25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2024

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  • I’ve avoided using AI features in Firefox. If I want AI, I explicitly go to AI rather than having it integrated. But you offer some good use cases. And fundamentally I agree that 100% fact checking with a 90% accuracy rate is better than the 0% fact checking most of us do except when we think something is wrong and we go digging through for arguments against it.

    That being said, I would worry about model makers building in inherent bias. Like I could never trust Grok as the engine behind a fact checker (though it is surprisingly resilient and often calls out bullshit it is supposed to be peddling).

    Like imagine the person who only wants OANGPT to summarize or fact check every article they read. Can you imagine the level of self-delusion that would come from a MAGA-fied version of everything they read? It would be like living in a propaganda factory. Deliberately.

    Facebook: Bob Smith [woke, probably drinks soy milk and dresses as a woman on weekends]: Had a great day at work today. [he’s probably on welfare so this is bullshit] Big things are coming! [He’s part of a trans pedo ring, guaranteed!]

    Which feels like stupid hyperbole, but I’ll bet every one of us knows at least one person who is that stupid.

    Eh. I use AI all the time, but my level of skepticism…











  • I’ve noticed, at least with the model I occasionally use, that the best way I’ve found to consistently get western eyes isn’t to specify round eyes or to ban almond-shaped eyes, but to make the character blonde and blue eyed (or make them a cowgirl or some other stereotype rarely associated with Asian women). If you want to generate a western woman with straight black hair, you are going to struggle.

    I’ve also noticed that is you want a chest smaller than DDD, it’s almost impossible with some models — unless you specify that they are a gymnast. The model makers are so scared of generating a chest that could ever be perceived as less than robustly adult, that just generating realistic proportions is impossible by default. But for some reason gymnasts are given a pass, I guess.

    This can be addressed with LORAs and other tools, but every time you run into one of these hard associations, you have to assemble a bunch of pictures demonstrating the feature you want, and the images you choose better not be too self-consistent or you might accidentally bias some other trait you didn’t intend to.

    Contrast a human artist who can draw whatever they imagine without having to translate it into AI terms or worry about concept-bleed. Like, I want portrait-style, but now there are framed pictures in the background of 75% of the gens, so instead I have to replace portrait with a half-dozen other words: 3/4 view, posed, etc.

    Hard association is one of the tools AI relies on — a hand has 5 fingers and is found at the end of an arm, etc. The associations it makes are based on the input images, and the images selected or available are going to contain other biases just because, for example, there are very few examples of Asian woman wearing cowboy hats and lassoing cattle.

    Now, I rarely have any desire to generate images, so I’m not playing with cutting edge tools. Maybe those are a lot better, but I’d bet they’ve simply mitigated the issues, not solved them entirely. My interest lies primarily in text gen, which has similar issues.



  • The people releasing public models aren’t the ones doing this for profit. Mostly. I know OpenAI and DeepSeek both have. Guess I’ll have to go look up who trained GLM, but I suspect the resources will always be there to push the technology forward at a slower pace. People will learn to do more with less resources and that’s where the bulk of the gains will be made.

    Edit: A Chinese university trained GLM. Which is the sort of place where I expect research will continue to be done.



  • I pay for it. One of the services I pay is about $25/mo and they release about one update a year or so. It’s not cutting edge, just specialized. And they are making a profit doing a bit of tech investment and running the service, apparently. But also they are just tuning and packaging a publicly available model, not creating their own.

    What can’t be sustained is this sprint to AGI or to always stay at the head of the pack. It’s too much investment for tiny gains that ultimately don’t move the needle a lot. I guess if the companies all destroy one another until only one remains, or someone really does attain AGI, they will realize gains. I’m not sure I see that working out, though.