Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Freddie Oversteegen Was Right

Well, since private equity intend to flood the zone with tens of thousands of AI books next year, I'll say it:

We officially need an "AI free" seal of approval, and one that doesn't allow the same bullshit loopholes the FDA allows re: less than half a gram. Less than half a gram of AI is still fuckin Ai.

#books #bookstodon #art

5 comments
StanceOfMind

@hannu_ikonen I think it depends on what the AI is being used to do by authors. Don’t like replacing authors. But it can be a tool to help an author check facts, check locations that the story involves, check writing and grammar…. I think those uses are fine as that would be something that publishers would/should do anyway. I can also see using AI to do research, like a research assistant does. But then the author needs to go through and check all the research and all the citations and build on the AI’s work.

myrmepropagandist

@ronaldtootall @hannu_ikonen

LLM are not reliable enough to "check facts" this isn't what they are even designed to do well.

What they are designed to do is generate plausible seeming streams of text similar to existing sets of text. That is all.

There is no logic behind that, no verification. It's pure chance.

Do not use them to check facts, please.

Lina

@futurebird
@ronaldtootall @hannu_ikonen

yeah LLMs aren't at all reliable for any of the use cases he proposed. 🙄😮‍💨 literally any modern word processor is more reliable for spelling/grammar checks, and the suggestion of using them for research is always nauseating.

Lina

@futurebird
@ronaldtootall @hannu_ikonen

by portraying LLMs as a panacea, the hypemongers have successfully kneecapped a lot of people's ability to consider alternative tools that are often well known, widely used for decades, and solve the specific problem they're targeting with a 0% fail rate.

i've had to tell project managers way too many times, "no, we don't need to pay OpenAI to fuck up at doing what regex does perfectly. all we're trying to do is extract a consistently-formatted string for fucks sake."

Шуро

There are applications where AI based tools can help though.

E.g. factchecking. Sure using them to query data directly isn't the best idea (same goes for search engines btw as these only provide potential sources not answers) however AI does a pretty good job at things like text and video summarization or audio/video transcribing. It doesn't mean one should use the resulting data directly but if you need to find some relevant research it might come in handy helping to browse through lots of materials and identify those potentially interesting so you can evaluate them yourself.

IMO "AI is God" and "AI is useless crap" are two equally radically unproductive approaches. It is just a tool which is suited for some things and not so much for others.

There are applications where AI based tools can help though.

E.g. factchecking. Sure using them to query data directly isn't the best idea (same goes for search engines btw as these only provide potential sources not answers) however AI does a pretty good job at things like text and video summarization or audio/video transcribing. It doesn't mean one should use the resulting data directly but if you need to find some relevant research it might come in handy helping to browse through lots of materials...

Go Up