2d ago

Séamas O'Reilly: "I hate that writers and artists must suffer the indignity of being pickpocketed by the richest men who’ve ever lived."

www.irishexaminer.com

Séamas O'Reilly: I discovered my own memoir had been used to train Meta AI

Excerpt:

I hate all of this in almost every way a thing can be hated. I hate the factless waffle that surrounds Big AI’s every improbable goal. I hate how insipidly stupid, or just plain evil, those goals so often are, and the yawning chasm between them and any form of achievable reality. I hate that Big AI’s successes are inflated and its failures ignored — or are even categorised as hilarious mis-steps, like when AI chatbots tell people to eat poisonous mushrooms, put glue on pizza, or make air diffusers from chlorine gas.
I hate that Big AI consumes so much energy that every time you generate a six-fingered portrait of Anne Frank or a scene from the Vietnam war in the style of Studio Ghibli, you might as well just kill a polar bear with a crossbow. I hate that it can run roughshod over every copyright law and environmental protection on the planet in pursuit of the data it needs to continue failing, with no consequences save for the enrichment of the worst people on Earth, who have managed to make all of this magical bullshit seem sensible to an intellectual class comprised of people I wouldn’t trust to print an email.

8 comments

Don't worry mate, the rest of us are suffering the indignities of AI too 😭💙

This puts creative workers in the same boat as all other employees who do work once and don't continue to get paid for it afterward.
And for anyone who would take this as an argument in favor of the wealthy exploiting people, no, it's not. It's just pointing out that it's more typical for humans to be exploited, and the fact that there used to be legal protections to protect people who did creative work but there haven't been protections to protect others is very interesting.
- This would be so true if writers made money.

I know this goes beyond AI a bit, but I hate that a vast majority of new books are only on Amazon. Or the only practical place to get new books. And I can't use anything other than Amazon's proprietary bs to read it. I've had to yo ho books even when I want to pay for them.
And the money gets siphoned up rather than spread around.
There are some alternatives like Baen: https://www.baen.com/ so thats nice
- The book thing is absolutely the traditional publishings fault. It's almost impossible to publish unless you're already established

Nice rant but he doesn't stick the landing. He ends with comparisons to Blockchain, NFT, and says, "AI’s failure to approach the intelligence of a human being more alarming than ever."
Current AI doesn't need to be any better than it already is to be very useful. It can be used as a grammar checker on steroids. It's useful in that role. Being useful is good enough.
- Being useful as a “grammar checker on steroids” is not good enough to justify the environmental impact AI require to run. Tf you on about.
  
  Training a model which is good for a long time isn't the same as running a model. You can run the full 768B Deepseek on a $2k PC with no GPU.
  The current AI server energy use is the "factory" for llms. It's like looking at the costs to build a solar plant and declaring that solar is dirtier than oil while ignoring the entire lifecycle.
  It's certainly a better use of computing resources than the hundreds of millions of home users burning terrawatts with their 3080's (or worse) playing Call of Duty and Fortnight.

8 comments