#and Google gemini

[hecateisalesbian]

by the way character.ai is STILL AI and if you use it I automatically dislike you

[thelocalmuffin]

Hey everyone, I know it's going to be a busy day for a lot of people, but Google enrolled everyone over 18 into their AI program automatically.

If you have a google account, first go to gemini.google.com/extensions and turn everything off.

Then you need to go to myactivity.google.com/product/gemini and turn off all Gemini activity tracking. You do have to do them in that order to make sure it works.

Honestly, I'm not sure how long this will last, but this should keep Gemini off your projects for a bit.

I saw this over on bluesky and figured it would be good to spread on here. It only takes a few minutes to do.

[ecrivainsolitaire]

A summary of the Chinese AI situation, for the uninitiated.

These are scores on different tests that are designed to see how accurate a Large Language Model is in different areas of knowledge. As you know, OpenAI is partners with Microsoft, so these are the scores for ChatGPT and Copilot. DeepSeek is the Chinese model that got released a week ago. The rest are open source models, which means everyone is free to use them as they please, including the average Tumblr user. You can run them from the servers of the companies that made them for a subscription, or you can download them to install locally on your own computer. However, the computer requirements so far are so high that only a few people currently have the machines at home required to run it.

Yes, this is why AI uses so much electricity. As with any technology, the early models are highly inefficient. Think how a Ford T needed a long chimney to get rid of a ton of black smoke, which was unused petrol. Over the next hundred years combustion engines have become much more efficient, but they still waste a lot of energy, which is why we need to move towards renewable electricity and sustainable battery technology. But that's a topic for another day.

As you can see from the scores, are around the same accuracy. These tests are in constant evolution as well: as soon as they start becoming obsolete, new ones are released to adjust for a more complicated benchmark. The new models are trained using different machine learning techniques, and in theory, the goal is to make them faster and more efficient so they can operate with less power, much like modern cars use way less energy and produce far less pollution than the Ford T.

However, computing power requirements kept scaling up, so you're either tied to the subscription or forced to pay for a latest gen PC, which is why NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and all the other chip companies were investing hard on much more powerful GPUs and NPUs. For now all we need to know about those is that they're expensive, use a lot of electricity, and are required to operate the bots at superhuman speed (literally, all those clickbait posts about how AI was secretly 150 Indian men in a trenchcoat were nonsense).

Because the chip companies have been working hard on making big, bulky, powerful chips with massive fans that are up to the task, their stock value was skyrocketing, and because of that, everyone started to use AI as a marketing trend. See, marketing people are not smart, and they don't understand computers. Furthermore, marketing people think you're stupid, and because of their biased frame of reference, they think you're two snores short of brain-dead. The entire point of their existence is to turn tall tales into capital. So they don't know or care about what AI is or what it's useful for. They just saw Number Go Up for the AI companies and decided "AI is a magic cow we can milk forever". Sometimes it's not even AI, they just use old software and rebrand it, much like convection ovens became air fryers.

Well, now we're up to date. So what did DepSeek release that did a 9/11 on NVIDIA stock prices and popped the AI bubble?

Oh, I would not want to be an OpenAI investor right now either. A token is basically one Unicode character (it's more complicated than that but you can google that on your own time). That cost means you could input the entire works of Stephen King for under a dollar. Yes, including electricity costs. DeepSeek has jumped from a Ford T to a Subaru in terms of pollution and water use.

The issue here is not only input cost, though; all that data needs to be available live, in the RAM; this is why you need powerful, expensive chips in order to-

Holy shit.

I'm not going to detail all the numbers but I'm going to focus on the chip required: an RTX 3090. This is a gaming GPU that came out as the top of the line, the stuff South Korean LoL players buy…

Or they did, in September 2020. We're currently two generations ahead, on the RTX 5090.

What this is telling all those people who just sold their high-end gaming rig to be able to afford a machine that can run the latest ChatGPT locally, is that the person who bought it from them can run something basically just as powerful on their old one.

Which means that all those GPUs and NPUs that are being made, and all those deals Microsoft signed to have control of the AI market, have just lost a lot of their pulling power.

Well, I mean, the ChatGPT subscription is 20 bucks a month, surely the Chinese are charging a fortune for-

Oh. So it's free for everyone and you can use it or modify it however you want, no subscription, no unpayable electric bill, no handing Microsoft all of your private data, you can just run it on a relatively inexpensive PC. You could probably even run it on a phone in a couple years.

Oh, if only China had massive phone manufacturers that have a foot in the market everywhere except the US because the president had a tantrum eight years ago.

So… yeah, China just destabilised the global economy with a torrent file.

[copperbadge]

I have a lot of feelings about the use of AI in Everything These Days, but they're not particularly strong feelings, like I've got other shit going on. That said, when I use a desktop computer, every single file I use in Google Drive now has a constant irritating popup on the right-hand side asking me how Gemini AI Can Help Me. You can't, Gemini. You are in the way. I'm not even mad there's an AI there, I'm mad there's a constantly recurring popup taking up space and attention on my screen.

Here's the problem, however: even Gemini doesn't know how to disable Gemini. I did my own research and then finally, with a deep appreciation of the irony of this, I asked it how to turn it off. It said in any google drive file go to Help > Gemini and there will be an option to turn it off. Guess what isn't a menu item under Help?

I've had a look around at web tutorials for removing or blocking it, but they are either out of date or for the Gemini personal assistant, which I already don't have, and thus cannot turn off. Gemini for Drive is an integrated "service" within Google Drive, which I guess means I'm going to have to look into moving off Google Drive.

So, does anyone have references for a service as seamless and accessible as Google Drive? I need document, spreadsheet, slideshow, and storage, but I don't have any fancy widgets installed or anything. I do technically own Microsoft Office so I suppose I could use that but I've never found its cloud function to actually, uh, function. I could use OneNote for documents if things get desperate but OneNote is very limited overall. I want to be able to open and edit files, including on an Android phone, and I'd prefer if I didn't have to receive a security code in my text messages every time I log in. I also will likely need to be able to give non-users access, but I suppose I could kludge that in Drive as long as I only have to deal with it short-term.

Any thoughts, friends? If I find a good functional replacement I'm happy to post about it once I've tested it.

Also, saying this because I love you guys but if I don't spell it out I will get a bunch of comments about it: If you yourself have managed to banish Gemini from your Drive account including from popping up in individual files, I'm interested! Please share. If you have not actually implemented a solution yourself, rest assured, anything you find I have already tried and it does not work.

[roseverdict]

new character idea: dude who wakes up with amnesia for whatever reason and tries to go through their phone to figure out "ok who do i allegedly know well enough to get their help" except pre-amnesia!dude had all their contact names like this:

[wonderful-emoji]

[off-color-darkrai]

Wait... Wait! Wait! Wait!

The star sign symbol for Gemini, aka the twins...

And The Gear Station Logo...

...

Pokemon you sneaky S.O.B.s!

But seriously, that's clever character design!

[madiplication]

Sorry no art today just memes I've been struggling a lot lately and I just got hit with more exams.

Life's been though, but it's been tougher.

[osterby]

So google added an AI chatbot icon to all their products. You can simply refrain from using it and can turn off tracking activity in the privacy settings, easy enough, but the stupid icon will still mock you

Add this to your uBlock origin filters to get rid of it on gmail: mail.google.com##.e5IPTd.r4vW1e And this to get rid of it on Drive: docs.google.com##.appsElementsSidekickEntryPointRoot

Tadah!

[madame-helen]

[the-ellia-west]

I CCAN'T FUCKING TURN OFF THE GOOGLE GEMINI OVERVIEW

MY DEVICES DON'T HAVE THE FUCKING SETTINGS

I'VE BEEN TRYING FOR HOURS

HELPPPPPPPPPPPP

I CAN'T TURN THAT FUCKING THING OFF

[lemedstudent2021]

where is the gtfo button on this omg

STOP IT GO AWAY *bug spray*

guys help ive removed the gemini shortcut (thank u sir) but im still getting this when i look stuff up. help :')

[in4newz]

See more on Threads

[sparklyskeletonsworld]

It's 1am this is not what I asked for google 💀

[takumitsukishima]

shut the hell up Google, give me what I asked for even if I am drunk

[arcadelife2021]

The AI Debate

Look, I get the whole hating on AI because it steals content from creators to train itself, I understand disregarding it as actual art because it was created from algorithms and pre-made images, I even sympathize with the disappointment most people feel when find out something they were interested in (be that an artwork, a fanfiction, or anything else) was artificially generated.

But for the love of everything, stop acting like it is the end of the world as we know it.

AI is a tool. AI can be misused, like literally any other tool. The original purpose of AI was to cut down on research time, and to provide resources to those who didn't have access to them.

Have an idea you want to explore, a certain room in a fanfiction you want to describe but are either lacking the skill in descriptive writing or simply cannot find a good enough reference anywhere, or have the money or time to commission an artist to create it for you, as well as factoring in changes? Generate an image to give yourself a clearer picture of what you are already imagining.

Can't find that exact right phrase that would tie your work together in a beautiful little bow, giving yourself the satisfaction that you spent hours and hours pouring your creativity into it and the gratification that you finally completed it? Tell an AI to rephrase a sentence for you.

Don't have the time to properly research the nuances of a specific character's speech style you'd like to include in your writing? Don't have the energy to get farther than just your idea and actually try to come up with a plot that would tie into it? Tell the AI to make a prompt. Let it give you information and inspiration and a starting point.

It is the people you should hate. The ones who pass off entirely AI generated works as their own, the ones who benefit from no other work than putting in 1 line of text and having it create the rest. It is the ones who misuse a tool. It is designed to assist you, not create for you.

When you utilize AI with its original intention, it is absolutely no different than asking your friend to beta edit your story, pouring over a thesaurus to find the right word for your story, or spending hours finding the perfect reference images, just that it's faster.

Yes, AI is flawed in it's information sometimes. Quite literally everything is. Whether you got your information from a textbook, firsthand accounts, AI, or the News makes absolutely no difference - you will never have the entire story, you will always be missing pieces because the people providing the information are biased. Everyone is biased. It's called pushing a narrative, and it might be wrong but it's a real thing that really happens, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

Yes, AI is bad for the environment because of carbon emissions in their energy usage. Literally no different from the celebrities using their private jets to fly everywhere, the fashion industry creating cheaply made clothing just to end right back up in a landfill, or pesticides and inorganic fertilizers in agriculture. The world doesn't care, you can't cherry pick a particular angle of a problem to use in your argument without including the things that are better or worse, and the benefits and consequences of doing so.

Be as mad as you want, but AI misusage will inevitably happen because humans are inherently selfish and starved for instant gratification. It is inevitable that your creations will be misused for personal gain, that's the sad shitty reality we live in.

So please, stop your incessant whining and filling up all of these fanfiction tags with AI debate nonsense. You complain about people leaving negative feedback on works when there's a back button? Take your own damn advice. Report it and move on.