AI crawlers cause Wikimedia(The umbrella organization of Wikipedia and a dozen or so other crowdsourced knowledge projects) Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%.
How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects – Diff
We should stop using ai
I still struggle with a use case for artificial intelligence in my own life. I play around with it all and I'm just like, it doesn't do a good job. Also, I think humanity is missing the plot, you know? Like, we don't need government. If government isn't going to do government. Government serves the people, not corporations. Or at least it should. I don't know, I think we're entering in times. At some point, I think people will pray for nuclear war, because life will be so miserable. That it would be better than just to end it all.
AI has niches but they're exactly that: Niches. Small duct tape tasks for fudging over "hard problems" where manual code would result in a worse outcome and take far more time. Little esoteric problem spaces, which notably don't actually require you to use several states worth of electrical power training on a 50PB dataset of anime titties.
An example: I have a name generator in my game that strings together several consonant+vowel phoneme pairs into a name. This means that the names are always pronounceable, but often the spelling looks really unintuitive. Eg Joosiffe, which the player would likely pronounce as Joseph. However, the leap we do in our head between those two spellings is a process of declassifying phonemes and then re-classifying phonemes, and is actually a "hard problem" from a coding perspective due to the unintituive, multifarious complexities of written, spoken, and conceptualized human language. Adding this step to my name generator in code would be a project of it's own, larger than the game itself, and wouldn't ever work nearly as well as it needed to. But relatively small (30MB) AI models that do this with something like 99.8% satisfaction already exist. They didn't require a data center's worth of resources to train, and since they're academic projects they have licenses that allow them to be used for free in a game.
I’m dyslexic and basically a terrible writer. It has helped my professional communication develop. It really helps me speed up my issues with my disability and feel confident in my communications.
This is a cool use case. Just make sure you retain your own voice! If you read an AI-generated sentence out loud and think "I'd have said it this way instead", IMO you should absolutely then change it to be that way.
Understood and I do. I try to tweak it a little to my own style. But it helps write the hundreds of cover letters I’m submitting a day. Looking for work. This usually took me hours for just one submission. Now I can fly through.
Like, we don't need government.
Welcome to the anarchist. Now you have to pick your flavor! Social Anarcho-syndicalism, Anarcho comunist, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho christianis, and the list goes on!
I found LLMs helpfuls to develop some scripts and answer some simple trivial questions (like how does house property work in China). I could have looked for that in a regular search engine though. But that's it, I am still happy looking for things myself and investigating since you can't really trust their answers.
At some point, I think people will pray for nuclear war, because life will be so miserable.
Reminds me of Roll out the Fallout by The Chalkeaters
Actual AI?
Imagine your phone knows that you have a business meeting downtown today. It's already reserved a parking space for you, set your car to warm up before you leave and looped your contact in on your ETA, along with automatically notifying you of any delays. Then, your kid wakes up this morning in with a horrible toothache, you ask your phone what to do and it rings up your family dentist, who has a full schedule today, but makes you a referral nearby. You agree to try that other dentist today, and your AI books an appointment, checks your meeting today, coordinates with their AIs and approves a 15 minute delay so you can get to the dentist. It also notifies your kid's school of their absence and has their teachers AI automatically queued up to send transcripts, notes and homework assignmenta from today's classes.
That's the kind of stuff actual AI can do. Overgrown autocorrect? It's basically a multi-billion dollar Magic Eightball.
I don't know about stopping entirely. I built a pretty cool RAG system for internal use in my company, it very much facilitates navigating very large amounts of text data.
even better stop joining major platforms like social media and then they won't be able to create data sets. Be a leach, especially when they give it away for free, but don't contribute to the project. Understand how it works, sure. But it seems like most of humanity says they don't want something, yet they do the contrary. It's like we choose to comply before we even ask to comply for the fear of missing out. But if you look at what is today, what are you really missing out on?
So, uh. What about Lemmy?
They can also crawl this publically-accessible social media source for their data sets.
I'm on board with abandoning mainstream social media, but my point is that your suggestion would not solve the problem just relocate it. A better solution to the AI conglomerates stealing everyone's data from the open Internet is legislation and regulations - ie tackling the whole 'stealing data' component, along with stronger privacy regulations for everyone to make it harder for them to do the same in the future. It's nice seeing the EU taking some positive steps, but we will not see the US take any steps in that direction anytime soon, due to corporate capture of their politicians and the AI companies all being in the top 10 most wealthy companies in the US.
It's nice seeing the EU taking some positive steps
Yet they helped introducing the super cookies and are trying to end encryption on communications.
They can also crawl this publically-accessible social media source for their data sets.
Crawling would be silly. They can simply setup a lemmy node and subscribe to every other server. Activitypub crawler would be much more efficient as they wouldn't accidentally crawl things that haven't changed, but instead can read the activitypub updates.
Sure but we're in the comments section of an article about wikipedia being crawled, which is silly because they could just download a snapshot of wikipedia
That's right. It's not humans making careful decisions about what to download. It's a program that follows links and saves files.