Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

New blog post: Why picspam and repost accounts are bad! https://out.flipping.rocks/blog/why-picspam-and-repost-accounts-are-bad

> You've seen them on Twitter, you're seeing them on the fediverse: accounts with names like "AmazingNature8" or "HistoryPix", or occasionally human-sounding names like "Massimo" and "Veronique". Popular topics include nature and wildlife photos, historic images, relatable memes, fine art, and so on.
>
> They repost photos or memes that have gone viral elsewhere, like Twitter, Instagram, or Reddit. The text of the post is scraped as well; google a distinctive sentence and you'll turn up a previous post. Credit, if it's ever given, is a handle with no URL or indication of what social network it belongs to. Tellingly, on the fediverse, there are virtually never image descriptions. […]
>
> Since I end up having to give this spiel every time I raise the alarm about such accounts, I'm putting it down here in a more permanent place.

Are there any lawyers in #Ottawa on fedi that will witness me signing my name/gender change forms? So far nobody has responded to my emails.

Edit: thanks everyone, I may have a lead on someone who specifically works with a local LGBTQ+ group to get this done: https://kindspace.ca/idclinic/ ​​

Looking for a post/paper I saw noting that the main difference between LLMs is their training data - same data, same outputs. (Because LLMs are lossy text compression.) Does anyone have the post/paper I'm thinking of?

EDIT: this is the one i was thinking of: https://nonint.com/2023/06/10/the-it-in-ai-models-is-the-dataset/

> model behavior is not determined by architecture, hyperparameters, or optimizer choices. It’s determined by your dataset, nothing else. Everything else is a means to an end in efficiently delivery compute to approximating that dataset.

when you order something as ":3 meowmeowmeow" and the staff still treats the order seriously:

My mission: keep using #Firefox
My obstacle: whatever the fuck #Mozilla is doing

AMD and ARM (including Apple) keep winning on the CPU market by... checks notes ... Making CPUs that do not explode.

This post is sponsored by the latest Intel CPUs, which explode.

LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads https://www.macstories.net/stories/lgbt-and-marginalized-voices-are-not-welcome-on-threads/

Here’s a story that I wish I didn’t have to write. But it’s high time that we make this a central point anytime, anywhere Threads is pictured as a decent alternative to Twitter and Mastodon. It is only that if you’re a straight, white male.

@macstories

A quick follow-up: digging into the history of CrowdFlower a bit, this exploitative data labelling company claimed Mozilla as one of its customers: https://web.archive.org/web/20170515113522/https://www.crowdflower.com/success-stories/

The same Mozilla that is now loudly talking about "ethical AI", and seems to have never spoken about their past dealings with this company. It's also not clear whether they still do business with them (it's part of Appen now).

Now it's not *certain* that this claim is true - tech companies, especially of the techbro kind, are certainly not beyond embellishing their customer lists to look more respectable. But this certainly raises some questions - especially since CrowdFlower legitimately has at least some large companies as its customer.

So after watching the Ghost Worker documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPSZFUiElls) and finding that Lukas Biewald (featured in the documentary) seems to have written his own puffy Wikipedia article, I dug into the guy a bit more, and I ran across a thing he'd made in the past - the GiveWork app.

To quote from a picture (attached) explaining how that app worked: "Ever wonder if you could use a few spare minutes to do good for the world? [...] When you complete a task on your iPhone or iPod Touch, the same task is assigned to a marginalized person in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, or Haiti. When your answers match and the task is verified, this person gets paid for the work you did together."

This app seems to have been widely covered at the time as an altruistic endeavour, a progressive use of tech, a way to "support refugees". It was developed and run by CrowdFlower, Biewald's for-profit company, and a 'non-profit' called Samasource.

Now you might have already noticed that that's kind of a weird model to be using to 'support refugees'. Why all the extra steps? (If you're familiar with the subject matter, you probably already know the answer by this point.)

Well, guess what Lukas Biewald, now the founder of Figure Eight (formerly CrowdFlower), was featured in the documentary for?

Quoting from an old conference recording shown in the documentary, Biewald speaking: "Before the internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for 10 minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those 10 minutes. But, with technology, you can actually find them, pay them a tiny amount of money, uhm, and then get rid of them when you don't need them anymore."

This makes it transparently obvious what the actual goal was of GiveWork: it was never meant to support refugees, it was meant to *exploit* them as a cheap source of labour. Each bit of data had to be processed by two independent people to spot wrong/fake data, and this was an easy way to both cut down on labour costs *and* frame it as a charitable act instead of the labour exploitation that it actually is.

But the reporting about GiveWork didn't mention that bit. Instead, it uncritically copied the framing of charitable, progressive tech.

Unsurprisingly, Biewald was featured in the Ghost Workers documentary because people doing work for his company where paid far below minimum wage, with Biewald trying to dodge any critical questions about that, explicitly only wanting to talk about AI.

Oh, and that non-profit Samasource?

"Samasource Impact Sourcing, Inc., formerly known as Samasource and Sama, is a training-data company, focusing on annotating data for artificial intelligence algorithms. [...] First founded as a non-profit in 2008, Sama adopted a hybrid business model in 2019, becoming a for-profit business with the previous non-profit organization becoming a shareholder."

---

And this is exactly the problem with 'liberal' approaches to progressive politics, that are not actually led by marginalized folks but by privileged folks who are out to 'save' them through a business, through tech, etc. (or at least claim so) - almost without exception, it turns into some exploitative bullshit, often deliberately so.

And since people rarely pay attention to what some organization does after the initial wave of "look what amazing progress they are making", there are essentially zero consequences or accountability. I bet that you didn't know about how GiveWork turned out, for example.

Is there a #greenlandic speaker here? Google translate just launched #Kalaallisut, I'm trying it out but the answers look wild? I *think* it is translating danish via english to Kalaallisut, but that is a bizarre decision because there must be many more training data from danish.

I'm now using
https://nutserut.gl/machine from the official #Greenland govt and it seems to work (ish). The problem is I only have a few words of Greenlandic, so it's hard to be sure.

#askFedi

Another amazing French system

This Intercités Nevers - Nantes is NOT compulsory reservation. But you can reserve. But there’s no way to know if seats are reserved or not. So is someone going to come here or not?

"AI will not democratize creativity, it will let corporations squeeze creative labor, capitalize on the works that creatives have already made, and send any profits upstream, to Silicon Valley tech companies where power and influence will concentrate in an ever-smaller number of hands. The artists, of course, get 0 opportunities for meaningful consent or input into any of the above events. Please tell me with a straight face how this can be described as a democratic process. "

(Original title: AI is not "democratizing creativity." It's doing the opposite)

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-is-not-democratizing-creativity