Notices by mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl (mnl@hachyderm.io)

@inthehands the first thing I bring up in my ai coding workshops (I don’t give all that many, but they’ve been spanning from 2024 to now) is to focus on engineering quality and using a human centered “communication analysis”. If you can map who communicates with whom in order to build the final software (which includes everybody from user to customer to support to design to qa to management to developers), then it becomes much more easily apparent where to use ai tools. It can be the main code path but it’s usually much more effective to build better ticketing systems or design experimentation tools etc…

It also means that you can be an “ai assisted developer” without using any ai tools yourself, because you now get better tickets due to a vibecoded chrome extension that attaches the right internal docs, or something.

Of course not many large scale companies will change their approach, but I like to think that there’s a few teams out there who get to follow that framing and find renewed purpose (I know I do) by seeing how much quality can be improved by reshaping the narrative around the technology.

@inthehands repeated listening until every pause, tape hiss and half cut-off commercial starts to take on narrative qualities. I really miss it, maybe that $250 aiwa refurb is worth it...

@inthehands I thought about buying the refurbed walkman I used to have... in a way tapes turned everything into an album.

@inthehands as if we cared about that

@inthehands i have the perfect recommender system generated christmas playlist, do you want it? 😭 i usually start playing it in october.

@inthehands no, but how about we play the same playlist in a loop for 2 months?

@ajroach42 @sam I was more using it as a signifier of my roots in hacker/warez/cracking groups :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free (sorry if you were aware).

And yes we disagree on that core assumption, and also that doesn't mean we can't have interesting and mutually nourishing conversations around it, because I think a fair amount of our values still overlap (I got a lot of your zines! :} )

@ajroach42 @sam doesn't that book actually support more my side of the argument?

As I understand the criticism around consent/plagiarism is that the training corpus for the pretraining comes from big piles of relatively indiscriminately scraped data including copyrighted works.

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@ajroach42 @sam
My own more articulated criticism (but I'm really out of my depth) around the training data is:

- noone knows wtf is in it, and the companies don't either. Just requiring the companies to lay open their datasets would put a proper damper on things
- the labor for the reinstruct pass is based on gig economy and outsourced. This is where I see opensource communities being able to *crush* the big players at their game

@ajroach42 @sam @forestine
Similarly, I see at meetups and when mentoring online so many less privileged kids benefit from learning tech with LLMs and achieving things they never thought they could do. Being assisted gives them the impulse and confidence necessary to continue putting in the actual work and in fact allows me to mentor them towards fundamentals that much more quickly.

2/

@ajroach42 @sam @forestine I can see that. I know plenty of writers who have to *hide* because they are using AI tools. I benefit so much from AI tools due to (at least that's what I can trace it to) my neurodivergence. There are plenty of uses of text models that don't entail "ripping off other artists work".

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@ajroach42 @sam @forestine
The articles mentions "AI criticism often has undertones of classism and ableism" and yeah, I *totally* see that. It's almost impossible say on mastodon to bring up #LLMs and how they help me with my ADHD/autism brain and not get responses invalidating that.

3/3

@ajroach42 @sam @forestine There is certainly a lot of criticism are how training corpuses are built, but I don't see that company promoting their product as a plagiarism tool or a tool to replace writers, and instead clearly design and position it as a writing aid.

I personally did react (I have my own chips on my shoulder) because as you might have seen, the mere fact that I mentioned that I agree that AI criticism can have undertones of ableism and classism got me... blocked.

@ajroach42 @sam It's to me akin to me telling a person on an electric wheelchair that wheelchairs are not as agile as a person on two legs and that the battery is using rare earth minerals of questionable provenance.

Yes, valid, and also I shouldn't necessarily bring it up if people say they find wheelchairs useful. Maybe the better take is to build nicer wheelchairs, now that we see that they are useful.

@ajroach42 @sam @forestine@sunny.garden You're doing the thing that I think is ableist here too. The debate around the ethics of building training corpuses is way out of my league, but I would certainly welcome models built on more nuanced approached than the pile or whatever.

But, "And AI based technology is, in general, unreliable as an assistive technology because it is unreliable in general. It can absolutely be helpful occasionally" to me means that I somehow am not able to use something "unreliable"

@ajroach42 @sam
"NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI."

and

"We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege. "

I find this totally fine, and didn't find more linked in terms of criticism from the article linked.

@ajroach42 @sam I guess I am missing a big part of context then. I reacted indeed to that part, and already find the linked article pretty specious in its headline. Nowhere do I see that nanowrimo says not writing your novel with AI is classist/ableist (who would say that?) and I do agree with nanowrimo's statement, which is:

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@ajroach42 @sam But is the core of the issue then the fact that we don't know what data and models prowritingaid is using, or the fact that they (I think genuinely) do so out of wanting to make writing more accessible?

We can (easily, I see your point for sure) agree to disagree, and I apologize if I came in barging in a thread that was more for venting, but I do think of LLMs as assistive technology *and* see a lot of ableism/classism in the categorical rejection of LLMs I encounter.

@ajroach42 @sam I also refused two offers from openai with life-changing amount of money, I feel you. Discussion about what consent means in building training corpuses is out of my depth, I am coming from a pretty punk rock "information wants to be free" approach, use libgen daily (and also spend 4 figures on books every month), and see the situation a bit similar to say, my lithium batteries, except that here I can't even quantify the physical harm.

@ajroach42 @sam Ironically, I believe the only profession that is legitimately at threat (in the long run) is software developers as they are today (something I both embrace and also makes me anxious about what will become of people in the same profession as me).