#Language modeling

[probablyasocialecologist]

A group of Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, “a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.” The group’s goal is to protect one of the world’s largest repositories of information from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued Google search results, books sold on Amazon, and academic journals. “A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar ‘styles’ using ChatGPT,” Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup, told me in an email. “Discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles, which we quickly wanted to formalize into an organized project to compile our findings and techniques.”

9 October 2024

[mochasucculent]

Was looking at refs and since Viktor has two different leg braces I was wondering, do we think he wears them simultaneously?? The refs don't perfectly line up perspective-wise so it's hard to tell but parts of the one he wears during the Hexcore scenes look like they could maybe line up with the brace that he wears over his clothes, but also some parts really don't and look like they'd be super uncomfy. Also HOW does he take these on and off. Experts weigh in

[softlabsgroup05]

Discover the essential components of speech recognition systems with our informative guide. This simplified overview breaks down the key elements involved in converting spoken words into text, enabling seamless communication with technology. Perfect for those interested in understanding how speech recognition enhances user experiences. Stay informed with Softlabs Group for more insightful content on cutting-edge technologies.

[river-taxbird]

AI hasn't improved in 18 months. It's likely that this is it. There is currently no evidence the capabilities of ChatGPT will ever improve. It's time for AI companies to put up or shut up.

I'm just re-iterating this excellent post from Ed Zitron, but it's not left my head since I read it and I want to share it. I'm also taking some talking points from Ed's other posts. So basically:

We keep hearing AI is going to get better and better, but these promises seem to be coming from a mix of companies engaging in wild speculation and lying.

Chatgpt, the industry leading large language model, has not materially improved in 18 months. For something that claims to be getting exponentially better, it sure is the same shit.

Hallucinations appear to be an inherent aspect of the technology. Since it's based on statistics and ai doesn't know anything, it can never know what is true. How could I possibly trust it to get any real work done if I can't rely on it's output? If I have to fact check everything it says I might as well do the work myself.

For "real" ai that does know what is true to exist, it would require us to discover new concepts in psychology, math, and computing, which open ai is not working on, and seemingly no other ai companies are either.

Open ai has already seemingly slurped up all the data from the open web already. Chatgpt 5 would take 5x more training data than chatgpt 4 to train. Where is this data coming from, exactly?

Since improvement appears to have ground to a halt, what if this is it? What if Chatgpt 4 is as good as LLMs can ever be? What use is it?

As Jim Covello, a leading semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs said (on page 10, and that's big finance so you know they only care about money): if tech companies are spending a trillion dollars to build up the infrastructure to support ai, what trillion dollar problem is it meant to solve? AI companies have a unique talent for burning venture capital and it's unclear if Open AI will be able to survive more than a few years unless everyone suddenly adopts it all at once. (Hey, didn't crypto and the metaverse also require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense?)

There is no problem that current ai is a solution to. Consumer tech is basically solved, normal people don't need more tech than a laptop and a smartphone. Big tech have run out of innovations, and they are desperately looking for the next thing to sell. It happened with the metaverse and it's happening again.

In summary:

Ai hasn't materially improved since the launch of Chatgpt4, which wasn't that big of an upgrade to 3.

There is currently no technological roadmap for ai to become better than it is. (As Jim Covello said on the Goldman Sachs report, the evolution of smartphones was openly planned years ahead of time.) The current problems are inherent to the current technology and nobody has indicated there is any way to solve them in the pipeline. We have likely reached the limits of what LLMs can do, and they still can't do much.

Don't believe AI companies when they say things are going to improve from where they are now before they provide evidence. It's time for the AI shills to put up, or shut up.

[briteredoctober]

The real issue with DeepSeek is that capitalists can't profit from it.

I always appreciate when the capitalist class just says it out loud so I don't have to be called a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the obvious.

[creature-wizard]

is checking facts by chatgpt smart? i once asked chatgpt about the hair color in the image and asked the same question two times and chatgpt said two different answers lol

Never, ever, ever use ChatGPT or any LMM for fact checking! All large language models are highly prone to generating misinformation (here's a recent example!), because they're basically just fancy autocomplete.

If you need to fact check, use reliable fact checking websites (like PolitiFact, AP News, FactCheck.org), go to actual experts, check primary sources, things like that. To learn more, I recommend this site:

[alpaca-clouds]

This might be the best summation of GenAI I have seen.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The problem here isn’t that large language models hallucinate, lie, or misrepresent the world in some way. It’s that they are not designed to represent the world at all; instead, they are designed to convey convincing lines of text. So when they are provided with a database of some sort, they use this, in one way or another, to make their responses more convincing. But they are not in any real way attempting to convey or transmit the information in the database. As Chirag Shah and Emily Bender put it: “Nothing in the design of language models (whose training task is to predict words given context) is actually designed to handle arithmetic, temporal reasoning, etc. To the extent that they sometimes get the right answer to such questions is only because they happened to synthesize relevant strings out of what was in their training data. No reasoning is involved […] Similarly, language models are prone to making stuff up […] because they are not designed to express some underlying set of information in natural language; they are only manipulating the form of language” (Shah & Bender, 2022). These models aren’t designed to transmit information, so we shouldn’t be too surprised when their assertions turn out to be false.

ChatGPT is bullshit

[sweetmapple]

When your Lambkin uses the Pureblood Knight Medal before the commencement of your dynasty

[professorcalculusstanaccount]

I don't know if you've already been asked this before, but would it be okay to make tintin fanart with your chang design?

Absolutely! I'd love to see what people make with my design! Be sure to tag me so I can see it!

He's a little tricky to draw so here's a sort of model sheet/style guide for him. Even though this is my own design I struggle getting him right half the time! This is what his design has become after I've spent ages drawing him so you will find plenty of examples of my own art breaking these "rules." I've done one for Tintin some time ago here

You don't have to adhere to this strictly in order to draw him! This is only a guide if you want to emulate my way of drawing him! Have fun with it. Chang would want you to.

[victusinveritas]

From Rebecca Solnit:

When you outsource thinking, your brain goes on vacation. "EEG analysis presented robust evidence that LLM, Search Engine and Brain-only groups had significantly different neural connectivity patterns, reflecting divergent cognitive strategies. Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support: the Brain‑only group exhibited the strongest, widest‑ranging networks, Search Engine group showed intermediate engagement, and LLM assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling."

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

But also here's a fantastic essay on the subject: "Now, in the age of the internet—when the Library of Alexandria could fit on a medium-sized USB stick and the collected wisdom of humanity is available with a click—we’re engaged in a rather large, depressingly inept social experiment of downloading endless knowledge while offloading intelligence to machines. (Look around to see how it’s going). That’s why convincing students that intelligence is a skill they must cultivate through hard work—no shortcuts—has become one of the core functions of education."

https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-death-of-the-student-essayand

[mindblowingscience]

When summarizing scientific studies, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and DeepSeek produce inaccurate conclusions in up to 73% of cases, according to a study by Uwe Peters (Utrecht University) and Benjamin Chin-Yee (Western University, Canada/University of Cambridge, UK). The researchers tested the most prominent LLMs and analyzed thousands of chatbot-generated science summaries, revealing that most models consistently produced broader conclusions than those in the summarized texts. Surprisingly, prompts for accuracy increased the problem and newer LLMs performed worse than older ones. The work is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Continue Reading.

[racingghost]

Mika Hakkinen is quite the character, because he has a pretty large tattoo, and got interviewed about it, essentially saying...

... if you want a tattoo, consider it thoroughly, why you want one, etc. Which is fair advice, especially when you're a guy like him who traveled all over the world.

But then, when he's asked about his own tattoo...

LIKE OK MAN. Did you ever heed your own advice?

But that's not even the funny thing that stuck out. He says he had a talk with his artist friend about getting a tattoo.

So he has definitely put some thought into it. The thing is.

This is his tattoo.

At the time of the interview, it was actually bigger than original.

Originally it was just a band around his arm with both Chinese characters ( from what he said, these are *supposed* to be his children's names) and a "tribal" design.

The reason this is so funny to me is that back in the day, it was a certain rival of his that really liked to get arm band tattoos with either asian or tribal designs.

And Mika, who said "we checked what came to mind" when he decided he wanted a tattoo, basically went on this direction.

[x]

[probablyasocialecologist]

The premature unleashing of AI and large language models (LLMs) in particular onto the open Internet is already having dire consequences for what were, for years, considered stabilized, centralized (if flawed) systems, such as the search engine. AI, thanks to the scope of its spread, its rogue unreliability (it lies — often), the way it poisons search results, hijacks SEO, and is increasingly being used for disinformation and fraud, is reintroducing a fundamental and destabilizing distrust back into the Internet. Once more, I can no longer trust the results Google provides me. On a daily basis I have to ask myself increasingly familiar questions: Is this first result a legitimate news source? Is this image of a protest real? Is that picture of a Kandinsky painting really his or is an AI forgery of his work? Across the board, it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell. For me and countless others, what used to be rote Internet usage has now turned into a nightmarish amount of wasted time spent discerning what is and isn’t real. As far as I, the ordinary user, am concerned, AI is evolving not into a life-changing and labor-saving technology as was promised by its capitalist overlords, but rather into a form of malware that targets, whether unwittingly or not, critical Internet infrastructure.

1 October 2024

[creature-wizard]

What an AI generated website can look like

Hey folks! I just encountered a website that's obviously AI generated, so I figured I'd use it as an example to help you spot websites that might be AI generated content farms!

First, the website is called faunafacts.com. And one of the first things that sticks out to me is how low-effort the logo is:

Regardless of whether a website is AI generated or not, a lazy and low-quality logo is a big clue that the website's content will also be lazy and low-quality.

If we click on Browse Animals, we see four options: Cows, Wolves, Bears, and Snakes.

Let's click Wolves.

The first thing I want you to notice is the lack of topical focus. Sure, it's all about wolves, but the content on them is all over the place. We have content on wolf hunting, a page on animals that resemble wolves, pages that explain the alleged social structure of wolves, and pages on wolf symbolism.

A website with content created by real people isn't going to be all over the place like this. It would be created with more of a focus in mind, like animal biology and behavior. The whole spiritual symbol thing here mixed with supposed biological and behavioral information is weird.

The next thing I want you to notice are the links to pages on topics that are quite frankly bizarre: "Wolf vs Mastiff: Things You Need To Know" and "Can You Ride A Wolf? (No, Because...)" Who is even looking for this kind of information in large enough numbers that it needs a dedicated page?

Then of course, there's the fact that they're repeating the debunked wolf hierarchy stuff, which anyone who actually knew anything about wolves at this point wouldn't post.

Now let's look at what's on one of the actual pages. We'll check out the wolves vs. mastiff page, and we can soon find a telltale sign of AI: rambling off topic to talk about something completely unrelated.

Both animals are carnivores. In the wild, wolves hunt large animals like bison, deer, and even elk. Sometimes, they may also hunt small mammals like the beaver.

Mastiffs, on the other hand, are mainly fed with dog food. As a dog, a mastiff left in the wild will eat anything. However, it will have difficulties hunting, as this instinct may have already departed the dogs of today.

A mastiff is not an obligate carnivore. Dogs can eat plant matter. Some say that dogs can survive on a vegetable diet.

Dogs being made vegetarians is a contentious issue. Scientifically, dogs belong to the order Carnivora. There is a movement today to convert dogs to a vegan diet. While science has nothing against it, the fear of many is that when dog owners do this, a vegan diet will certainly have an impact on the species.

This page is supposed to be comparing mastiffs with wolves, but then it starts talking about the vegan pet food movement. This happened because large language models generate text based on on what's statistically likely to follow the last text it just generated.

Finally, the website's images are AI generated:

If you know what to look for, this is a very obviously AI generated image. There's no graininess to the image, and the details are both unnaturally smooth and unnaturally crisp. It also has that high color saturation that many AI generated images have.

So there you go, this is one example of what an AI generated website can look like! Be careful out there!

[wontune]

✿ miyoshi ayaka ﹙ atriz ﹚ lockscreens !