This is explicitly the problem people notice with LLMs. The text they produce sounds fine only if you are so ignorant of the subject that you can’t properly read it yourself. That’s not a “boon” it’s a flaw.

Please link some of the mathematical research which concludes takeover of Earth’s resources by a superintelligent agent is “very likely.”

This is a very token-brained take. The length of a work has no bearing whatsoever on its comprehensibility.

I truly don't get why people have so much reverence for Pluto. And, unlike something like "fruit," which has a botanical and culinary definition which serve different purposes, I really don't get why anyone would care about the non-scientific definition of planet. Maybe I'm just ignorant here: what's the cultural significance of some celestial object being considered a planet?

Some people simply like to be a contrarian to the official or consensus position, Pluto itself has nothing to do with why some people are irrationally upset about its.

being selective about who you provide free services to makes you an activist group?

Yes, see, if you sell guns, but you only sell guns to people who promise to use them for defense, but don't sell them to people who promise to murder, that makes you an activist gun seller and personally responsible for whatever happens with those guns.

Either you wanted to be sarcastic or your simile did not work well.

That simile captures perfectly the logic here. I don't think it's technically sarcasm

EDIT: a better simile would be if guns were giving away for free. You can see how that could be construed as increasing the responsibility of the provider if a receiver then does something illegal with it

I really do not see that responsibility. It is so perplexing, so odd a perspective that some of you are advancing, that I could (jokingly, I understand good intention) call it resembling "gaslighting" from here - do you know, for example, in the series Parks and Recreation the topos of Ben not understanding why Li'l Sebastian would be a big deal?

I'll repeat a few of similes I used, with this latest: somebody giving guns away for free would be /less/ responsible if he screened the receivers first; somebody serving drinks would be /less/ responsible if he checked the costumers first; somebody in possess of a hammer would be /less/ responsible if he lent it to known vetted people instead of just anyone...

I get it that some see that cases for the opposite exist, but I would need a strong example because those provided made me strengthen the view I advanced instead of seeing an acquired responsibility on those who select their customers.

Don't get me wrong, I also don't see it personally. I just think that the framing is useful: it highlights how our society has a bias towards business and a bias against morality-driven initiatives

If selling the weapons is "ok" because business must be allowed because the motive is purely selfish (I just want to make a living for myself and my family), and giving away weapons is "suspect" because "you clearly have an ulterior motive", if just means that we live in a world where selfishness is the norm being altruists is suspect.

I think this is the core divide of our society, much more useful than the obsolete "left" and "right" divide

The metaphor is ridiculous and that's the point. GP is saying the GGP's argument is just as ridiculous

As a second factor of authentication, a one-time passcode is supposed to be “something you have,” which is still satisfied when stored in a password manager. It no longer serves as a preventative in the event your password manager is compromised, but it’s still fine if any individual password is.

They can provide text which contains thoughts, reasoning, and empathy, but is that evidence of them having thoughts, reasoning, or empathy?

To paraphrase the Chinese room argument: Put me in a room with infinite time, paper, pencils, filing cabinets, and give me an English language list of instructions for doing all the neural-net calculations required to run an LLM. Slide your prompt under the door, and, after doing all the calculations, I will slide the next word out, and so I will repeat until the response is done.

In this thought experiment, I'm just following the instructions. So, in this case, what is doing the "thinking" or "reasoning" or "empathy" here?

The inputs going through the model. That act is what is doing the thinking and reasoning and empathizing. Same as when your brain feeds your sensory inputs through its neural network.

Your brain is just a big set of weights/neurons organized into layers that do back and forward propagation, turns out. You are just statistics surrounded by flesh and bones.

> And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass.

Do products like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office Suite not count as “targeted at mass?” People—normal people—absolutely used to pay for software before SaaS took hold.

I don’t think the problem is that normal people don’t want to buy ““artisan software”” but that people are so cynical about software companies that giving them any money at all is asking to have the rug pulled out from under you.

wow absolutely not

Sorry, is your stance seriously that authors and publishers should digitize and freely distribute their work, at their own expense?

Also, who’s forcing AI companies to “ingest” books in such a destructive way?

Also also, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from AI scrapers, it’s that they’d never scan the exact same thing multiple times at the expense of public access to the resource.

Relinquishing copyright does not imply any of the labor you're suggesting. It's the opposite: you're just committing not to perform the labor of pursuing legal action against someone who does digitize and freely distribute the work.

Anna's Archive, for one, would be more than happy to host at no cost to the author.

AI companies are buying the physical books, they can turn them into confetti if that's what they want to do. If the physical books are running out, the authors can print and sell more. Or they can sell digital copies so the information is not lost.

The law is currently forcing these companies to destroy the books after scanning them.

> The law is currently forcing these companies to destroy the books after scanning them.

No, the law is stopping them from digitally sharing their scans. They are perfectly capable of reselling or donating or storing the books they buy. (Wasn’t Amazon originally a book seller?)

> Sorry, is your stance seriously that authors and publishers should digitize and freely distribute their work, at their own expense?

digitize: no, there's no burden to do this

freely distribute: no, there's no burden to do this

use it or lose it on the copyright: yes; if a work is copyright but a publisher doesn't want to make new copies because they won't make money on it then it should be free to copy