This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.
We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.
But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.
Ironically, I read about three lines of this article before I got a full-screen popup and then a paywall then closed the tab. And it's going to get worse apparently.
I don't think the issue is corps feeding the internet into AI systems. The real issue is gatekeeping to information and only giving access to this information while milking the individual for data by trackers, money by subscriptions, and more money by ads (that we pay for with subscriptions).
Another larger issue that I fear is often ignored is the amount of control large corporations and in theory the government can have over us just by looking at our trace we leave in the internet. Just have a look at Russia and China for real world examples of this.
As an open source contributor, I believe information (facts and techniques) should be free.
As an open source contributor, I also know that two-way collaboration only happens when users understand where the software came from and how they can communicate back to the original author(s).
The layer of obfuscation that LLMs add, where the code is really from XYZ open-source project, but appears to be manifesting from thin air... worries me, because it's going to alienate would-be collaborators from the original authors.
"AI" companies are not freeing information. They are colonizing it.
The code that AI produces isn't "copied" from those original authors, though. The AI learned how to code from them, it isn't literally copying and pasting from them.
If you think a bit of code is "really from" XYZ open-source project, that's a copyright violation and you can pursue that legally. But you'll need to actually show that the code is a copy.
Yep, the truly free and open internet is coming to an end. Corporations and governments have spent decades trying to claim control over it, and they're nearly there.
Which, ironically, will be greatly expedited by the drive to prohibit AI from learning from "unlicensed" materials. That will guarantee that the only AIs with a broad training set will be those owned by corporations that already control an enormous amount of training materials (Disney, Getty Images, etc.)
Sir, we have the top of the line ChatGPT7 online. What should we ask it?
Ask it what our board should direct the company to do.
Sir its answer is to immediately raise salaries as there is no logical or sustainable reason for excess wealth at the levels of concentration we are at currently with everyone but a few suffering and living our their working years in stress, anxiety and misery for no gain.
When there is just paywalls and AI generated text garbage everywhere, it's nice to have a place where you can read what actual people think about things, good or bad.
Actual user generated content is absolutely where it's at.
I trust a 8 year old forum post or a product review on YouTube by someone with 1,000 subscribers much more than any of the Amazon affiliate link riddled listicles that dominate search results.
Exactly, which is why I keep repeating here, the Google/Facebook advertising model of "personalized content algorithm" was and is a lie that they've been selling for decades. There really is nothing more effective to promote something than genuine word of mouth, and that is not something that can be automated by an unfeeling machine.
So, in that sense, actual human content are a dwindling resource on the Internet right now, and that's where Lemmy comes in. If we want Lemmy to grow, you should actively contribute your own expertise here(everybody is good at something) instead of arguing pointlessly, so people can think of Lemmy as a place where people help people.
But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.
This analogy falls apart when you note that "overgrazing" these resources does absolutely nothing to harm them.
They're still there. They haven't been affected in any way by the fact that a machine somewhere has read them and learned a bunch of stuff from them. So what?
None of those things directly harm the resources being "grazed", and none of them are inevitable consequences of AI. If you think they are then you're actually arguing against AI in general and not the specific way in which they've been trained.
While the analogy is not perfect, you can think that the harm is getting lost in the noise. If the "overgrazing" of content on the internet (content which has the purpose of being read/listened/etc. Often for a job) causes a huge amount of other content based on it (AI-generated), then the original is damaged by being lost in the noise.
idk if this is sarcasm, but there's tons of real players in Slither.io it's one of my favorite games to de-stress :)
You can tell bots from people by observing the snakes. Bots are wiggly and prioritize nearby orbs. ~700 orbs they begin their adventure to the red wall to deposit their orbs. These snakes also have reoccurring names like Popular MMO, The White Rabbit...
Real players will have a more straightened pathing, probably following a sequence of orbs if they're not dashing and making it obvious. They also aren't programmed to kill themselves, so any snake above 1k that isn't moving straight to the wall is a real player.
Pro MLG players will be zooming to one of the many clusters on the map in the hopes that they can steal orbs from bigger snakes if they aren't already circling as the big snakes. You'll likely notice these players as tiny snakes desperately dashing in a straight line.
You’re correct, although it’s not super relevant to the crux of the article.
Hardin was a white supremacist eugenicist who fabricated pretty much every ounce of support for his theory of “the tragedy of the commons” in an attempt to promote support for reducing the non-white population.
His work has been thoroughly debunked by Elinor Ostrom, who later won a Nobel Prize for her work on commons.
Hi, uneducated rube here. Could you elaborate on that? Because at many times during my life I have seen objective evidence of what looks quite a lot like the tragedy of the commons. When something is considered a public responsibility without a specific owner someone will mistreat it to the point of uselessness in an extreme majority of cases. I observe this in college common areas, gas station air pumps, litter left in public areas, dog park cleanup stations, self-serve kiosks of all types from vending machines to car washes, and more.
I admit (and more than that, agree) that a situation can be created in which said tragedy of the commons can be avoided, but in my experience it would require a handler who is specifically responsible for the well being of the item in question. Either one who is paid to police the object, or one who has taken it upon themselves to police the object because they cannot function without it.
But the fact that you can assign a babysitter to prevent someone from ruining "the commons" doesn't mean the concept as a whole is moot. I also admit that a lot of the problems I encounter are uniquely American, and social culture in other places may help prevent commons tragedies like theft or defacement. But in my experience as an American the tragedy of the commons is a very real and living thing. If you give public access to an item and expect said public to take appropriate care of it, you'll more often than not be sorely disappointed, at nearly any location in our country.
Yet now I'm being told the entire concept was invented to push white supremacy and isn't real. Frankly that may be true because a ton of shit here was invented in service of white supremacy, but a broken clock is still right twice a day. Regardless what the original intention was I have a hard time saying outright that it's just wrong. And hell, white people are often the ones fucking up common items just like brown folks. I don't see a racial component to it at all, at least in the modern understanding. I have no doubt this was being used as racist propaganda at points within the last couple hundred years, because historically, America has been pretty goddamn racist - but these days I believe the understanding has evolved. At least mine did. This is the first I'm hearing about it being a racist thing, and not only that, but putting your foot in something and then blaming it on black folks is a classic American racist move right out of the playbook. So it makes perfect sense that this was something that was happening anyway, nearly everywhere by everyone, but could be conveniently blamed on a certain population as a way of saying "They're the reason you can't have nice things". Just like everything else racists have made up for the last 6,000 years and continue to do.
But, again, uneducated rube. I don't know much about this stuff beyond the common understanding of the phrase and what I've seen in my own lifetime to support it.
Garrett Hardin's essay the Tragedy of the Commons wasn't the first instance of the idea being written about by any means, not by a long shot, but it was one of the most important pieces for popularising it. Hardin doesn't say anything explicitly racist, but he comes down pretty hard on the side of enforced population control and privatisation of everything. He even takes specific exception to the part of the UN's universal declaration of human rights about the right to a family. While Hardin didn't say anything like, "and we should control the population of black people first to make room for the whites," (in the essay at least, the guy may well have been a massive raging racist elsewhere but I wouldn't know), such Malthusian arguments are very often used to justify such beliefs.
Regarding the pro-capitalism side, this is something Hardin was pretty explicit about. One criticism of his essay is, as an example, that rather than enclosing sections of the commons in to individual parcels of private land, the community could share in the profits of the grazing animals instead, and then the incentive to abuse the commons is still handled. Perhaps this could still be seen as a sort of private property with shareholders if the community then winds up fending off a neighbouring community from using it, but I think for the purposes of one quick and short example of the limitations of Hardin's thinking it works well enough.
You're right that it's pretty easy to find examples of it happening in real life. I think what we're doing to the climate is probably the best possible example. However, Hardin and other writers typically don't describe it as a thing that can happen, but a thing that will inevitably happen. In this case we do know that they're wrong, ironically enough because of the commons that the term comes from. Hardin uses a broad variety of examples and doesn't tie himself to the example of common grazing grounds, but the fact that such grazing grounds were successfully managed by communities for many centuries is something of a dent in the argument that humans will always follow the selfish incentive to abuse them.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, however, IBM was able to sell Mr. Marston’s decades-old sample to websites that are using it to build a synthetic voice that could say anything.
A.I.-generated books — including a mushroom foraging guide that could lead to mistakes in identifying highly poisonous fungi — are so prevalent on Amazon that the company is asking authors who self-publish on its Kindle platform to also declare if they are using A.I.
But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I.
Consider, for instance, that the volunteers who build and maintain Wikipedia trusted that their work would be used according to the terms of their site, which requires attribution.
A Washington Post investigation revealed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT relies on data scraped without consent from hundreds of thousands of websites.
Whether we are professional actors or we just post pictures on social media, everyone should have the right to meaningful consent on whether we want our online lives fed into the giant A.I.
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