Perhaps you may wish to look up “anecdote” vs. “data” sometime.

No. Hot dogs are repulsive.

I’ll rent you mine. 🤣

Time to sharpen the blades and oil the tracks of the guillotines.

I just tried asking perplexity.ai about that and … SURPRISE! … it said it wouldn’t help me do something “unethical” (because apparently destroying an unethical system is unethical).

You seem nice.

The way to spot that this is bullshit is trivial: replace “AI/Artificial Intelligence” with “ghost writer”.

We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of the use of a ghost writer has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of ghost writers tie to questions around privilege.

Because … unless they accept ghost-written submissions their acceptance of AI (which is just bad ghost writing by a madlibs machine) is hypocritical bullshit.

Wow! NaNoWriMo somehow managed to make itself even less relevant than it already was.

And yet other studies have the people making the software say it’s a failure 75% of the time. (Keep in mind that the 75% comes from the people making it, not the people selling it who have a vested interest in claiming their product isn’t a failure.)

Most pieces of software fail (I’ve heard numbers in the range of 75%) according to the people who made them. 80% is only marginally higher than that, so … 😉

I don’t know I’d call it “respecting robots.txt” if you don’t tell people that your robot even exists. Basically if you don’t just automatically block any and all robots (and then watch many of them cheerfully ignore you), this is an end-run around user desires.

Which is why I give these institutions the same moral regard I give door-to-door salesmen, telemarketers, slug slime, and other moral vacuums.

I think that’s spelled !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world

My take is that if never-ending opt-in requests are a pest, perhaps people should stop doing the pesky activities.

Let’s move this from the digital world (where people seem to get easily confused on topics of consent) into the physical. Remember the good old days of door-to-door salesmen? (Probably not. I only barely remember them and I’m likely far older than you.) In any case you had some twat interrupting your daily/evening tasks, your family time, your sleep, etc. all so they could sell you some shit you didn’t want. They got so obnoxious that regulations had to be put in place to control them: what time they could arrive, what things they could say, what tactics they could or could not use (the old “foot in the door” shit), etc. Finally, over time, people would put up aggressive signs about sales (which salesmen would cheerily ignore, rather like this robots.txt thing), buy dogs to frighten them off, etc.

And this was being done by people selling the products of “established corporations”. When taken to task for it they’d throw the salesmen under the bus, claiming that the tactics used were not countenanced by them (but the fact that their sales targets practically mandated this was quietly left unspoken). “Established corporations” are no more prone to ethical behaviour and, indeed, even basically social behaviour than are small agents. It’s just that in this day and age when they commit an ethical breach (like Google’s camera trucks siphoning personal data that time) it’s an ‘accident’ or ‘just some bad apples’ and so on.

The reality is that Meta can be trusted as far as you can throw it. Which is to say zero distance. As can Google, Microsoft, anything Elon Musk foists on us at any point, etc. etc. etc. And this whole “opt out” bullshit is how they get away with being antisocial shits.

… but that’s not the kind of shenanigans this article is about, as meta is being pretty upfront about what they’re doing with the data. At least after they announced it existed.

Uh … Meta is being pretty upfront about what they’re doing after they ran it a while and siphoned off the stuff they wanted. This is not the pass you seem to think it is.

We’ll talk in a year.

Until then, go ahead and be like the cryptobros of a few years back.

Even more important to being able to opt out, however, is not having to opt out in the first place.

Otherwise you get this script:

Wanna fuck?

No.

How about now?

No.

It’s five minutes later. Have you changed your mind?

No.

. . .

Which is exactly what techbrodudes have been doing to us by having “opt out” features a dozen times a day.

You’re so caught up in the hype curve you can’t see it.

Yet.

Let’s talk next year when the sheen has worn off and you’ve seen the damage wrought by the technology you’re currently gung ho about.

Anybody who thinks “well defined opt out mechanisms” are good has no clue how “consent” works.

Right. “The Peak of Inflated Expectations” then.

I’ll wave when you wind up in “The Trough of Disillusionment”.

I know, right? When the most powerful tool for arguing against degenerative AI is the degenerative AI itself, it’s just Inception grades of crazy.

I’m not sure how that’s relevant.

There’s many determinants of what isn’t a piece of steel. Trying to make, however, a piece of steel by enumerating each item that isn’t a piece of steel is not going to be productive. Generally you have to know what steel is and how it’s made to make one.

We don’t know what an intelligence is. We thus don’t know how to make one.