As someone who would consider himself in the same situation, I don't see dissonance, but pragmatism.

The scenario isn't a temporary crisis, it's total collapse, end of the world stuff. Why would I be so keen on surviving that? What for? Everyone and everything I enjoy in life would be gone anyway.

It's like the billionaires' apocalypse bunkers. What do they think they would be doing all day, and to what end? Even if they managed to secure enough clean air, clean food, and clean water, how many years are they planning to spend in their bunker pool, or watching their local movie library until the TV breaks? What's the end goal there?

I get that survivalists have a whole subculture, and it's an interest and hobby people enjoy doing, that's cool. But I think even they, if this happened and their skills allowed them to survive, would pretty soon start wondering why they would want to try to survive by all means possible in a barren, empty, dead world. If the survivalism is a fun hobby for someone, sure, but to force oneself to learn those skills for a potential apocalypse scenario doesn't seem to me like a reasonable thing to invest time in at all.

Emulating being the key word here. Putting words in a similar order as a critical thinker would, isn't the same as critical thinking. Have you looked at the output of "reasoning" models? It's funny, for sure, but not impressive or threatening. It exposes the models for the statistical word generators they are.

Add the fact that they totally suck at tasks outside of those spanned by the training data. I know there's a vision of the future where humans are all gig workers generating specialised training data for LLMs, but it doesn't sound much more plausible to me than a future where intellectual progress forever stops at the 2022 level, because everything will be done by LLMs and that's when anything new stopped being thought of.

We're not at the early stages. The LLM hype started almost for years ago! And for the past two or three years, progress has plateaued (if not regressed) and the economics, which still have to be figured out, point to it becoming an order of magnitude more expensive at least, compared to this aggressive marketing and VC phase.

I've been told for three years that it's the early days, and everything completely changes every few months, and these are the worst the tools will ever be. Meanwhile, I see very little technical progress, zero return on investment anywhere, negative infinity profitability on the side of the providers, and a fast growing realisation among the masses on all the myriad tasks they are systemically unsuitable for.

Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.

The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media. And that very thing is already what private individuals got and get sued for millions over.

The GenAI Corp., having gotten away with that unpunished, then goes on to commit further violations by commercially exploiting the media with neither a license to do so, nor any intentions to pay the rights-holders for their use.

By the media conglomerates' own math, these GenAI companies should all be drowning in lawsuits over kazillions of bajillions of dollars.

> The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media.

My contention is that this is not happening. Most generative AI companies do not source their training data from illegal torrents and the few that do are currently paying for it. Further, I suspect the companies that get away with it today are _smaller_ not larger.

Training data is typically sourced by scraping the publicly available web.

> Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.

Setting aside your own moral standards here, we should at least be able to agree that from a legal standpoint training a model is not copyright infringement.

Reminds me of one of my favourite episodes of one of my favourite TV shows ever, The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Technically a children's show, but with such cool, philosophical layers.

"What if you could only hear [your favourite song] once, and that was it?"

Also very relevant to modern day concerts, with so many in the audience focusing more on recording their crappy phone videos than on appreciating the live moment.

There's Bandcamp. I'm sure it's more difficult the more mainstream music is, but in my areas of interest, I'd estimate that at least 80% is available from Bandcamp. And for those who really want to optimise on where their money goes, you can save you cart for Bandcamp Friday where the store forgoes its cut (if I understood it correctly).

I might be overlooking something, but is a mirror of the Internet Archive even mentioned as a plan anywhere here? It was my first thought after reading the headline, too, but the website only speaks of archiving LLMs and, vaguely, some other collections, but not, for instance, the Wayback Machine.

I, for one, find the language used in these posts and publications extremely off-putting. "Behaviour", "teaching", "the model's ethics". And this is presumably written by technical folks, who know how these systems actually work, and should know better than to use such anthropomorphic, magicalhocus-pocus terminology.

I think the hocus-pocus language is also to a large part responsible for this ridiculous hype bubble in the first place, why investors are ignoring all the warning signs and betting it all on vapourware, why mass media is diligently ignoring that all of those amazing projections are built on an entirely fictitous circular zero-sum game with made-up numbers, and why non-tech executives are talked into sacrificing their companies' product quality, service level, and know-how for a third-party dependency with some vague promises of future savings and some unproven efficiency gain.

More personally, it makes me very glad that I left CS research more than a decade ago. My friends from academia, and having remote-visited a conference again recently, confirmed my suspicion that this is what CS research is largely about these days. Throw tokens at the wall, pull the handle, see what sticks and present it as a discovery. Nobody asks about what could possibly be learned from it, and nobody cares. Nothing is reproducible in any reasonable sense of the word, and nothing is of any real use for other researchers. These communities and conferences used to be about curiosity, discovery, and collaboration. Now it's just about showing what everyone got from the slot machine. How terminally boring.

> this is presumably written by technical folks, who know how these systems actually work, and should know better than to use such anthropomorphic, magicalhocus-pocus terminology

I get your point. But regardless of whether we can definitively establish if any of these Generative AI LLM agents are conscious (we cannot, because we can't even say the same of our fellow humans, see Philosophical Zombies), the bigger issue which we are already in the midst of is that many people believe and behave as if they were, and how that downstream behavior has very real consequences in our world which cannot be ignored.

The results of people anthropomorphizing needs to be dealt with more than the actual process itself (which we have no way to stop anyhow).

These agents have mostly conquered the realm of intelligent-seeming expression of complex ideas through language. Speaking about their actions in terms of ethical concepts is not only appropriate, but necessary.

It always seemed like Turner was the last media mogul with a conscience (there were never that many in the first place). As the article mentions, it's kind of surprising that he didn't turn into a villain given what he went through, both during his childhood and his massive success in business later. Proof that it's possible for people to stay grounded, empathetic, and true to themselves despite running into wealth and power.

No one can say he didn't live a full life.

Turner Classic Movies is, in my opinion, the only TV channel actually worth paying for. Curation, curveballs, and great commentary by fans and experts -- that's what you won't find on streaming servies.

I don't know if "anti-natalist" can be so simply placed on the conservative vs. progressive axis. Worrying about overpopulation means worrying about the quality of life of future generations, whereas "natalism" à la Musk is basically worrying about how they can keep making themselves richer, while not giving a damn about what happens to the world or humanity afterwards. So Turner's concern about population growth, if not necessarily progressive, strikes me as very fitting and in line with the humanist, philanthropic positions shown by the other points mentioned about him.

> I don't know if "anti-natalist" can be so simply placed on the conservative vs. progressive axis.

That was kind of my point. I doesn't belong on that axis at all, especially trying to transpose a comment from decades ago onto the current political dividing lines between "left" and "right" when so many ideologies have shifted sides over that period.

> Worrying about overpopulation means worrying about the quality of life of future generations, whereas "natalism" à la Musk is basically worrying about how they can keep making themselves richer, while not giving a damn about what happens to the world or humanity afterwards.

One can be natalist or anti-natalist for a variety of reasons. There's no one ideology that leads a person to each conclusion. People have come to (anti-)natalism from both humanist and anti-humanist arguments (and a variety of other arguments).

> So Turner's concern about population growth, if not necessarily progressive, strikes me as very fitting and in line with the humanist, philanthropic positions shown by the other points mentioned about him.

Again, avoiding the left/right/conservative/progressive labeling as those terms are dynamic over time. He's essentially a Malthusian for humanitarian and environmental reasons. Which makes sense, given his age. He'd have been in his mid 20's through the 60s and that was a fairly popular viewpoint at the time.