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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • It is accurate to call it a parrot in the context of it essentially being used as ambiguated plagiarism machines to avoid paying workers.

    Yes it is capable of that. Yes that word means something else in the actual field. But you need to understand people are talking about this technology as it’s political relationships with power, and pretending prioritizing that form of analysis is well thats just people being uninformed about the REAL side and that’s their fault is yourself missing the point. This isn’t about pride and hurt feelings that a robot is doing something human do. It’s about the fact it’s a tool to undermine the entire value of the creative sector. And these big companies aren’t calling it AI because it’s an accurate descriptor. It could also be called a generative language model. They are calling it that because the common misunderstanding of the term is valuable to hype culture and VC investment. Like it or not, the average understanding of the term carries different weight than it does inside the field. And it turns the conversation into a pretty stupid one about sentience and humanity, as well as legitimizing the practice by trying to argue this is fundamentally unenforceable from the regulations we have on plagiarism, which it really isn’t.

    People who are trying to rebrand it aren’t doing it because they misunderstand the technical usage of the word AI. They are arguing the terminology is playing into the goals of our (hopefully shared) political enemies, who are trying to bulldoze a technology that they think should get special privileges: by implying the technology is something it isn’t. This is about optics and social power, and the term “AI” is contributing to further public misunderstand how it actually works, which is something we should oppose.







    1. while it will draw more users into the fediverse, nearly all of them will join directly with threads
    2. users who would have joined other instances will be parasited to threads as the safest best supported option
    3. whatever threads does, other instances will be forced to copy or risk losing feature parity with the most important player in the space.
    4. existing users will get accustomed to the content from threads as occupying the dominant super majority of content on the site.

    Threads will essentially be the space, with all currently existing communities left as periphery. Which is very bad on it’s own because the decentralized space is no longer decentralized, and in fact is in the hands of Meta.

    Meta will eventually wall itself off because not having control of your users social graph is an unnecessary threat. And since they are the space, so they will lose very little by walling off. When they do wall off, the fediverse will have it’s communities deeply intermingled with Meta, and when people lose most of their friends and content to meta walling themselves off - most are going to choose to relocate to meta.

    Slowly growing the decentralized space organically is important to avoid this kind of stuff. If we allow someone to become the hyper-dominant instance, the principle of de-federation ceases to matter because they have so much controlling leverage over the users.

    I do still think this is a good thing, but it’s a complicated good thing that could do more damage. I am very worried that they aren’t starting off federated. That also means their internal community norms will develop isolated from what fediverse has tried to establish.