Everything out of Google is Rube-Goldberg machines held together with duct tape. It is engineering in a way, but by squirrels on crack. It’s alien to how engineering is done in the real world.

Everything out of Meta is pure evil. It is engineering-led if you could behavioural psychologists designing Skinner boxes as engineers. Actually, I’ll grant the Oculus division, which was mostly about engineering and designed cool products. The exception in the Borg.

I think it goes without saying that emulating PHP is rarely a good decision.

(For the record, I read DF quite often as a Mac-minded techy weirdo, I just happen to disagree on this particular issue)

> The EU mandate for AI watermarking is likely the first step in the direction of prohibiting AI for specific use cases.

I am not sure how practical that would be. The cat’s already out of the bag and they won’t prevent companies in the whole world from releasing open weight models. Playing catch up by distilling flagship models is also relatively cheap; we’d see smaller companies setting up shop in friendly regimes. And I don’t see any appetite to go full child porn and criminalise the possession of a LLM. So we’d end up with a similar situation as with illegal downloads, i.e., everyone will do it and nobody will care.

> The pretext for outlawing (or at the very least controlling) the use of AI when the time comes will be something along the lines of data integrity or just general compliance legalese.

They could forbid using LLM for hacking, but hacking is already illegal. They could make it a factor when determining punishment, but I don’t think that would work terribly well. Most of the dangerous stuff we can do with LLMs is already illegal, or should become so. Things like propaganda, identity theft, harassment, scams. We need enforcement with teeth on these, not pointless feel-good legislation. Again, there are parallels with cryptocurrencies and torrenting software. These things have illegal uses, but it’s also really difficult to make them illegal, at least in semi-functioning democracies.

> So, the use cases that are being sold to mainstream audiences actually will be affected by detection tools, especially if the output is intended to be monetized in some way.

I don’t know that mainstream audiences are really against LLMs. They are mostly against AI in a nebulous sense, but even non-technical people use ChatGPT or equivalent. I think that the critical mass is already there and the tools are convenient enough that they couldn’t outlaw them without a massive uproar.

Detection tools don’t seem all that relevant to mainstream audiences’ use of LLMs. AI companies will sell this as a safeguard against misuse, and everyone will be happy about it. The politicians will say they accomplished something, the AI companies will slowly turn public opinion, and the public will have shiny toys.

> The number of legitimate use cases for costly frontier models drops significantly once eliminating professional jobs is off the table.

I don’t know. They can open possibilities that we don’t necessarily consider.

One example I have is a friend who is getting his house refurbished. He’s not an engineer or a material scientist. He does not have enough free time to read thoroughly on the many subjects involved. With a decent LLM, he could untangle the technical documents sent by the architect and the contractors to really understand what was going on and be involved, rather than passively follow the architect’s advice. For starters, the LLM was very useful in finding issues in the quotes he received when he was looking for an architect. Those were long, technical documents, with no really standardised structure and full of jargon. I don’t think that person is going to want to stop using LLMs now. Many people are having this sort of moments right now.

> In the near future the EU will likely come down with heavy intervention to prevent AI from impacting employment rates across Europe.

Maybe. But i don’t believe the EU is well equipped for that. Labour laws are largely local and different in each member state. The EU regulations are basically the common denominator, ore or less, and it is easy to see why: for regulations to get adopted, they need a strong enough majority in the Commission, in the Parliament, and in the Council. It is very difficult to get anything controversial that affect the sovereignty of member states passed.

The angle of the current AI regulations is that they set the rules for the single market, which is where the EU is the most legitimate. It is difficult to see market angle for the effect of AI in labour, and I think enough member states would be keen to kill the project.

Also, there are many influences at play, but the EU is fundamentally an economically liberal institution. It very rarely goes in the direction that reduces economic activity. Look at how clumsy it is at fighting against cheap Chinese imports. I don’t think the institutions themselves would really want to make AI illegal. Companies have too much to lose.

I also do it with a LLM every now and then and, while it’s feedback is more useful than a toy’s, it does not need to be intelligent either.

The power of confirmation bias…

> Try it on a paragraph … the connections between sentences feel clunky now.

We might have a definitive explanation at some point, but there are about a dozen possible reasons for something like this. For starters, is this something really significant and not something you notice because you are looking for it (again, confirmation bias)? A bit like some people still lose their minds when they see a dash, even though statistical analysis showed that they are not a significant marker of AI-generated text?

Right. If the exact words matter, using a non-deterministic LLM is a terrible idea in the first place. I hope these people never try putting the same prompt in different sessions.

Also, now I am curious. How would these people interact with other humans? Is there anyone on earth who would provide the exact same reply, down to every single word, if we asked them the same question more than once?

He had a very similar rant a couple of days ago when he somehow thought that they would use invisible characters. It’s just as useless.

It’s also in their interest to demonstrate that they can be trusted and to show that they at least pay lip service to limit the obvious downsides of the tools they are selling. The use cases they sell to mainstream audiences are not affected by detection tools. The point of having a LLM do the work for you is that the work is done, and reliably. It does not matter if it is done by a LLM, and most of the time it is obvious anyway.

I would think that these things would eventually converge and we’d get one watermarking algorithm as an industry standard. That way, all major provider would follow it and we’d get independent software for checking. This would partly limit the efficacy of the watermarks, but on the other hand if it’s done correctly, removing the mark could still be enough of a pain that casual users would not bother. That would obviously depend on a lot of factors. It would at least add significant friction in the production of daily slop.

Of course it wouldn’t do much for thing like foreign propaganda but that’s a whole other discussion we need to be having.

> Any university using AI detection in their submission pipeline, or lawyers, editorialists, proofreaders that check for AI marks will be sending significant amounts of text like unpublished research, books, potentially internal documents and more, most of which is high quality human written, to dozens of AI companies, blindly trusting they won't train on any of that.

Isn’t it already what they are doing right now with some of the plagiarism detection tools? Not every university is going to have a representative corpus, and yet they are all using the software. So I guess the provider is doing the work of feeding all that data to their algorithm.

My experience is that after a point it gets annoying, and then oppressive. The proximity in smaller communities can help when everything is right. Neighbours can check on you, bring your kids to school, this sort of things. But at some point personal issues arise, and then it’s impossible to get out of them. That’s how you end up with family feuds over centuries because at some point someone did not like someone else.

Also, it’s nice if you correspond to what the community expects. If you don’t and you don’t build your own niche very quickly you get typecast and then outcast. Humans can be vile and petty, even in small communities. It gets particularly hairy if your bully is somewhat popular locally. Ask me how I know.

Anyway, I much prefer larger communities. I can still make friends if I want to, and if we have a fight it’s not the end of the village.

Personally I am a bit ambivalent. It’s not needed in most cases most of the time, but it could help transitioning en masse to reversible heat pumps, which would be a step in the right direction. What I worry is that it would be hailed as a silver bullet and detract from improving thermal insulation and mitigating techniques that would not require constant energy supply.

We need to see where we will be, not where we are. The electric grid is not going to get more stable in the next years and will get more and more strained as more and more of our economy has to use electricity. Reducing energy use where appropriate should be a higher priority than an AC band-aid.

But my observation of the media landscape is that right-wing politicians hop on everything that can be shown as boneheaded leftists who refuse progress. Of course, the usual useful idiots like Mélenchon are happy to oblige, but the mainstream left-leaning parties are not particularly anti-AC.

No argument from me. It would not have completely saved us but we’d be in a better position now. The absolute priority should be to avoid burning fossil fuels for energy.

> But Russian propaganda entrenched in spy infested austria and germany forces cheap gas upon us

Indeed. Germany’s energy policy was a huge risk and set Europe back. I am not sure whether Schröder was a useful idiot or a willing pawn, but the fact that there was no reckoning is very disappointing. And all of Merkel’s balancing act came to naught anyway. So much time wasted…

No, it’s probably not what they meant, because otherwise that would be completely inconsistent with the bit about "increased gravity" (whatever that mean).

It’s also wrong. Less wrong than Earth being a living organism, but still quite wrong.

> This view is kinda ostracized in geology and considered heresy.

I know this is a figure of speech, but this is not the right metaphor at all for how science works.