Photocopy of a photocopy is my go-to metaphor for model collapse.

That doesn’t prevent power hungry mods from modding hundreds of communities, or mods or admins from enshittifying the most popular communities (or whole instances) with absurd rules or misinformation bots, or any other of the abuses that were rampant on reddit and even more rampant here… sure, the users can migrate to some other community or instance, but most won’t (and migrating instances is significantly more work than simply unsubscribing from one subreddit and subscribing to another).

Looked like the least worst alternative to reddit (which was the least worst replacement for what the internet used to be before reddit, and facebook, and the like, killed it).

Turns out it’s mostly reddit reposts (often by bots, which is ironic since the originals were also reddit reposts posted by bots) and US politics garbage, and even more susceptible than Reddit to power hungry mods and echo chambers.

I guess I’m just addicted to doomscrolling. Which is almost as depressing as the fact that this inane crumb of utterly useless and purposeless garbage is by far the least worst furuncle in the rotting bot infested corpse of the internet.

No. The fediverse is just more of the same mindless gargling and regurgitation of mainstream media excrement that the internet has become, but federated.

It lacks the creativity, originality, experimentation, wonder, sheer life of the old internet.

It’s just as dead, enshittified, and riddled with misinformation bots as everything else.

if you ask it again, it again feeds you the wrong information

Well, it’s a LLM, they can’t learn anything without rebuilding the whole model from scratch, which I wouldn’t exactly call learning anyway… all they “know” is what word is most likely to follow a certain sequence of words according to their model.
Any other facts or information are completely inconsequential for their operation and results.

Being against LLMs being sold as AI (or as useful for anything practical) is not being against AI.

LLMs have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with AI, other than being sold as if they did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

No, I’m not db0, but thanks for the compliment. 😅

I’m way too lazy (and broke) to set up and admin a Lemmy instance.

We’re talking about LLMs. They’re useless for most practical applications by definition.

And when they’re not entirely useless (basically, autocomplete) they’re orders of magnitude less cost-effective than older almost equivalent alternatives, so they’re effectively useless at that, too.

They’re fancy extremely costly toys without any practical use, that thanks to the short-sighted greed of the scammers selling them will soon become even more useless due to model collapse.

If they still profit from it, no.

Open models made by nonprofit organisations, listing their sources, not including anything from anyone who requests it not to be included (with robots.txt, for instance), and burdened with a GPL-like viral license that prevents the models and their results from being used for profit… that’d probably be fine.

If you do crime big enough, it becomes good.

No, no it doesn’t.

It might become legal, or tolerated, or the laws might become unenforceable.

But that doesn’t make it good, on the contrary, it makes it even worse.

OS vendors aren’t selling¹ what users copy into the clipboard.

¹ Well, Microsoft probably is, especially with that recall bullshit, and I don’t trust Google and Apple not to do it either… but if any of them is doing it they should get fined into bankruptcy.

It’s an LLM. Odds are it’s hallucinating the sources and they don’t even exist.

Know what does compile sources for you which are guaranteed to exist and be related to what you’re looking for…? A good old not LLM infected search engine.

If my plumber replaces their wrench for a rabid gerbil claiming it’ll be just as good I’m definitely changing plumbers.

The good thing about that is that this kills the LLMs, since new models can only be trained on this LLM generated gibberish, which makes the gibberish they’ll generate even more garbled and useless, and so on, until every model you try to train can only produce random useless unintelligible garbage.

Generative AI is not going back into the bag.

It probably will, though, once model collapse sets in.

That’s the irony, really… the more successful it is, the sooner it’ll poison itself to death.

Impressive how…? It’s just statistics-based very slightly fancier autocomplete…

And useful…? It’s utterly useless for anything that requires the text it generates to be reliable and trustworthy… the most it can be somewhat reliably used for is as a somewhat more accurate autocomplete (yet with a higher chance for its mistakes to go unnoticed) and possibly, if trained on a custom dataset, as a non-quest-essential dialogue generator for NPCs in games… in any other use case it’ll inevitably cause more harm than good… and in those two cases the added costs aren’t remotely worth the slight benefits.

It’s just a fancy extremely expensive toy with no real practical uses worth its cost.

The only people it’s useful to are snake oil salesmen and similar scammers (and even then only in the short run, until model collapse makes it even more useless).

All it will have achieved in the end is an increase in enshittification, global warming, and distrust in any future real AI research.

I think this is still fundamentally misunderstood widely.

The fact that it’s being sold as artificial intelligence instead of autocomplete doesn’t help.

Or Google and Microsoft trying to sell it as a replacement for search engines.

It’s malicious misinformation all the way down.

LLM models can’t be updated (i.e., learn), they have to be retrained from scratch… and that can’t be done because all sources of new information are polluted enough with AI to cause model collapse.

So they’re stuck with outdated information, or, if they are being retrained, they get dumber and crazier with each iteration due to the amount of LLM generated crap on the training data.

So, they’ve basically accidentally (or intentionally) made Eliza with extra steps (and many orders of magnitude more energy consumption).

This article seems to put the blame on the shockwave from Starship’s rapid unscheduled disassembly in the upper atmosphere (not its launch) but there’s also been recent warnings about the effects of metal particulates from such explosions, satellites burning in the atmosphere, and similar pollution on the ionosphere.

All in all, burning or blowing up metallic crap in the upper atmosphere seems to be quite a bad idea.