Cringey as fuck.

This dude markets his distro the same way that Trump tweets: slopped out while sitting on the toilet.

Slop is a consequence of tool use, not a design feature of the tool.

To me “slop” is a description that reflects the supply and demand imbalance of all generative AI output: there’s a practically infinite supply of AI generated stuff (to put it kindly), but very little demand.

For example, someone could generate a book with an LLM faster than any person could actually read it (assuming anyone actually wanted to read it in the first place…), and that represents a fundamental logical problem with regard to the value of things that AI produces.

There are vast amounts of ethical data to train against.

Of course there are. Like I said in the comment above: works in the public domain, works licensed cc-0, original works, works licensed for training, and so on. Ethical AI is possible.

But is that what your local AI is trained on?

If so, cool and good for you, you’re using the tool ethically.

But that’s not what I’m seeing from >99.99% of AI users out there generating Ghibli-core slop for an audience of 0. Stealing all of Kazuo Oga’s background art is not curing cancer or doing anything good for society, it’s just blatant exploitation of one man’s life’s work and legacy so frauds and billionaires can make a quick buck off of people who can’t tell the difference between AI slop and human art.

I could go on but you don’t really care, you care selectively. Or you wouldn’t be using the computer (the tool in front of your hands) undeniably built upon exploitation and compromise.

This comparison isn’t exactly working in your favor…

Even assuming some of my PC parts were made in a sweatshop in Asia, how many people were exploited to make it? How badly were they exploited? Were they payed something for their time and effort?

Odds are that the model you’re using was trained off a mountain of work from of untold numbers of people, all over the world, who didn’t see a red cent for their skills, time or effort. Not only is their work being exploited for other people’s profit, nobody even bothered to seek consent to do it in the first place.

This is exploitation of labor on an industrial scale. AI turns the whole world into a sweatshop for every person in the creative working class. Forget talking about the “means of production”, creative types today aren’t even able to control the fruits of their labor anymore.

It is a tool. It exists. You can’t stuff the genie back in the box.

Like every technology, it can and should be regulated to prevent abuse, exploitation and other forms of negative impact. Every new technology introduces new problems, challenges and implications. But unlike what happened with oil and nuclear technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, we shouldn’t wait 50-100 years to consider them.

The big problem I have with most AI stans is that you are all so infatuated with the subjective utility of the “tool” that you’re unwilling to even have a good faith conversation about the objective impact of this technology on the world and society.

Ok, you have a local model… but did you train it yourself? On what data?

Sadly, modern generative AI is a tool that’s built on top of the exploitation of other people’s work.

Actual human beings put blood, sweat and tears into their words, art and music, only for it to be used without consent or compensation by unskilled lazy misanthropes to generate an infinite sea of unwanted slop.

There is theoretically an ethical way to do AI (using public domain, creative commons, licensed or original data), but it seems to me that almost nobody is doing that.

Personally I don’t care how “useful” people want to claim AI is. For one, I’m not seeing things getting better faster, if anything they’re all getting worse. And regardless, the ends don’t justify the means, so if we’re exploitint people to generate slop I don’t really care how nice the slop is.

Even most of of the local and “open” models are exploiting the work of others by training off unethically sourced data without even so much as consent.

There is such a thing as ethical AI, but damn near zero people are doing it that way.

The powerhouse of the cell, at it again.

Oh NOW you care about stealing intellectual property!

Fuck off. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, AI assholes.

I like a distro with problems that I can relate to.

These AA frauds are directly providing AI companies with scraped data, no?

Because these “assets” are at best hemorrhaging billions of dollars per year, and are also the result of total cultural strip mining. Why would I, as a taxpayer, want to take over a massive, and massively unprofitable business?

I think it’s naive to believe that the government will seize these companies without without a huge amount of taxpayer cash winding up in the hands of big tech companies and their owners.

Let failing businesses fail. Leave the taxpayers out of it

How can they “open source” other people’s work?

The data that they’ve trained on wasn’t theirs to begin with.

Absolutely fucking not.

Nationalizing AI companies represents nothing more than a big tech bailout, leaving the American taxpayers holding the bag for the grandiose excesses, industrialized IP theft, and borderline fraudulence of some of the richest and most powerful corporations in modern society.

Hell no. No bailout for big AI.

They stole everything they have from the people, and if they are too stupid to figure out how to turn unprecedented plagiarism on a global scale into a viable business plan, then they deserve nothing more than to fail outright.

One look at the characters faces show me the same generic generative AI slop eyes and expressions I’ve seen a million and a half times now. On top of that, some very unnatural looking lines.

Just overall a very low effort pun about AI with an equally low effort slop illustration, in my opinion.

Cringe slopcore.

Maybe this is my pro-weed bias talking… But in the modern world where cannabis is increasingly legal and recreationally used, I’m not really sure what a meta-analysis of decades old studies is supposed to actually add to the discussion.

Is there a causative link between cannabis use and schizophrenia or psychosis? If so, are we seeing a proportionate uptick in schizophrenia and psychosis diagnoses in places where recreational cannabis use has been legalized?

There’s plenty of data these days, we should be doing real, original research. (And if there are legal hurdles still preventing that research from being done, then those hurdles should be removed.)

They’re planning on it. They want nothing more than to go public and leave retail investors and retirement plans holding the bag.

Removed by mod

Call me cynical, but I think this is an attempt to do the bare minimum in an effort to preempt laws being put in place.

I stroke a had

I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but I really don’t like the basic ergonomics of taking photos with my phone. To me there’s no comparison to the weight and layout of a dedicated camera.

Ok top of that, I like to fiddle with settings and focus manually, and I don’t want my images to be automatically filtered through AI or scraped by Google.

I can certainly agree that a big part of photography is being in the right place at the right time and using whatever camera you have to take the photo. And I know that the phone cameras these days are pretty good and more than enough for the casual user, but I like a dedicated camera, even a cheap and old one, if only for the experience of taking photos that way.

No, sadly it wont.

However, decompilation and recompilation are areas that AI could theoretically be extremely effective (due to the fact that much of it is based on educated guesswork in the first place, whether done by humans or not), and being able to turn proprietary software into plausibly “open source” software will be an effective tool for fighting back against big tech corporations (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Adobe, etc.) as well as for preserving classic, beloved software and games.

Listen, I’m as big of a generative AI hater as the next guy, if not bigger. I see myself as much as an artist and musician as a programmer, and I hate big tech for what I can only call the most egregious act of IP theft and cultural strip-mining in human history. It’s plagiarism on an industrial scale. It’s ethically wrong, economically a house of cards, and generally fucking sucks.

But at the same time, machine learning is an effective method of data-driven guessing and pattern recognition. Arguably it is the most effective method, which is why it’s much easier to use ML to make a program for things like image recognition than traditional algorithmic coding. Having recently read Chris Lewis’ blog on the decomp/recomp effort for Snowboard Kids 2 on the N64, it’s clear that LLMs are absolutely not a silver bullet of decompilation (at least, not yet), but it is almost an ideal problem space for what ML really does, guess shit based on a big pool of data.

So, my feeling is, if big tech companies are going to leverage these tools to steal from the people, then I think turnabout is fair play and I look forward to seeing the people leverage these tools for relative good. If people who sell art are going to be pushed out of the market due to slop generators, then it’s only fair for people to reverse engineer any and all of the software that matters in return.