For those who downvoted without reading the link… This whole thing is satire.
The aim of this satirical campaign is to use humour to connect your personal needs for Earth’s resources with the evidence of just how much of these resources are now being claimed for the data centres running generative AI. And to make you smile.
Well, it was only a matter of time till the bot got to me!
wtf did I just read?
veeeeery powerful tool for self-education
You know these are pattern recognition machines, right? And not an actually reliable source of information, right? These are hallucination machine which sometimes gets right simply by virtue of such truthful statements being repeated often enough in the data for the machine to pick it up. It can give contradicting answers depending on what keywords you use. As such it is of little education value.
If anything, it makes self-education harder, as search results will be filled with perfectly SEOed LLM article with no quality standards and complete disregard for the truthfulness of the text written, poisoning the well of knowledge the internet was supposed to be. And as a bit of irony, these poor quality pattern-based texts will later be used in future machine learning databases, thus lowering the quality of said data, causing the machine’s own decay.
AI just screams “lazy” and “lack of care”. If they don’t care that every article they put out has a completely unnecessary AI image in it, what guarantee do I have they care about any of the content on their website?
If they can’t afford an image then it’s better to have none than to give money to a company that will DDOS their servers with web-scrappers.
In my eyes, AI = Complete disregard for quality control.
Yup. These “AI” machines are not much more than glorified pattern recognition software. They are hallucination machines that sometimes get things right by accident.
Comparing them to .tar or .zip files is an interesting way of thinking about how the “training process” is nothing more than adjusting the machine sot that it copies the training data (backwards propagation). Since training works is such a way that the machine’s definition of success is how well if copies the training data:
Why am I not surprised? People who know nothing about these things think we just created a brain simulation: they think it’s magic! While those who are tech-savvy know just what these things can and can’t do and know just how unreliable they can be.
You are severally over-estimating the computer skills of the general population. Here is some data on that.
Yup… right what I suspected! The Slippery Slope Fallacy!
Whats gonna happens when politicians realize kids are just gonna click “I’m at least [Age]”?
Many pornography work like that and can, as such, be easily bypassed. But does that mean we should drop the age restriction for access to pornography? Of course not!
Here is another example:
Murder. Murder shouldn’t be legal and it is not. However, despite this restriction, some find ways to get away with murder. Does that mean that laws against murder are useless since we cannot stop murder 100% of the time? I highly doubt it.
It is impossible for any law enforcement to prevent 100% of all crimes, but that is not justification for those law to not exist.
Either you have a toothless law, or you live in a country with Great Firewall of China.
False dilemma fallacy.
Again, I’ll refer to pornography. Many pornography work on the trust system. By your logic, that means we should drop all laws restricting access to it. However, that is absurd.
The point isn’t to stop 100% of all usage. It is simply there to reduce the usage. You are forgetting that we are talking about human beings. Beings which have a natural tendency to conform to social norms as to not be cast out of their tribe (since humans cannot survive in the wild without each other, such would be a death sentence).
This law would set the societal precedent that people need to be of a certain age to access these social media apps (as shown by scientific data, which revealed that social media usage can have many negative effects on a developing mind). This societal precedent will, hopefully, make it taboo for people bellow 16 to access social media, which will, in turn, reduce, but not outright 100% stop, underage social media usage.
???
How is restricting access behind an age requirement the same as the “Great Firewall”. Right now, as we speak, you cannot use social media until you are 13. They are just increasing that requirement to 16.
There are many many many other things that are already lock behind an age restriction and I don’t see you freaking out. Here are a few examples of things locked behind an age restriction:
alcohol
gambling
cigarettes
pornography
Media has age restrictions. Books have age restrictions, movies have age restrictions, games have age restrictions. Media has had age restrictions for a very long time and it’s high time the same standards are applied to social media.
Just because it isn’t perfect it doesn’t mean it’s useless.
Just because there is no way to stop 100% of all crime it doesn’t mean taking measures to reduce crime is futile.
There is a lot more to this than just blocking the site. It will also change social norms. Right now, if a 14 year old as social media, nobody bats an eye; but with the 16 year requirement, through all the sudden, parents aren’t too comfortable with letting their 14 year old have social media. So not only will they need to find some free VPN totally not spyware to use (and even know that that exists and how to use), they will also have to hide it from their parents, as it is no longer socially acceptable for 14 year olds to have social media.
And before you say “Kids can easily get a free VPN and hide it.” Never underestimate tech illiteracy.
just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?
As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren’t posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn’t an audience there. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn’t immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.
Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don’t know…, .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world’s content.
You need the plurality of site content
I wouldn’t say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn’t kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.
Wait, Trump is doing what? Can you link some sources?
BlueSky isn’t decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can’t set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.
a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don’t see how the venture capital firm could stop them… For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen… but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.
They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn’t under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we are good.
It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that’s what I hope.
What do I think? I think it’s normal to have wallpapers that aren’t related to the kernel of you OS and I’m struggling to make sense of how people setting their wallpaper to something they like could possibly be a problem.
Listen, I know that the term “AI” has been, historically, used to describe so many things to the point of having no meaning, but I think, given the context, it is pretty obvious what AI they are referring to.
It’s not even generative
It doesn’t need to be generative to be AI.
It’s a scraper that uses already available information to then “learn”.
That’s just every single “AI” product out there, that’s how they work: They scrape data from all over the internet, create a model that makes predictions based on that data. Chat-GPT doesn’t understand anything. It is simply a really complicated model which predicts what word is most likely to follow a given sequence of words. These “AI” aren’t inteligent, nor are they creative. They, by their very nature, stay as close as possible to the data they are given and never deviate, as a deviation would mean inaccuracy.
From an historical point of view, the word “AI” simply means “cool new technology”. That’s what it has been used to describe, while people think that AI means “artificial person”, like we see in the movies. So we need to be careful while using this word, because it can mean so many thing to the point that it has little meaning.
Huhhhhh… Last time I checked AIs were horrible at summarizing stuff: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/02/11/ai-chatbots-are-still-hopelessly-terrible-at-summarizing-news/
Granted, this article is about summarizing news.