Clearly that wasn't spam, because his name is nospam007.

Forced? You think reviewers of writing contests are captives, imprisoned by mad scientists and forced to read story after story, like some sort of literary equivalent of the backstory to MST3K?

It is no more "theft" than you are.

I'll never get over how many people I watch online complain about how they'll never use AI because "it's theft", and then post photoshops they made with pictures they don't own, when that's not what the AI is doing.

I'll never get over how many artists I've seen complain about how AI is theft, and then paint something with "inspiration images" sitting in front of them while they paint, with their painting effectively being a blended composite of their inspiration images - when that's not what the AI is doing.

I'll never get over how many writers I've seen write the exact same derivative stuff that they also read, down to the same phrasings at times, just packaged in a new plot with new characters, and yeah, same story.

Even a person who isn't *directly* copying things that they're literally looking at is still the sum of their experiences. And it's rather hard to say that the breadth of human experience is broader than an LLM (whose "breadth of experiences" is "the whole world's outputs"), outside of the things that relate directly to having a body in a way which a blind / deaf / quadraplegic / whatnot person wouldn't grasp well.

And on that latter note, most people underestimate how well e.g. the congenitally blind actually grasp colours and the like. They're far better at reasoning about colours - similar to the sighted - than they are at knowing what colours things are. One study I read for example asked about polar bear fur. A good fraction of the congenitally blind subjects answered that they didn't know what colour it was. When asked to guess, about half of them answered that it was white so that it could blend into the snow, while the other half wrongly guessed black, but did so on the assumption that they'd want to soak up light to help stay warm. And actually in reality, both are true - to an outside observer, the exterior scattering of visible light without pigment makes them look white, but it's also designed to trap non-visible light up against black skin to absorb it for warmth. A sighted person, just seeing "white fur" and not knowing the latter property, might not have thought to even consider that.

To a LLM, our bodily experiences are akin to a blind person asked about colour: only knowing for sure things that they've learned about them directly, but still quite adept at reasoning about them.

You understand that this was not a sales contest, right?

What should be telling is that people started criticizing the metaphors only after concerns were raised that it was AI.

I do this experiment all the time (as it amuses me endlessly): when some people are hating on AI, I post some masterpiece panting or award-winning photo, suggest it's AI, and then watch them all explain why it's terrible, obviously-flawed, soulless crap. Sometimes I also do the reverse and post an AI image by comparison, say I prefer the "AI image" (actually real) to the "real image" (actually AI), and watch them go on about how the "real" (actually AI) image is so much better and shows so much more human creativity and emotion that AI could never have.

One person did this recently (posted a real Monet, said it was AI) and hundreds of such replies. The funniest part however was that someone took all their replies about the real Monet and fed them (along with the real Monet) into an AI model and had it improve the real Monet to match their criticisms ;)

It's not gravity?

That explains this.

The problem here isn't scams and grift. It's that by growing the number of bets by orders of magnitude, you grow the number of insiders with insider info by orders of magnitude. Which creates perverse incentives across your entire economy for people to profit off of their status, while simultaneously making it much harder to do so.

Say there's a bet on whether Russia will take the village of Mala Tokmachka by a certain date. Well, now every Russian commander on that front has an incentive to have family members / friends bet against it and then delay / undercut their ability to wage incentives, while every soldier also has the incentive to do so and then do everything they can to spoil the offensive.

Or say the US is planning a major offensive in Iran, and various insiders are betting *on* an imminent attack. Well, Iran can feed Polymarket data into their intel assessments as one factor to help determine when the US will invade in order to maximize their readiness. OR, Iranian intel services could track down US officials / military officers who are making these bets based on insider info and blackmail them in order to get them to cooperate.

Every single aspect of society that gets bet on gets subtly undercut by the existence of these bets. It's one thing to have bets be placed on sports, an action that by definition is entertainment, something that doesn't actually matter. But it's an entirely different thing to have bets on virtually everything in our world. It's already been a problem with stock trading, but sites like Polymarket make it so, so much worse.

That's too much. The management class doesn't really understand math, they don't understand statistics, they don't understand technology. They are just bullies hoping to make money somehow. They are like Trump, but not as mouthy.

The people actually building the AI are mostly just trying to build the best thing they can, or alternately, just do their job and get paid. There's no grand scheme, but if given the chance to make a billion dollars, a lot of them will take it, nevermind if it ruins the economy.

Trump will continue to be annoying for the foreseeable future.

if you're not willing to look at facts, then you can't understand the situation.

The first thing that comes up from your link is anti-government protests.

Don't make things up. Pay attention to facts, even if the facts are uncomfortable.

Where did you get this? There is no free speech in Iran, there is no public polling, you have no idea.

Again, it's extremely hard to take you seriously when you keep making things up.

It's really hard to take you seriously if you try to claim that the IRGC is not killing its own people. It's a well verified fact.

You are a fact denier.

With the current generation of AI, reading/listening just makes me feel stupider. The prose is not quite tight, and it makes my brain go to sleep. The fact that I'm never sure what I'm listening to is true or not doesn't help.

I could see this being useful as a bit of a replacement for white noise, but even for that, there are so many good podcasts around that I will never run out.

Trump is not diplomatic, that's for sure. But somehow a bunch of countries are sending ships to the straights of Hormuz. I don't know how he got them to do that.

It seems like they must be planning something, but it's not clear what. Maybe a landing operation to seize the land around the Hormuz strait region of Iran, or maybe just naval escorts for tankers. If shipping through the straits restarts, then Iran will have lost most of its negotiating power.

If it were me, I would not want to restart military operations until there were better anti-drone defenses set up. But idk, Trump is also not good at planning, maybe he'll try to go ahead with it anyway.