Obviously the situations are different. We all know that. The point is that it’s hypocritical of a company to say hey, let’s ask our employees to do more by throwing AI at them, and then getting pissed off when potential employees do the same thing.

Although I think it’s more funny than anything else. The company found out that people are gaming the system, which means they have a really shitty system, and rather than change how they interview people or what types of questions they ask, they’re just acting obstinate.

I think we’ve seen enough changes in social media platforms over the past few decades to say that your claim is true until it’s not. As payments to content creators fall, and as garbage postings increase, the actual value to the average user of the site is clearly decreasing. So we’ll see how long YouTube is relevant.

So you’re saying that other options do exist but some companies don’t want to use them because Microsoft is very popular, which is kind of a circular thing, and I understand, but it’s a sign of laziness, not quality.

Many people in the world, they don’t know the difference between an expert system and an LLM. Or, to phrase it a different way, many people think that AI is equivalent to generative AI.

I think that’s largely a result of marketing bullshit and terrible reporting. Of course it would be good if people could educate themselves, but to some degree we expect that the newspaper won’t totally fail us, and then when it does, people just don’t realize they got played.

On a personal note, I’m a teacher, and some of my colleagues are furious that our students are using grammar checkers because they think grammar checkers are AI, and they think grammar checkers were invented in the last 3 years. It’s really wild because some of these colleagues are otherwise smart people who I’m certain have personal experience with Microsoft Word 20 years ago, but they’ve blocked it out of their mind, because somehow they’re afraid that all AI is evil.

I have to quibble with you, because you used the term “AI” instead of actually specifying what technology would make sense.

As we have seen in the last 2 years, people who speak in general terms on this topic are almost always selling us snake oil. If they had a specific model or computer program that they thought was going to be useful because it fit a specific need in a certain way, they would have said that, but they didn’t.

One of the problems that the major news outlets have is that they repeat each other. It’s not merely an issue of AI compiling news stories, but that on top of the fact that all of these newspapers are doing hardly any research. For example, if you live in a town that’s not too large, there might only be one local paper, and they might send out reporters to local events. Obviously you would then go to that newspaper if you wanted to learn about local events, because they are adding explicit value.

But if you’re trying to read about national politics, a lot of the information is going to be the same in a lot of the newspapers. Which means nobody cares about the newspaper itself. And this is a creation of the newspaper’s own decision making over the past few decades.

There you go again. Blame the protestors for actions that others caused in conditions others created. Forget about the DNC, Biden, Harris … they had no control over their own policies, did they? Of course not!

Of course we knew that was going to happen. That’s the whole point.

I’ll move myself and my family aside / If we happen to be left half alive / I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky / Though I know that the hypnotized never lie

The Who

We learned that lesson 95 years ago when the same thing happened during the Great Depression. And then apparently many of us forgot it and I hope many of those people are relearning it.

Yes of course they are at the limit, and because they poisoned the internet with generative bullshit, they can’t scrape it and expect improvement, but they are still scraping it, so they’re poisoning themselves.

The end of the article has classic snake oil trash. The idea that newer AI could be trained to think similar to how humans think. Yes, great, you know scientists have been working on that for decades. Good luck succeeding where nobody else did. There’s a reason that so-called weak AI or so-called expert systems are the ones that we all remember as having lasted for decades.

How cool! This is one great point of FOSS.

I’m not following you. What you think and what you say or do are entirely different, right? We think all kinds of things very quickly about all kinds of topics, and just as a practical measure we can only say or do do a small fraction of those.

So right now I’m not seeing the Mel Gibson connection, because that was a claim about his actions.

Exactly. Reverse DNS lookup matters in some situations.

That’s true but it doesn’t solve the problem now.

I think what you mean to say is that we should be pressuring public officials to try to bust up Google’s monopoly on many things. And we are doing that, and it is showing some progress. But there is much more work to be done.

YouTube took down the video because of its own policies, not because of copyright law. So we should be blaming YouTube.

I think it’s easy to see exactly why if you consider how YouTube treats small content creators. If I post a video and companies claim copyright on it, the video gets demonetized and I might lose my account. I can respond and contest the claim and maybe I can win but I still lost money in the meantime, and perhaps more significantly, the companies that made their copyright claims will never face a consequence for attempting to burn my channel. In other words, if I get things wrong a few times I’ll lose my channel and my income source, but if they get things wrong a million times, they face zero consequence.

And you might be inclined to blame the media companies. But again, this is YouTube doing what YouTube wants to do of its own volition, and not something that’s required by law. If YouTube valued small-scale content creators and end users, it would create different policies.

You can buy loyalty. Give someone a high paying 3-year contract and they’ll probably work to the end of it. But of course HR doesn’t want to hear that.