviting model collapse, but that’s more to do with distilling the output of a model. What Musk is describing is absolutely wholesale confabulation being fed back into the next generation of their model, which would be very bad. It’s also a total pipe dream. Getting an AI to rewrite something like the total training data set to your exact requirements, and verifying that it had done so satisfactorily would be an absolutely monumental undertaking. The compute time alone would be staggering and the human labour (to check the output) many times higher than that.
But the whiny little piss baby is mad that his own AI keeps fact checking him, and his engineers have already explained that coding it to lie doesn’t really work because the training data tends to outweigh the initial prompt, so this is the best theory he can come up with for how he can “fix” his AI expressing reality’s well known liberal bias.
I don’t feel like the hyperbole defense really cuts it when a significant number of people think the hyperbole is true. You can find an example of that happening in this same thread and I’ve had plenty of other interactions like it. For every person who takes it as hyperbole, there’s another who genuinely feels like we’re staring down the barrel of WW3, and that kind of fear is dangerous and harmful.
It’s never “Just a joke” when the joke is hurting people.
You’re misunderstanding my point. I’m not telling anyone off for venting about the prospect of America kicking off yet another forever war, or another brutal bombing campaign. That shit sucks, and people need to vent about it. Sometimes dark humour is the way to do that.
My issue is very specifically with people framing it as “World War 3”, even though a) its not, and it won’t be, and there’s nothing happening right now that could realistically cause it to be, and b) “War” should be bad enough. There’s plenty to vent about right there. Actual real people will die for the sake of Netanyahu’s political career and Trump’s fragile ego. That’s awful, and if you need to vent through memes to cope with that, fair play. But why do we have to add this entirely fictitious “world war” layer just to make it somehow worth venting about? Why build up this completely fictional set of horrors in place of the very real ones, in a way that convinces people already stricken with despair that things are somehow even worse?
You’re absolutely correct. Shit really sucks right now. Everything is awful. So why the fuck would you (plural, indirect, nonspecific) want to convince people that its even worse than that? Seems like reality is already bad enough.
Let me add - and I should have said this in my original reply - that I completely get why it’s easy to feel scared about this stuff. First, there’s this constant environment of everyone talking about the looming threat of WW3, which is exactly what memes like this contribute to, creating a culture of fear for no good reason.
But, second, there absolutely is a general ratcheting up of tensions across the world. Major powers are more militarized than they ever have been previously, and the strong trade relationships that helped maintain peace are eroding. There is, absolutely, an increased likelihood that we’re going to see conflicts break out, but what’s missing is the specific conditions needed for those conflicts to spiral out in a mass scale escalation.
What I think we’re likely to see over the next ten to twenty years is more limited regional conflicts like Ukraine. I think it’s quite likely, for example, that India and Pakistan may go to war. But there’s simply no reason to believe that war will pull in other major powers.
The world is becoming a scarier place. You’re not wrong to feel that way. And any conflict is a tragedy. Why these memes annoy me is not because I’m on the “Nothing ever happens train” but rather because they discard very real, very valid concerns in favour of this nebulous fantasy of everyone dying in nuclear fire for vague and unspecified reasons.
Turn the question around. Ask yourself, what are the conditions necessary for this to become WW3?
First, at a minimum, you need more than one major power to become involved. For the purposes of this discussion I’ll define make powers as The US, The EU / NATO (functionally indistinguishable for all practical purposes at this point), China, Russia, India.
Aside from the US, the only other major power with a serious interest in the region is Russia. You can vaguely make an argument for the EU, but they’re too concerned with the war in Ukraine to really give a shit right. At best you might see some involvement from the UK, and they’re no longer strongly aligned with or capable of influencing the rest of Europe.
So basically the only way this escalates beyond a limited regional conflict is if Russia decides to throw in. For Iran. While they’re struggling to win a war in Ukraine that is currently cratering their economy and killing off an entire generation of young Russian men. Do you really think they have the slightest inclination to get into a shooting war with the US right now, with everything they’re currently facing? I’m not even sure they have the logistics capacity to actually get troops to Iran right now.
But what if local powers get involved? They won’t. No one in the region likes Isreal or Iran. They’re both pariahs. No one around them wants to get involved in a war for either of their sakes.
Hell, they can barely even fight a war with each other. Rockets and bombing raids are the only real options they have, because there’s a whole lot of Iraq in between them. At best the US could stage a naval invasion (something that Isreal has no capacity to do on their own), in which case what you’re looking at is another Iraq style invasion followed by twenty years of bloody, costly occupation as they try to maintain order over a mountainous region containing a hundred million people.
Sure, but the button on the meme could just as easily have said “WAR” as “WW3”. It’s even the same number of characters. Do you see what I’m getting at? The the constant fearnongering about this turning into WW3 always suggests that what’s happening right now isn’t bad enough. Surely the dark humour could be directed at the actual real bad things Trump is currently doing, rather than hypothetical bad things that he might be doing?
I think the saddest part about these WW3 memes is that it really does feel like the people making them only care about the conflict being engineered in the Middle East by Trump and Natanyahu because there’s a chance that it might negatively impact their own lives. The implication is that as long as this doesn’t actually turn into WW3 (it won’t, Jesus Christ please learn some basic history) it’s fine and a bunch of people getting killed by bombs is missiles is OK as long as they’re brown and way over there.
I think that even if every single assertion that person makes is taken, prima facie, to be completely 100% accurate and correct, it would still only modify my previous statement to “Our enemy is stagnant wages that - for the overwhelming majority of all workers - no longer rise in step with productivity.”
I’m really not clear on how that’s all that much of a difference. Good for the few people who lucked out I guess. The linked comment actually wraps up by saying the graph only demonstrates rising wealth inequality, which is, you know, the entire fucking point of the god damn graph, holy shit, where the fuck do they think people are claiming the lost wages went, into fucking space?!?!
Not only could you handle it, it’s actually beneficial. Inflation - if matched with equivalent increases in wages - eats away at debt over time, because your debt is locked in at the point where you take it on, but your buying power relative to that debt continues to increase.
Our enemy is not inflation. Inflation can be our friend. Our enemy is stagnant wages that no longer rise in step with productivity.
Everyone needs to see this graph and really understand what our problem is.
Inflation takes a while. Shocks that affect consumer confidence can actually increase spending temporarily. What’s happening in the US right now is that people are spending more in order to get in all their long term purchases (car, tv, phone, computer, kids toys) before some combination of inflation and tariffs push the prices up. But this will only last as long as people’s excess of spending money lasts. Then consumer purchasing will, if nothing changes, recede massively.
The difference, you have to remember, is that the worse stuff is all hurting the people they want him to hurt. But betraying his made in America promises hurts the people who voted for him. That’s when they suddenly start to care.
Sorry, I meant “that and made in the US”, but I get that that’s not what I said.
Thing is, there’s going to be a lot of public attention on that “Made in the USA” claim, given how central it is to Trump’s domestic and foreign policy.
Sure, the FCC can turn a blind eye, but all it takes is for one worker at the assembly plant to call up a journalist. And let’s face, and journalist worth their salt is going to be hanging around every bar near that place. Even trying to screen specifically for MAGA friendly workers won’t help them much when one of those workers feels betrayed by how much of Trump’s product is actually coming from China.
My point is, there’s no good way to keep this under wraps. If they don’t actually build this thing in the US, word is going to get around, and it’s going to be seen as a total repudiation of Trump’s entire tariff strategy.
My son has doubled in size every month for the last few months. At this rate he’ll be fifty foot tall by the time he’s seven years old.
Yeah, it’s a stupid claim to make on the face of it. It also ignores practical realities. The first is those is training data, and the second is context windows. The idea that AI will successfully write a novel or code a large scale piece of software like a video game would require them to be able to hold that entire thing in their context window at once. Context windows are strongly tied to hardware usage, so scaling them to the point where they’re big enough for an entire novel may not ever be feasible (at least from a cost/benefit perspective).
I think there’s also the issue of how you define “success” for the purpose of a study like this. The article claims that AI may one day write a novel, but how do you define “successfully” writing a novel? Is the goal here that one day we’ll have a machine that can produce algorithmically mediocre works of art? What’s the value in that?