Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org

@Pat I try to resist too ... but not nearly as hard as I used to. 😀

@Pat That too. It's just a bizarre idea that a threat (or even just an insult) needs to be aimed directly at you for the blocking to be justified.

#Blocking in a nutshell. My #online life is *so* much better now that I've figured this out.

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-realize-that-blocking-a-person-who-has-made-no-threats-against-you-or-uttered-any-insults-is-tantamount-to-admitting-defeat/answer/Daniel-Dvorkin-3

All of this. I’m so tired of people who build their entire identities around being anti-#woke pretending to be ignorant of the following:

1. Much of the entertainment they enjoyed when they were young was already “woke” by the standards of the time, and often of the present day too.

2. There is no “woke” conspiracy suppressing such entertainment today. Every possible viewpoint is present somewhere in the enormous variety of movies and TV available at the click of a button. If any viewpoint gets short shrift, it’s “wokeness” as opposed to the endless stream of Bigger! Louder! Stupider! chock-full of utterly predictable stereotypes.

3. They, not the “woke” crowd, are the ones who would absolutely melt down if the classics they liked when they were younger and more open-minded were coming out today, word for word and scene for scene.

Or hell, maybe they’re not pretending, except to themselves. It’s amazing how people can edit their own memories.

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-a-movie-like-Blazing-Saddles-could-be-made-in-today-s-woke-society/answer/Andy-Burns-22

@jon 🙂

@jon Even the joke is kind of antique these days, I guess!

@karawynn @mitchw I want to argue with this. But I'm not sure I can.😐

#Scientists are cautious, #businessmen are idiots. Film at 11:00, as we used to say in the days when we wore onions on our belts.

@jon Scientists are cautious, businessmen are idiots. Film at 11:00, as we used to say in the days when we wore onions on our belts.

@freemo Sure, causal inference, largely from time series data and/or Mendelian randomization, is a big part of my work. The methods as described in the article don't seem to be Granger or SEM, though. Of course one should never rely on popular science reporting for a thorough understanding of methods. 😀 I'd have to read the paper to be sure.

Because I loathe the blithe use of "correlation is not causation" to dismiss legitimate causal inference results, I want to see researchers being really careful when making causal claims from observational data. _If_ they met that standard here, good for them.

With the usual #statistician's caveat that #causality is really hard to sort out in data like this even with good #controls ... yes, I believe this. And the #mechanisms aren't hard to find, either. 😐

@fatsam With the usual statistician's caveat that causality is really hard to sort out in data like this even with good controls ... yes, I believe this. And the mechanisms aren't hard to find, either. 😐

Can't argue with the #logic here.

Only mad scientists on either side of the Atlantic pronounce all the syllables. It was kind of a shibboleth for us until all those movies came out and people caught on.

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Americans-pronounce-the-word-laboratory-as-labratory-They-spell-it-correctly-but-I-wonder-if-theyre-all-dyslexic/answer/Claire-Jordan-10

The usual disclaimers: not posted for agreement (although I did get a chuckle out of the first image), if you share from my post please leave my commentary intact, originally posted by a friend I won't name unless they want me to because I'm not looking for a fight ... etc.

I really hope it's possible to have a middle-ground discussion about this.

On one hand, the idea that #AI-generated #text and #images are purely #plagiarism strikes me as fundamentally untrue. If you prompt #ChatGPT to write you a story, it will give you a combination of words which has never existed before. With a little back-and-forth, those words will be at least a reasonable approximation of the #story you had in your head when you started. Same with #Midjourney and pictures. That is a #creative act.

On the other, it's not just a tool like pen and paper, or word processors, or even add-ons like suggested text. You can plagiarize with all of those—but they don't *push* you toward plagiarism the way ChatGPT does, and although I'm not a visual artist I understand Midjourney is even worse. (I'm using those as the two best-known examples; I know there are lots of others.) My #writing contains turns of phrase from favorite books, and so does everyone else's. But not whole paragraphs or pages with the names changed ... if there's even that much editing.

So it seems to me that neither "nothing generated by AI can ever be true art" nor "stop whining, it's just another way to tell stories" is quite right. One thing for sure is that it's not going away, and things like the open letters urging a halt to AI development strike me as more attention-seeking stunts than serious attempts to solve the very real problems involved. We need to find a way to deal with it that respects *everyone's* rights.

Please tell me I'm not the only human, typing on my keyboard with my normal human hands, who sees it this way?

@fiction8 That's a terrifying possibility I hadn't considered. So yeah, fingers and toes crossed, knocking on wood, etc.

@Gregnee Indeed. And pretty much all of the ones in charge.