Lots of anthropomorphism going on here. Most of the time you can’t ask a chatbot where it’s got a number from. And pressing on does nothing. Unlike a human who knows something about his or her workplace, and what database they used or whether they made it up… An LLM does not. It’s just embedded into some framework. But I seriously doubt Meta taught it about the internal structures and what kinds of databases there are. And why would they? At best the AI can tell what tool it used, if there are any. But I’d say in this case it likely just made up a number and that happened to belong to someone. If it’s on some website, it could have been scraped an be in the training data as well. And since he demanded the AI explain itself, it just went ahead and made up some random excuses.

As you said, it ain’t easy. You wanted an example and I gave one of the major real-world ones. The strike had quite an impact and there’s a lot of different things involved. Your article talks about it. Things went up to the supreme court. Contracts have been changed, amended, and rules put in place. Shows were delayed or even cancelled. But it wasn’t winnig “the war”.

I’m not sure if some people are under the impression that workers rights or freedom is a one-time thing and then it’s settled and alright… Because it’s really not. This is a constant fight. We’ve been fighting it since the 1700s or so and it won’t ever be over. The moment you stop resisting, someone is going to take your freedom away. And it’s an everlasting struggle, for everyone. And so for the writers. They’ve tried to resist and immediately they’re threatened again.

It’s the same for everyone. Delivery drivers might have been somewhat okay. Then Amazon got invented and they had to pee into bottles to keep up. I’m not sure if that has been settled. Then Uber and food delivery came and they’re all subcontractors and severely struggle with that. And tomorrow someone else is going to make their lives hard.

Fighting for privacy is the same thing. The moment we have some small victory, they try to push (for example) for internet surveillance a different way and it starts again. You decide if you want to fight or accept it.

And philosophy hasn’t settled this either, so yo can’t say it’s dumb. Some people say you have to stand your ground. Fight for your ideals and morals. For who you are or what you stive for. No matter if chances are slim. Some are pushovers. Some people need to pick their fights. And there are other opinions out there. But just that something sems inevitable, doesn’t mean resistance is dumb per se. But I’ll wholeheartedlyagree that some forms of fighting it are dumb, and people won’t succeed with that.

I’m the wrong person to judge. I’m completely indifferent. I’d say “good for you” but really couldn’t care less. Unless that was my boss or mom or something…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Writers_Guild_of_America_strike

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act included public discourse.

I mean AI has an impact on the workplace. And on workers and human labour. So I think it is core business for unions. But I get what you say. It’s difficult. I still think it’s warranted to go on a writers guild strike like in Hollywood. Or be pissed if you’re a freelancer doing art or design.

Also that’s exactly what unions are about. Imagine assembly line work. And people advocating that it needs some rules. And a bathroom break. We regularly complain about technology at the workplace?!

Could go even further and announce you’re practicing how it’s done. Even without trying for a baby. And like you’re constantly getting better… Or lost 2 pounds due to the additional workout…

I doubt it. At least where I live it’s not like that for Gen Z. And I mean you’re somewhere between 13 and 28 yo. Your life isn’t over at that point.

And if you want my advice: Talk to people. You can simply both agree on having an open relationship. If you do it beforehand, it won’t be cheating. And it’d be honest and respectful.

I’m not sure about the “one chance” thing. Who told you that? I know people who are married for the third time now. Or who had several partners over the years. That’s very common. And while there is only one first love… You’ll usally get many chances. Also as a perfectly average man.

I did some wardriving a long time ago but never used those internet connections. And I shared my connection before and had a Freifunk router. With the neighbours not so much. I’m mostly nice to them and ask before borrowing their stuff.

I mean sometimes we get that with other things as well. Like wasting cloud storage permanently. Or printing full color images on the expensive printer. Sometimes there are expensive supplies which shouldn’t be wasted. Idk, kind of depends on the job. If you’re a bartender or pizza chef, you’d also track the expensive ingredients and not serve an arbitrary amount. I guess AI is about the same.

Don’t companies also limit the number of computers, staplers and pens in the office? …It somehow has to be worth it. And they have different contracts available, you can set a limit with most APIs, bookkeeping can look up how much they paid… I think working somewhat efficiently is a normal part of doing business.

I use LibreWolf and SearXNG as a metasearch engine. I like both. They get the job done. I wouldn’t use Vivaldi, since it’s not Free Software. But that’s personal preference.

I think that’s a size where it’s a bit more than a good autocomplete. Could be part of a chain for retrieval augmented generation. Maybe some specific tasks. And there are small machine learning models that can do translation or sentiment analysis, though I don’t think those are your regular LLM chatbots… And well, you can ask basic questions and write dialogue. Something like “What is an Alpaca?” will work. But they don’t have much knowledge under 8B parameters and they regularly struggle to apply their knowledge to a given task at smaller sizes. At least that’s my experience. They’ve become way better at smaller sizes during the last year or so. But they’re very limited.

I’m not sure what you intend to do. If you have some specific thing you’d like an LLM to do, you need to pick the correct one. If you don’t have any use-case… just run an arbitrary one and tinker around?

Thanks! I’ve updated the link. I always just use Batocera or something like that, which has Emulationstation and Kodi set up for me. So I don’t pay a lot of attention to the included projects and their development state…

I didn’t include this, since OP wasn’t mentioning retro-gaming. But Batocera, Recalbox, Lakka, RetroPie are quite nice. I picked one which includes both Kodi and Emulationstation and I can switch between the interfaces with the gamecontroller. I get all the TV and streaming stuff in Kodi, and Emulationstaation launches the games. And I believe it can do Flatpaks and other applications as well.

https://plasma-bigscreen.org/ from KDE? I’m not sure if they’ve replaced that since. Wikipedia says it’s unmaintained. Depending on your use-case, you might want to have a look at Emulationstation, Steam Big Picture and Kodi Plugins, as well.

You’re pretty much describing social media here, as it is now. I think it’s designed to do that. People go there to re-post some memes and share pictures, comment on each other, scroll through the news or blast out their opinion on all of that. More often than not it’s an uninformed opinion or what’s the most popular take on it, or what someone can come up with in 30 seconds…

In an ideal world, yes. But we already have 500 journalistic articles about Character ai. Probably countless social media posts. And it’s literally on their Wikipedia article. The likely outcome is nothing, the journalists won’t even bother writing yet another acticle about the same thing. And at best we’ll end up with the 501st article. All the while the content is still up unless someone listens to me and also reports it. What OP seems to have done. (I’m making up the numbers, but it’s really a lot of different articles.)

I think what we need to do is sue them. And people already did, and they were forced to implement moderation. I think we now need to follow up on that, report content and make them follow up on it. I think that’s a necessary step before the next article can be written or the next lawsuit starts. It’s far from perfect. But it is how it is.

Of course, continue to spread awareness and write about it. Just be aware this likely has next to no impact on the world at this point in time. But yeah, it’s difficult to do the right thing here. Your guess is as good as mine.

I think many people use it and it works. But sorry - no, I don’t have any first-hand experience. I’ve tested it for a bit and it looked fine. Has a lot of features and it should be as efficient as any other ggml/llama.cpp based inference solution at least for text. I myself use KoboldCPP for the few things I do with AI and my computer is lacking a GPU so I don’t really do a lot of images with software like this. And it’s likely going to be less for you than the 15 minutes it takes me to generate an image on my unsuited machine.

I’d say do complain to companies first, at least to those based in a regular country, and only then blog about it. Also underlines your point if you write, I informed them but they didn’t care.

I believe it’s the other way around if it’s really shady and/or crime involved and you suspect the company to sweep it under the carpet. So you’ll want to inform the police first so they can gather evidence. But don’t waste their resources with minor things. They have enough to do. And I think this one isn’t cutting it yet, so I wouldn’t add it to the workload of already overworked police.

Judging by what I’ve seen when talking to police and media, they often also lack interest or time to focus on some random things as long as there’s bigger fish to fry… I’ve already reported a worse service (which was already in the news) to the internet office of the police, and nothing ever came of it. So that’s sometimes not the solution either.

I think spreading some awareness is a good thing, so this post is warranted. But what I’d do in this specific case is take a screenshot and save the URL, in case I want to escalate things at a later date. But then start with a regular report to the company, as they seem to be a regular company registered in the USA. And then I’d wait 2 weeks before bothering other people.
If this was an image or video generator, I’d act differently and maybe go straight to the police. But it isn’t.

If you suspect any wrongdoing, it’s generally the best to report such things.They have several different social media channels at the bottom of the website.

They have a contact form here: https://support.character.ai/hc/en-us/requests/new

And it looks like it’s a US company, so they better comply with US law.