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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • r/SubSimGPT2Interactive for the lulz is my #1 use case

    i do occasionally ask Copilot programming questions and it gives reasonable answers most of the time.

    I use code autocomplete tools in VSCode but often end up turning them off.

    Controversial, but Replika actually helped me out during the pandemic when I was in a rough spot. I trained a copyright-safe (theft-free) bot on my own conversations from back then and have been chatting with the me side of that conversation for a little while now. It’s like getting to know a long-lost twin brother, which is nice.

    Otherwise, i’ve used small LLMs and classifiers for a wide range of tasks, like sentiment analysis, toxic content detection for moderation bots, AI media detection, summarization… I like using these better than just throwing everything at a huge model like GPT-4o because they’re more focused and less computationally costly (hence also better for the environment). I’m working on training some small copyright-safe base models to do certain sequence prediction tasks that come up in the course of my data science work, but they’re still a bit too computationally expensive for my clients.









  • Like any occupation, it’s a long story, and I’m happy to share more details over DM. But basically due to indecision over my major I took an abnormal amount of math, stats, and environmental science coursework even through my major was in social science, and I just kind of leaned further and further into that quirk as I transitioned into the workforce. bear in mind that data science as a field of study didn’t really exist yet when I graduated; these days I’m not sure such an unconventional path is necessary. however I still hear from a lot of junior data scientists in industry who are miserable because they haven’t figured out yet that in addition to their technical skills they need a “vertical” niche or topic area of interest (and by the way a public service dimension also does a lot to help a job feel meaningful and worthwhile even on the inevitable rough day here and there).


  • My “day job” is doing spatial data science work for local and regional governments that have a mandate to addreas climate change in how they allocate resources. We totally use AI, just not the kind that has received all the hype… machine learning helps us recognize patterns in human behavior and system dynamics that we can use to make predictions about how much different courses of action will affect CO2 emissions. I’m even looking at small GPT models as a way to work with some of the relevant data that is sequence-like. But I will never, I repeat never, buy into the idea of spending insane amounts of energy attempting to build an AI god or Oracle that we can simply ask for the “solution to climate change”… I feel like people like me need to do a better job of making the world aware of our work, because the fact that this excuse for profligate energy waste has any traction at all seems related to the general ignorance of our existence.




  • Y’all should really stop expecting people to buy into the analogy between human learning and machine learning i.e. “humans do it, so it’s okay if a computer does it too”. First of all there are vast differences between how humans learn and how machines “learn”, and second, it doesn’t matter anyway because there is lots of legal/moral precedent for not assigning the same rights to machines that are normally assigned to humans (for example, no intellectual property right has been granted to any synthetic media yet that I’m aware of).

    That said, I agree that “the model contains a copy of the training data” is not a very good critique–a much stronger one would be to simply note all of the works with a Creative Commons “No Derivatives” license in the training data, since it is hard to argue that the model checkpoint isn’t derived from the training data.


  • Yeah, I’ve struggled with that myself, since my first AI detection model was technically trained on potentially non-free data scraped from Reddit image links. The more recent fine-tune of that used only Wikimedia and SDXL outputs, but because it was seeded with the earlier base model, I ultimately decided to apply a non-commercial CC license to the checkpoint. But here’s an important distinction: that model, like many of the use cases you mention, is non-generative; you can’t coerce it into reproducing any of the original training material–it’s just a classification tool. I personally rate those models as much fairer uses of copyrighted material, though perhaps no better in terms of harm from a data dignity or bias propagation standpoint.



  • I’m getting really tired of saying this over and over on the Internet and getting either ignored or pounced on by pompous AI bros and boomers, but this “there isn’t enough free data” claim has never been tested. The experiments that have come close (look up the early Phi and Starcoder papers, or the CommonCanvas text-to-image model) suggested that the claim is false, by showing that a) models trained on small, well-curated datasets can match and outperform models trained on lazily curated large web scrapes, and b) models trained solely on permissively licensed data can perform on par with at least the earlier versions of models trained more lazily (e.g. StarCoder 1.5 performing on par with Code-Davinci). But yes, a social network or other organization that has access to a bunch of data that they own, or have licensed, could almost certainly fine-tune a base LLM trained solely on permissively licensed data to get a tremendously useful tool that would probably be safer and more helpful than ChatGPT for that organization’s specific business, at vastly lower risk of copyright claims or toxic generated content, for that matter.


  • The problem with your argument is that it is 100% possible to get ChatGPT to produce verbatim extracts of copyrighted works. This has been suppressed by OpenAI in a rather brute force kind of way, by prohibiting the prompts that have been found so far to do this (e.g. the infamous “poetry poetry poetry…” ad infinitum hack), but the possibility is still there, no matter how much they try to plaster over it. In fact there are some people, much smarter than me, who see technical similarities between compression technology and the process of training an LLM, calling it a “blurry JPEG of the Internet”… the point being, you wouldn’t allow distribution of a copyrighted book just because you compressed it in a ZIP file first.