Employees say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support. Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.

  • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    Cool. Using slave labor to train tools to strip the best parts of humanity away from us so that AI can do creative activities like poetry and art while we’re more and more stuck in a gig economy.

    Cool cool cool cool.

    • QHC@kbin.social
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      so that AI can do creative activities

      Let me stop you right there. The current concept of “AI”–otherwise known as Large Language Models because that is really what people are referring to–is not capable of creativity. ChatGPT and things like it just regurgitate stuff they find. They can’t create something new and original

      • sunflower_scribe@beehaw.org
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        It creates things. Whether it is truly “creative” in the sense that humans are “creative”, doesn’t really matter. Now, you might respond by saying that it only regurgitates, but I would argue that many if not all human creative outputs are, at least to some degree, “regurgitations” in the same sense. I am not disregarding art, just saying that art is always derivative to some degree.

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        It doesn’t really matter though. It will take away jobs from people in creative industries that only creative people were able to do before. The end result is basically the same.

        • QHC@kbin.social
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          Why would AI that can’t be creative take jobs from people that are capable of being creative?

          • phi1997@kbin.social
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            Because it’s not the AI that’s taking away jobs, but the executives hoping to cut costs regardless of creativity, quality, or ethics.

            • QHC@kbin.social
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              So then blame the real problem, which is not new and has always been the main enemy: capitalism and its demand for seeking profits despite any consequences.

              That has nothing to do with “AI” and still doesn’t have anything to do with the original claim of whether or not the new wave of LLMs are capable of creativity.

              • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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                I am. That’s the thing that I’m blaming. The claim I was making was that OpenAI has engaged in violent colonialism inherent to capitalism with the goal of making Elon rich, and the rest of us poor.

            • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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              2 years ago

              Bookmarking isn’t the same as boosting, but it’s the best I can do. Keep screaming it from the rooftops my dude, dudette, or non binary doodling

            • lloram239@feddit.de
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              2 years ago

              For the same reason that CGI has replaced practical effects: It gives more control to the producers and makes it faster to iterate and change stuff. It doesn’t even need to be cheaper or look better for that.

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        ChatGPT and things like it just regurgitate stuff they find.

        It utterly baffles me that people keep repeating this nonsense. Have you ever even bothered to try ChatGPT? At all? If you managed to make ChatGPT actually repeat existing text, congratulations, tell me how, since I never have been able to do that in months of using it. ChatGPT has no access and no way to reproduce the texts it was trained, the only thing it can successfully reproduce are shorts quotes or popular phrases (“May the force be with you”) that are repeated all through pop culture. Everything beyond that it will give you as vague retelling at best. Or simply put: It literally can’t “find” text, since there nothing it can search.

        Same for the creativity, you can complain that the stories it writes aren’t the most interesting ones or still suffer from lack of coherence when they get too long. But you can’t complain that it doesn’t get creative. You can throw literally any topic, item, person or whatever at it and it can weave it into a story. You can make it rhyme while doing so or turn it into haiku or talk like a pirate. And you can do so incrementally, ask it to change characters and locations in the story and it will rewrite it. And when you are out of ideas, you can ask it to come up with some.

        AI discussion is starting to feel like talking to moon landing deniers, just repeating the same nonsense that has already been debunked a million times.

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          The difference between what a human mind does in transforming their nature and experiences through artistic expression and what the machine does by referencing values and expressing them in human language without any kind of understanding is very different. You are right that LLMs don’t literally copy word for word what they find, and they certainly are sophisticated pieces of technology, but what they are expressing is more processed language or images than an act of artistic creation. Less culinary experience and more industrial sausage. They do not have intelligence and are incapable of producing art of any kind. This isn’t to say they aren’t a threat to commodified art in the marketplace because they very much are, but in terms of enrichment or even entertainment the machine is not capable of producing anything worthwhile unless the viewer is looking for something they don’t have to look at for more than a moment or read with any serious interest of the contents. I’m interested in people using LLMs as a tool in their own artistic pursuits, but they have their own limitations as any tool does.

        • QHC@kbin.social
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          Yes, I use the tools every day and understand how they work. Failing to fully explain the mechanics of LLMs does not materially change the meaning of my original statement.

          There’s a reason that fan fiction is not regarded as true creative art that should be respected and discussed like other mediums: it;s not trying to do something new and original, the whole point is to re-combine and shuffle things around to sound and feel and look like the original work, just more, but not different in any real enough way to matter.

          • lloram239@feddit.de
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            There’s a reason that fan fiction is not regarded as true creative art

            No true Scotsman

            it;s not trying to do something new and original

            Neither are humans. Everything is a remix.

            The only real advantage that humans have in this is that there are 7 billion of us and there is only one of ChatGPT. Everything ChatGPT produces ends up sounding very similar, since all of it is based on the same training data. With humans you get a lot more variety as each of them had their own unique slice of training data.

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        It is true that LLMs and DPMs do not create, they interpolate – that’s why training data and curation of that data is so critical to begin with. Nevertheless, it is correct to say they are being used for “creative activities” as cheap and (in my opinion) unsustainable substitutes for human minds.

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        AI is about at creative as Adobe Photoshop is, or a pencil for that matter. A human operating it (no, not txt2img prompting) is where the creativity comes from.

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      tools to strip the best parts of humanity away from us so that AI can do creative activities like poetry and art

      Yeah that’s a bullshit take on AI

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        But that’s exactly what’s happening. Bloodsucking capitalists have decided that AI is a cheaper option than paying people a living wage, so creatives are losing their jobs.

        Instead of actually learning how to create art, shitbag grifters claim theyre “taking the power back from creatives” and doing nothing but stealing from actual creatives to make some sort of soulless synthesis, leaving actual creatives high and dry. For just one example, look at how many publishing outlets have stopped taking submissions because of the overwhelming flood of AI spam.

        All the while people are out here trying to make ends meet and are being forced into shitty, low paid jobs or gig work

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          There’s nothing to elaborate on. It’s a stupid position put about by luddites and perpetuated by people with no understanding of the subject. It’s so not on target it’s not even wrong!

            • AfterthoughtC@kbin.social
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              The way AI advertisers constantly call others not on board Luddites reminds me of what somebody said on badly written magic systems in fiction. It was something like they focus more on making the most complex system rather than actually asking if it will add to the story. Then when the story fails to reach an audience these authors confuse the apathy with real life anti-intellectualism.

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            I’m a DevOps engineer. I work with big technology every day. I am very definitively not a Luddite. But the way the capitalists controlling our economy view and want to use AI is harmful to us, the lower and middle classes. I’m not sure which part of my view is so stupid that it enters into psuedoscience, leading me to not even being wrong

              • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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                I could not make it any clearer I think the root cause is capitalism. That you’re putting the focus elsewhere is exhausting

                • ReCursing@kbin.social
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                  No I agree. Keep going… Why are you therefore daemonising AI rather than focusing your ire where it belongs?

                  • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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                    I’m not demonizing AI. I’m demonizing OpenAI, the shitty company. I’m demonizing CEOs and publishing executives who think they can pass off an inferior product vomited out by a robot record scratching the entire history of human creativity while we get stuck doing bullshit jobs for Uber, DoorDash, Fiverr, and the rest.

                    You think I have a position on AI that I don’t and it’s exhausting repetitively explaining to you that I don’t think AI is the problem, I think capitalism is. What part of what I am saying is not clear? Why do you want to treat me like a moron luddite for something I don’t believe and didn’t say? I’m more and more getting the impression that you and I are on the same page about this but you’re inserting a position onto me I do not hold.

                    That’s why I said this is exhausting. In fact you’re exhausting. In fact, I feel like I’m being a jerk and I’m starting to think you’re a jerk

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      The average cost of living is somewhere around $650 for one person, and those wages are a bit low but the higher end is above average for the country.

      (I don’t know how accurate this data is, but based on https://livingcost.org/cost/kenya/United-States)

      I’m not saying they shouldn’t be paid better or more, but those wages aren’t as outlandish as they sound for the country.

      • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
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        And here I must be crazy thinking if it is US company paying them, maybe they deserve the equivalent of US employees, no matter what the fucking local pay is.

        That “local pay” bullshit is just an excuse to exploit. Pay them what you would have to pay a US citizen for the same job or fuck right off. They don’t deserve less because of geographic location.

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        Starvation wages are slavery. And yes. Our techocolonial society engages at it at many levels. No. We should not be okay with it. We should do what we can do disengage from businesses that engage in it, and we should be self forgiving of ourselves when we can’t. We should always be advocating for the workers, even if sometimes that means who we’re advocating for is us

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        Whether or not we call it slavery, it is for sure a gross exploitation of labour. The article reminds us that we in the so-called ‘western world’ can only afford their luxury life because there’s someone elsewhere who pays the price.