That... is a lot of work. I have my doubts I'm willing to take things this far just to twist, contort, wrestle, punch, pull my hair out, and force AI to work in reasonable conditions like that. I think I'll just stick to the standard method of writing articles and publishing them.
Basically agreeing with you here.
I know from first hand experience that support around you can easily make a huge difference.
I remember when my parents wanted to get me into sports. One of those sports was volleyball. The coaches that were there wanted to look around for the "star player" and focus all of their attention on them. I didn't quite make it there and was basically ignored like a good portion of the rest of the team. When it came time to play, I, along with a chunk of the team, were benched. The few that were played carried the team and the whole team couldn't get very many wins on the court. I was annoyed and left the sport completely and I'm sure others did as well. We barely were taught anything at all throughout the whole experience. Just, take part in the drills and don't complain.
The next thing I tried was 5 pin bowling. My average wound up being around 120 points overall. I didn't improve much beyond that. The coach there pulled me aside one day and asked me what I was focusing on the entire time. I told him it was the pins at the end of the alley. He told me, "uh, no, that's way too much distance to focus on that. Focus on the darts on the lane that are much closer and throw a few practice balls to see how it feels." I did and almost immediately, my average jumped to about 240 points per game. During one of the tournaments we played, I managed to dial in even more and scored 5 strikes in a row, nailing a 300+ point game much to the surprise of the rest of the team. Ended up being a top performing player which was not bad considering I was considered the lowest performing player on the whole team before. Only thing that held me back at that point was hitting head pins.
The difference was a coach pulling me aside for 5 minutes to help tweak my game. Not much help needed, but it made a massive difference.
I rarely get supported in anything and have been struggling ever since.
Still, point still stands: when you are supported by others around you, it massively increases your chances of success.
I’m very curious what you did/what tools you used that this was the outcome.
Everything I did was published here if you are curious: https://www.freezenet.ca/experiment-i-tried-using-chatgpt-as-a-writing-assistant/
The short of it is that I used ChatGPT and used the following prompt:
I’d like you to look at the following text I wrote and edit it to make it sound more natural to a native English speaker. Do only minimal/minor edits without changing the tone of the text, which should remain
After that, I meticulously searched for what was changed between the original article and the changes the bot made so I could determine whether I liked the changes or not.
Granted, this was mixed in with so many other things happening such as putting together and researching different articles, producing Youtube video's, and, of course, social media marketing for my site (mixed in with a day job to pay the bills).
So, I can admit that didn't help my cause, but I do know it was whole days worth of work that was introduced when incorporating ChatGPT (my guesstimation was 4 days in all of actual work spread over that month and 5 days because that's where I could cram it into what little free time I had).
Congrats to your kid on managing to make AI useful.
My experience wound up being very different, unfortunately. I finally got to run an experiment with AI as a writing assistant. It took a month and 5 days just to process a single article I wrote. The result was that it managed to introduce far more grammar mistakes than it would've fixed. It mangled several sentences and seemingly made changes for the sake of changes as well. I came out of the other end of this never-ending huge amounts of busywork to find... two minor grammar mistakes. Would my article technically be improved with those to fixes? Sure. Was it worth it? Absolutely not. Using AI was awful and extremely tedious for me. I couldn't ditch AI fast enough.
Nicely spotted.
I use Jetpack to share my articles on Bluesky (begrudgingly paying money for that service) and my feed is doing fine. So I think you can rule out Jetpack as being the cause if Jetpack is being used here.
The amount of effort it takes for Null to be so wrong here is quite impressive. No, I won't waste my time and effort explaining to someone so intentionally ignorant of how things work why.
Me too. Sadly, there's too many people out there paid to not understand these things. The end goal is smashing the entire internet into bits so that legacy corportations can go back to the pre-internet era. It isn't going to work as there is a big world outside of the US, but that's not going to stop the corporations from trying at least.
It's a clear cut example of sanewashing by the media. Yet, when you point out that it's obvious sanewashing, the media types will whine about how they are not sanewashing and that they are just "clarifying" or "explaining" what the president meant. Then, the media will turn around and wonder why so few trust them anymore afterwards. It's all frustrating, but it has also been going on for years now. It's gotten to the point that this is hardly surprising.
Even the Canadian media when covering the US president does it. Live footage gets put out with Trump with his usual senile crazed rantings that make no sense at all, then when they cut back to the reporters who "break it down for all of us", they basically do everything in their power to make Trump look as presidential as humanly possible. Sometimes, they'll admit that he can be "unpredictable", but that's about it. Why the Canadian media contributes to the sanewashing of a president who is actively trying to undermine Canadian sovereignty is something I'll never fully understand.
It's always amusing to me when people come running in and saying the data is all over the place to confirm their personal beliefs, yet somehow fail to cite a single source. This while conveniently ignoring all the evidence that was in the featured article - in this case right there in the 5th paragraph.
Second: as someone who runs, and has run, all kinds of discussion forums for decades, I’m not in the least bit worried about being sued. I wasn’t worried even before Section 230. I’m not worried because I’m not deliberately doing stupid things — like designing and building an addictive implementation — and because I deal with problems (such as abuse) promptly.
Your web forum contains content, therefore, it is addicting because people might read it and want to read more of it.
Your web forum allows people to register and write comments. That makes your web forum addicting because it incentivizes the user to keep using it.
Your web forum allows people to send private messages to each other. Therefore, it is addicting because people might want to send more and more messages.
Your web forum has e-mail notifications. Therefore, it is addicting because it is drawing users in from their respective inboxes.
Your web forum may also have features that highlight popular posts (such as popularity icons, view counts, etc.), meaning it is addicting by design because users are being nudged towards specific kinds of addicting content.
When you get sued in this scenario, you are going to flip out at the absurdity of it all. The litigants are not going to give a damn because ruining your life is the goal to make for a better society in their minds. Nuance and reasoning will mean nothing to them. They took down Meta and several other major sites, you happen to be next in line based on overall popularity. Don't worry, because you cheered all of this on because it meant, in your mind, hurting Meta regardless of the consequences.
If you think it's hard for the reader to read how screwed up the world is becoming, just imagine what it's like for the writer in question. You know all the ins and outs and exactly how a particular development is going to continue to screw things up. What's more, you're going to be seeing a lot of things that the reader ultimately doesn't see because you can't write about everything on top of it all.
In the late 2000's (!!!), I was writing in an environment where two websites acted as rivals complete with writing staff on both. I ended up working for one and then writing for another, so I got to see WAY more internally than what most staff members ended up seeing.
The biggest reason people end up leaving the profession of writing news content online is stress. Whether it is keeping up with the volume of news content or the stress of the content that is being written on, most people end up leaving this role either directly because of those reasons or citing that as a contributing factor.
I tell people that it takes a very particular kind of person to be able to withstand all of this and continue to write about these things. Given that of the aforementioned two news staffs I worked with in the past and the fact that I am literally the sole survivor out of both of them in terms of continuing to write content, I think my experience is proof of this in action. How much crap can you handle seems to be a big determining factor of how long you can last.
Believe me, there were certainly days where I just wanted to let it all go and just leave all of this stress to some other random person interested in taking up the mantle. The problem is that decades of experience is being left behind if I did that, so I still continue to fight (even if it rarely gets recognized as an effort at all).
There's no shortage of people out there that love to shit on the writers work. Whether it is personally disagreeing with what the facts say, telling them that they are the worst writer out there because they disagreed with a stupid comma placement and can't be treated seriously, or in my case, not even being paid to do the work in the first place, the job of the writer in the world of news is WAY tougher than people realize. Us news writers don't get anywhere near the credit we deserve most of the time (TechDirt is a bit of an anomaly on that front).
Yeah, the YouTube copyright takedown system is a disaster. People who fraudulently abuse the system can get away with censorship all day long with little to no consequence while it is creators who suffer from it. So, I agree, the system desperately needs to be reformed in some way so that there is some semblance of balance. This highlighted incident shouldn't have happened.
I can admit I have been without hope for a few years now. Whenever I speak to people about trying to build a small business and help the local community, it is largely responded to with complete indifference. Whenever I talk about technology in general, I'm frequently looked at like I'm an idiot. I've run numerous experiments to increase my websites presence only to see very little in terms of results. I've invested money into advertising and it's starting to look like I might as well have burned that money in a fireplace. I've tried being out and meeting people only to be greeted by empty rooms with four walls. My family is dying out one member at a time.
I only continue doing what I've been doing because I don't know what else the heck I'm supposed to do. I've been given platitudes many times over the years like, "there's someone for everyone", "it'll all work out", and "success is just around the corner", yet despite my strides to keep going, I've gotten no shortage of emptiness after.
So, forgive me for my skepticism that things are ever going to get better. I've been told this sort of thing for well over a decade now.
That is very interesting timing. I was recently criticizing the CBC for publishing disinformation and when I questioned the CBCs decision, the response amounted to 'it's not our job to fact check stuff'. https://www.freezenet.ca/cbc-response-its-not-our-job-to-fact-check/
After running the article, I was told on another site that I was being a horrible person for questioning what the CBC did. So, there is a developing double standard where if a major media outlet publishes something that amounts to misinformation and disinformation, not only is that OK, but people who question it are the real bad guys at this point.
Hopefully, this trend doesn't impact you because the media deserves to get called out whenever they make screw ups like what you wrote about. I worry things are going to get nastier as time goes on because what I'm witnessing is a pretty recent thing as I've called out the media in the past without incident.
Granted, this is not something I actually looked into since my coverage didn't touch on it, but I legitimately had no idea that the water usage aspect of the AI debate was actually exaggerated. Happy to say I learned something today.
I also get tired of the “this kerfuffle over social media is just another moral panic” people claiming this is just like the hemming and hawing over rock n’ roll, violent videogames in the 90s and early 2000s, or D&D.
That would be because the comparisons are justified. Video games were supposedly going to corrupt the youth by turning them into murdering psychopaths who would be deadly effective because they train all day on their "murder simulators". That never played out no matter how many times the media blamed video games for anything violent.
The same is being done with social media. Social media is corrupting the youth because the youth will become distracted or have no sense of morality because they are seeing easily accessible pornography on platforms like YouTube (something that doesn't even pass the laugh test in my books).
If there are any fundamental differences between the two, I'm not seeing it. There was never really any evidence that video games were going to turn the youth into murder machines and there was never any evidence to say that social media will inherently destroy the youths moral compass, attentiveness, or whatever else the heck that is being fabricated by politicians and the media.
The irony here is that by making your argument, you proved Masnick's point about someone always insisting that "this time it’s different".
This still strikes me as more of a “all AI is bad” crowd grasping at lots of other things to buttress their pushback than anything else.
I think your over-generalizing the pushback. Yes, there's some of that, but there are a lot of people pointing out that the filter - and it is a filter at the end of the day - overrides the artistic intent of the character faces. A cartoon face does not need to have a filter that puts in peach fuzz hair and pores on the skin.
One of the examples that gets used a lot is the Resident Evil examples in the tech demo. The characters have a certain look to them that blends well with the overarching themes. The filter completely overrides it and makes one of the characters turn into a super model with the heavy amounts of air brushing that got applied (and likely part of the meme of photoshopping monsters and male humans and turning them into super models with large boobs with the label "DLSS5 Turns on").
The developers of these games are also split on this. Some are OK with it while others are not.
I think there are plenty of people that looked at the tech demo and concluded that the faces looked ugly. Are some of them part of the "all AI is bad" crowd? Sure. Are all of them part of that same crowd? I sincerely doubt it.
The only faces in that tech demo that looked like it was improved were the examples from Starfield. Even then, it was a very moderate improvement and nothing revolutionary.
I don't think it's speculative to say it's worse when people are reacting to what they see. If there was rumours of DLSS5 adding a filter onto things and no tech demo out there, then yes, you'd have a point that it's speculative. The reality is that there is a tech demo and people are seeing what it is supposed to be doing with their own two eyes. That's not speculating, that's reacting - and the reaction was negative.
Anyway, I think you are painting too many people with the same brush in a bid to dismiss the criticism outright. The reality is that there is nuance to the pushback that I think you are glossing over.
That... is a lot of work. I have my doubts I'm willing to take things this far just to twist, contort, wrestle, punch, pull my hair out, and force AI to work in reasonable conditions like that. I think I'll just stick to the standard method of writing articles and publishing them.
Basically agreeing with you here. I know from first hand experience that support around you can easily make a huge difference. I remember when my parents wanted to get me into sports. One of those sports was volleyball. The coaches that were there wanted to look around for the "star player" and focus all of their attention on them. I didn't quite make it there and was basically ignored like a good portion of the rest of the team. When it came time to play, I, along with a chunk of the team, were benched. The few that were played carried the team and the whole team couldn't get very many wins on the court. I was annoyed and left the sport completely and I'm sure others did as well. We barely were taught anything at all throughout the whole experience. Just, take part in the drills and don't complain. The next thing I tried was 5 pin bowling. My average wound up being around 120 points overall. I didn't improve much beyond that. The coach there pulled me aside one day and asked me what I was focusing on the entire time. I told him it was the pins at the end of the alley. He told me, "uh, no, that's way too much distance to focus on that. Focus on the darts on the lane that are much closer and throw a few practice balls to see how it feels." I did and almost immediately, my average jumped to about 240 points per game. During one of the tournaments we played, I managed to dial in even more and scored 5 strikes in a row, nailing a 300+ point game much to the surprise of the rest of the team. Ended up being a top performing player which was not bad considering I was considered the lowest performing player on the whole team before. Only thing that held me back at that point was hitting head pins. The difference was a coach pulling me aside for 5 minutes to help tweak my game. Not much help needed, but it made a massive difference. I rarely get supported in anything and have been struggling ever since. Still, point still stands: when you are supported by others around you, it massively increases your chances of success.
Congrats to your kid on managing to make AI useful. My experience wound up being very different, unfortunately. I finally got to run an experiment with AI as a writing assistant. It took a month and 5 days just to process a single article I wrote. The result was that it managed to introduce far more grammar mistakes than it would've fixed. It mangled several sentences and seemingly made changes for the sake of changes as well. I came out of the other end of this never-ending huge amounts of busywork to find... two minor grammar mistakes. Would my article technically be improved with those to fixes? Sure. Was it worth it? Absolutely not. Using AI was awful and extremely tedious for me. I couldn't ditch AI fast enough.
Nicely spotted. I use Jetpack to share my articles on Bluesky (begrudgingly paying money for that service) and my feed is doing fine. So I think you can rule out Jetpack as being the cause if Jetpack is being used here.
At this point, that would almost require it's own dedicated website to track that lunacy.
The amount of effort it takes for Null to be so wrong here is quite impressive. No, I won't waste my time and effort explaining to someone so intentionally ignorant of how things work why.
Me too. Sadly, there's too many people out there paid to not understand these things. The end goal is smashing the entire internet into bits so that legacy corportations can go back to the pre-internet era. It isn't going to work as there is a big world outside of the US, but that's not going to stop the corporations from trying at least.
It's a clear cut example of sanewashing by the media. Yet, when you point out that it's obvious sanewashing, the media types will whine about how they are not sanewashing and that they are just "clarifying" or "explaining" what the president meant. Then, the media will turn around and wonder why so few trust them anymore afterwards. It's all frustrating, but it has also been going on for years now. It's gotten to the point that this is hardly surprising. Even the Canadian media when covering the US president does it. Live footage gets put out with Trump with his usual senile crazed rantings that make no sense at all, then when they cut back to the reporters who "break it down for all of us", they basically do everything in their power to make Trump look as presidential as humanly possible. Sometimes, they'll admit that he can be "unpredictable", but that's about it. Why the Canadian media contributes to the sanewashing of a president who is actively trying to undermine Canadian sovereignty is something I'll never fully understand.
It's always amusing to me when people come running in and saying the data is all over the place to confirm their personal beliefs, yet somehow fail to cite a single source. This while conveniently ignoring all the evidence that was in the featured article - in this case right there in the 5th paragraph.
The major media outlets and politicians freaking out and memory holing this study in 5... 4... 3...
If you think it's hard for the reader to read how screwed up the world is becoming, just imagine what it's like for the writer in question. You know all the ins and outs and exactly how a particular development is going to continue to screw things up. What's more, you're going to be seeing a lot of things that the reader ultimately doesn't see because you can't write about everything on top of it all. In the late 2000's (!!!), I was writing in an environment where two websites acted as rivals complete with writing staff on both. I ended up working for one and then writing for another, so I got to see WAY more internally than what most staff members ended up seeing. The biggest reason people end up leaving the profession of writing news content online is stress. Whether it is keeping up with the volume of news content or the stress of the content that is being written on, most people end up leaving this role either directly because of those reasons or citing that as a contributing factor. I tell people that it takes a very particular kind of person to be able to withstand all of this and continue to write about these things. Given that of the aforementioned two news staffs I worked with in the past and the fact that I am literally the sole survivor out of both of them in terms of continuing to write content, I think my experience is proof of this in action. How much crap can you handle seems to be a big determining factor of how long you can last. Believe me, there were certainly days where I just wanted to let it all go and just leave all of this stress to some other random person interested in taking up the mantle. The problem is that decades of experience is being left behind if I did that, so I still continue to fight (even if it rarely gets recognized as an effort at all). There's no shortage of people out there that love to shit on the writers work. Whether it is personally disagreeing with what the facts say, telling them that they are the worst writer out there because they disagreed with a stupid comma placement and can't be treated seriously, or in my case, not even being paid to do the work in the first place, the job of the writer in the world of news is WAY tougher than people realize. Us news writers don't get anywhere near the credit we deserve most of the time (TechDirt is a bit of an anomaly on that front).
Yeah, the YouTube copyright takedown system is a disaster. People who fraudulently abuse the system can get away with censorship all day long with little to no consequence while it is creators who suffer from it. So, I agree, the system desperately needs to be reformed in some way so that there is some semblance of balance. This highlighted incident shouldn't have happened.
I can admit I have been without hope for a few years now. Whenever I speak to people about trying to build a small business and help the local community, it is largely responded to with complete indifference. Whenever I talk about technology in general, I'm frequently looked at like I'm an idiot. I've run numerous experiments to increase my websites presence only to see very little in terms of results. I've invested money into advertising and it's starting to look like I might as well have burned that money in a fireplace. I've tried being out and meeting people only to be greeted by empty rooms with four walls. My family is dying out one member at a time. I only continue doing what I've been doing because I don't know what else the heck I'm supposed to do. I've been given platitudes many times over the years like, "there's someone for everyone", "it'll all work out", and "success is just around the corner", yet despite my strides to keep going, I've gotten no shortage of emptiness after. So, forgive me for my skepticism that things are ever going to get better. I've been told this sort of thing for well over a decade now.
That is very interesting timing. I was recently criticizing the CBC for publishing disinformation and when I questioned the CBCs decision, the response amounted to 'it's not our job to fact check stuff'. https://www.freezenet.ca/cbc-response-its-not-our-job-to-fact-check/ After running the article, I was told on another site that I was being a horrible person for questioning what the CBC did. So, there is a developing double standard where if a major media outlet publishes something that amounts to misinformation and disinformation, not only is that OK, but people who question it are the real bad guys at this point. Hopefully, this trend doesn't impact you because the media deserves to get called out whenever they make screw ups like what you wrote about. I worry things are going to get nastier as time goes on because what I'm witnessing is a pretty recent thing as I've called out the media in the past without incident.
Granted, this is not something I actually looked into since my coverage didn't touch on it, but I legitimately had no idea that the water usage aspect of the AI debate was actually exaggerated. Happy to say I learned something today.
It's only OK when they do it.