technology

Felt like that went out the window so fast too. Like as soon as Facebook became popular, suddenly it was totally fine to post your full name online.

Just going off open source models, most of them are at least somewhat better than that out of the box, and certain strains of model have a bunch of tools built around forcing it into a more reasonable state (like modern descendants of SD1.5 - a model from two years ago - fail hard on their own 9 times out of 10, but there's a mature ecosystem of tools to control post-NAI-leak SD1.5 and cover for its flaws). The most recent big model, Flux, is terrifyingly accurate on its own although it still tends to get proportions subtly wrong in very offputting ways.

Closed source models are impenetrable and no one knows what they're doing under the hood since the public only interacts with them with prompt boxes and every company is being super secretive about whatever they're doing.

That said, I do agree that it feels like there's something fundamentally wrong with the way "AI" is currently being focused on. It's like what's being trained now are eyes (and backwards eyes that reverse the process of seeing to produce an image from how that image might be parsed) and speech centers, and there's all this hype that the speech center bits can just be made big enough to start being smart instead of just being a potentially useful bit of language processing, and I really can't help but feel like it's just a flawed overfixation on one novel bit of tech kind of like how rockets became the standard for space launches because primitive rocket tech looked neat and had already been developed.

When this conversation comes up, my go-to is talking about people getting doxxed who were innocent. Boston Bomber, that airplane doctor, a lot of kids/minors, etc. It's easy for people to grasp they can randomly be targeted by a lynch mob because they look like someone or their name matches the wrong guy.

You can also get into deep dives on people finding out where a photo was taken just by looking at things like which way the wind was blowing, contrails in the sky, or where the sun is. You explain this can be used to track their kids or find out where they live.

Furthermore, just by figuring out a person's relationships, people can figure out important security questions (mother's maiden name, where they went for third grade, etc.). These can be used for ID theft.

My concern personally is there's no protections on privacy. As we've seen with the repeal of Roe v. Wade, social media and electronics can be used to track people in order to convict them with crimes. This can happen with any issue. Republicans may be fine with abortion being outlawed, but how are they going to feel when democrats finally repeal the second ammendment and throw them into FEMA camps or whatever nonsense conservatives are thinking of? The government can figure out if you're part of a gun club or maybe sees you in the background of your friend's picture at a shooting range.

You start piling on bad things that can happen to them and people start realizing they need to delete Facebook and Instagram.

The entire point of marketing is to manipulate us into buying shit we don't need and didn't want. If it didn't work then companies wouldn't throw billions at it.