Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

It happened again.

Okay, so that AI letter signed by lots of AI researchers calling for a "Pause [on] Giant AI Experiments"? It's just dripping with AI hype. Here's a quick rundown.

First, for context, note that URL? The Future of Life Institute is a longtermist operation. You know, the people who are focused on maximizing the happiness of billions of future beings who live in computer simulations.

https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/

#AIhype

>>

The risk to large language models isn't that they'll become sentient in ways that are inconvenient to capitalists, it's that capitalists continue to use LLMs without considering how they've been trained, what biases and hatreds they launder, what the climate impacts of their use are, or how to fairly compensate people who create the stuff that they're trained on.

John Rogers on the money, as usual:

Also, i don't think that habitual line steppers/boundary breakers have ever considered that other people are *watching*

they are watching and making calculations as to whether asking for a thing is worth the endless stream of reply guys that nobody sent for but magically show up, ready to be bulls in china shops

and many people decide against asking for help *because* they do not want to deal with the caucus of boundary breakers

they'd rather suffer in silence

thanks to you!

who decided it was called “emotional baggage“ and not “griefcase” ???

Opened up my newsreader this morning to discover the most singularly dystopian prompt I've ever seen

A #pixelart diorama from SoC, mid-development. The mines and the pines still remain some of my favourite art from that game. #gameart

@zens Hi. All of my work is open source, including commercial games and the engine. https://shirakumo.org

Hot take x2:

Creative work done with language models is plagiarism.

Technical work done with language models is negligence.

I've seen a lot of crap being put about on the idea of parents' rights. I want to reject this idea outright.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PARENTS' RIGHTS.

Parents do not have "rights" over their children. The children have rights; the parents have responsibilities to see that those rights are upheld.

In order for the parents to have rights, then necessarily the child does not have them. The only situation in which we have allowed one human to usurp another's rights was slavery; and I would argue children are not property.

If they're not property, then they're people, and if they're people, then they have rights. If they have rights, parents can't.

This is such a crucial distinction. The parents don't have a right to have their child educated; the child has a right to a good education. The parents don't have the right to participate in sport; the child does. And so on.

Once you reframe the idea like this, that children are human beings with their own rights, you see what a disingenous line of attack this is from the right wing.

Parents have an awesome responsibility: the care and management of the human rights of beings not able to assert them for themselves. But it must be clear that the rights belong to the children, and that they are being safeguarded, not owned, by the parents.

This simple conceptual shift shows that children should have full bodily autonomy, including their right to assert consent to being touched by anyone (think touch sensitivity), and including the right to present as the gender they want. The right to religion, or freedom from it if they want. The rights are theirs, and the parents should have no power to abrogate those rights without due care and consideration.

Yes, by the way, I am a parent, as well as a grandparent. I stand by this. My kids are not my property, never were.