Grief bots, LLMs pretanding to be deceased people.

[fatsam@mstdn.social]

Grief bots, LLMs pretanding to be deceased people.

Noooooo. Nope nope nope. People should have the decency to stay dead.

That's not the same thing as a person who transitioned to a machine substrate. But fuck me, you think people are mad about gender transition, wait till you see that one.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@fatsam Nuanced disagreement: the screeching over gender transition is an orchestrated campaign by the religious right, running since 2017, to open a new front in the war against LGBT rights after they lost the battle over marriage equality. There's a lot of money for propaganda but very few true believers behind it.

LLMs as philosophical zombies impersonating the loved dead is definitely offensive but it's really a money-extracting grift by the AI bros. They'll shut up and move on if rejected.

[fatsam@mstdn.social]

@cstross I don't think we're disagreeing there. Some of the gender transition psychosis is built into religious belief. But certainly evil people are using that as a weapon.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@fatsam I think active transphobes are also deeply insecure about their own identity, and feel threatened by the visibility of non-conforming people who felt increasingly safe declaring themselves in public during the past decade. And the religious right leadership weaponizes this to keep their flock in line.

[fatsam@mstdn.social]

@cstross and, I should probably add, I disagree with most of my feed, I suspect, on the utility of llms/diffusion engines. They're very primitive tools, and most of the use cases that have been suggested for them are nonsense. But some of them aren't, and I think eventually they will become useful speech and vision modules in better systems.

But I doubt I have any daylight with the anti-ai people as regards the corporations. They're enemies using generative AI as a weapon.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@fatsam I think you're right about LLMs and their uses. But also, they're being used to bamboozle the non-CS-educated public into thinking we're on the threshould of true AI. sp yeah.

This century is being led by the shittiest people, isn't it?

[fatsam@mstdn.social]

@cstross The only men I'm sure are straight are liberal men who say they are. Sure, some conservatives are straight, but almost all of them would have to lie about it if they weren't.

You come out in liberal circles, everybody gathers around to pat you on the back. Gay conservatives coming out have to move for fear of being killed by their friends.