"if you don't build me a world eating data center my shitty autocomplete algorithm will run slow :(" meanwhile in the 90s if your code needed more than a few bytes of ram they just took you into the parking lot and shot you

butlerian jihad is the moderate position

if you're on a first date don't forget to ask if they program computers!! major red flag!!!!!

Another possible strategy: those of us with code currently in ffmpeg under [L]GPL could file copyright infringement complaints for them linking code that's license-incompatible with it (anything spewed from LLM is license-incompatible). 😈

Maybe someone should prepare to file licensing bug reports against all the distros if any of this stuff makes it in.

I can't believe how grossly irresponsible it is to even entertain the idea of AI slop code in a core dependency library that deals with untrusted data and that's already been a huge historical source of vulns. Utterly batshit.

Heads up distro folks, clowns are apparently submitting code vomited out of LLMs to ffmpeg and it didn't get shot down immediately. Obligation to vet updates is going to get a whole lot more serious if they let any of this shit in...

https://lists.ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2025-April/342146.html

fucking lol if you think you can "eradicate autism" and still have computers

A lot of the problems with provenance of knowledge didn't begin with LLMs. LLMs just greatly accelerated the threats that fashy political aspirations and capitalism/adtech already incentivized. LLMs make the defender's role a lot harder, but not fundamentally different.

We can preserve and strengthen our standards for provenance of knowledge. In particular, open and community based projects that deal with knowledge can clearly and unequivocally ban model-generated bullshit and users who try to sneak it in.

We can recognize the people pushing this shit as charlatans, enemies of humanity, rather than the geniuses they want us to see them as. We can stop falling for their scam of the day. We can organize to tear down their power, devalue their wealth, deliver them consequences.

So how do we move forward? We can't entirely put this shit back in the shitter. The models are large but tractable for bad actors to keep and continue using even if we somehow banned them.

But there's a lot we can do...

And quite coincidentally, all this comes right at the moment Elon burned down the greatest tool we had for realtime vetting of information across a vast range of knowledge domains through a shared domain-knowledge trust graph. We're still a long way from rebuilding that here.

I've seen folks arguing that good and accurate info can come out of "AI" too, so we can't dismiss it as garbage.

This misses the point entirely.

Even if "AI" "says" something 100% accurate, the provenance is still garbage. It's like a broken clock. It's like waiting for the nazi to say something non-offensive and saying "wow they're at least right about some things".

The ability to produce unlimited amounts of plausible-looking garbage at essentially no cost, and to crowdsource that kind of vandalism to millions of randos by disguising it as something fun, destroys that capability. It's a DDoS attack on written knowledge.

Provenance of human written knowledge comes from a lot of places. Just because something was written by a human doesn't make it accurate or non-garbage. But the labor cost in producing misinformation that's hard to distinguish from meaningful writing in the same domain, together with a lot of systems we have in place, makes evaluating provenance a tractable problem.

For a lower stakes example, why is the organic produce in the grocery store more expensive? If you took the labels off and mixed it all together with the rest, it wouldn't be. The value at sale time is derived from a meticulous record keeping process that makes faking provenance comparable in cost to just doing it right.

Suppose you have a $100M batch of medicine but an inside saboteur has put poison in a few bottles and you can't determine which ones. How much is your inventory worth? $0 - or less since you have to dispose if it too. This is because the value depended on the provenance - having a reasonable basis to believe it's what it appears to be.

I think a lot of ppl who are skeptical of the criticisms here really don't understand how it's *burning* anything because they haven't thought about how value is derived from provenance.

AI is a lot like fossil fuel industry. Seizing and burning something (in this case, the internet, and more broadly, written-down human knowledge) that was built up over a long time much faster than it could ever be replenished.