"When the Singaporean government asked local writers if they would agree to having their work used to train a large language model, it probably did not expect the country’s tiny literary community to react so fiercely."
I just issued a data deletion request to #StackOverflow to erase all of the associations between my name and the questions, answers and comments I have on the platform.
One of the key ways in which #RAG works to supplement #LLMs is based on proven associations. Higher ranked Stack Overflow members' answers will carry more weight in any #LLM that is produced.
By asking for my name to be disassociated from the textual data, it removes a semantic relationship that is helpful for determining which tokens of text to use in an #LLM.
If you sell out your user base without consultation, expect a backlash.
i used an analogy yesterday, that #LLMs are basically system 1 (from Thinking Fast and Slow), and system 2 doesn’t exist but we can kinda fake it by forcing the LLM to have an internal dialog.
my understanding is that system 1 was more tuned to pattern matching and “gut reactions”, while system 2 is more analytical
i think it probably works pretty well, but curious what others think
Just came up with a new analogy I'm rather proud of: LLMs are digital compost heaps. They decompose whatever you hurl in and turn it into artificial excrement.
Also I'm moving from StackExchange to Codidact. If I'm going to do any more unpaid labour it's going to be for a not-for-profit, rather than a for-profit company. Feeding that work into a digital compost heap is the push I needed.
Everyone should immediately stop contributing to the stack overflow and its network. The human touch is what made it unique. Delete your profile from SO AND all your answers. Freeloaders are making money out of human contributions.
@nixCraft Wow! Doesn't this mean that the company will now die a slow death once all their databases have been incorporated into #ChatGPT? On the one hand, this seems like a really stupid move, but on the other hand, I reckon that this deal is actually the only real choice they have left, as all their data has probably already been crawled by the best #LLMs before. At least they can gain a bit of money from #OpenAI in the short term before becoming completely obsolete in a few months to years. 😢
#AI#Writing#GenerativeAI#LLMs#ChatBots#Creativity: "Here, at last, is the grisly crux: that AI threatens to ruin for us—for many more of us than we might suppose—not the benefits of reading but those of writing. We don’t all paint or make music, but we all formulate language in some way, and plenty of it is through writing. Even the most basic scraps of writing we do—lessons in cursive, text messages, marginal jottings, postcards, all the paltry offcuts of our minds—improve us. Learning the correct spellings of words, according to many research studies, makes us better readers. Writing by hand impresses new information into the brain and sets off more ideas (again: several studies). And sustained writing of any kind—with chalk on a rock face, or a foot-long novelty pencil, or indeed a laptop—abets contemplation."
Eventually, people may stop writing, stop filming, stop composing—at least for the open, public web. People will still create, but for small, select audiences, walled-off from the content-hoovering AIs.
If we continue in this direction, the #web—that extraordinary ecosystem of knowledge production—will cease to exist in any useful form.
The TinyChart-3B LLM answers questions about data visualizations. It can also generate underlying data from a dataviz and Python code to re-create a similar chart.
i generally regard, “i will think less of you” type comments as a joke, because of how ridiculous the sentiment is, but this sort of stuff is perverse on the fedi
alright, i have to declare this as a strong opinion — #LLMs are better at alt-text than people are
the goal of alt text is to let a person “without eyes” see the picture, to get the same experience as someone who can see fine
but often, almost always, human-written alt text is either too succinct to be helpful, or just an extension of the post itself, and so doesn’t help an impaired person understand what’s in it
OTOH #LLMs generate what “the average person sees”. that stochastic parrot behavior is actually quite desirable, it gives impaired people as close to the same experience as non-impaired
i’m at the point where i don’t even edit the LLM-generated text, because, if it wasn’t clear to the AI, maybe it’s not clear to most people either
i've been getting into the things #LLMscan't do well, because i think it says a lot about what they're useful for, and it helps build a mental model around how they work
I really like the convention of using ✨ sparkle iconography as an “automagic” motif, e.g. to smart-adjust a photo or to automatically handle some setting. I hate that it has become the defacto iconography for generative AI. 🙁