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#21
Politics, Society and News. / Re: Simple Known Dangers with ...
Last post by Jason - June 09, 2025, 07:23:36 AMQuote from: buster on June 08, 2025, 06:15:51 PMI am afraid publishers will simply get AI to check what sells, call up the software, and imitate those books, ignoring the unique awareness that some great writers have to see the world differently. They may not sell a lot, but they last forever. We will lose the artists.
Although I haven't heard of any major cases of publishers using AI to write books, there are already people selling ebooks written by AI. I've only used short story AI generators online and in apps to see what they do, and certain phrases keep coming up repeatedly, almost like cliches written by a similar author. That's also why people can tell that AI wrote the text you're looking at. Here's a relatively simple AI (I presume).
https://perchance.org/ai-story-generator
Try giving it a subject, a character and a plot (if you want). It will generate everything else. Things I've noticed:
1. The same names crop up again and again.
2. The same characters come up. Different names might even look different, but they act the same way.
3. The same tropes come up.
You won't notice these things until you have written several stories. It doesn't write the entire story. It does so many paragraphs, and you can either add suggestions of what happens next or just click next and let 'er rip. It's an interesting exercise.
I play a Dungeons & Dragons game session with some friends every Sunday. Recently, we had a question about a particular spell, and while a couple of us were checking the official rules in books, both online and in hardback, one guy used ChatGPT. It gave him the wrong answer.
Answers are based on training data, but without the ability to know the difference between correct and incorrect information, as you say, it can come up with wrong answers.
With this game, it's probably that accurate information for the game isn't available for free (i.e. beyond paywalls). Or there's so little of it that the incorrect information or house rules, or the like, outweigh the amount of accurate info.
D&D has a lot of versions (5th edition so far). It's been through a lot of incarnations since the 70s, and some players are still playing the original editions and probably post about it on forums, asking questions and receiving different answers because D&D is an open-ended game, and not everything is or even can be in the rules. But AI doesn't know the differences because it's not actual intelligence. It wouldn't know what a "version" is unless you grouped everything for it under a version.
My understanding is that AI is a pattern recognizer. That's awesome for certain situations. If you have thousands of X-rays showing what real cancer looks like, AI can give a pretty high detection rate of seeing it. But that's based on someone helping it by training it with thousands (maybe more) x-rays. In some cases, AI can even detect conditions better than doctors. But we wouldn't have AI deciding if we should have surgery or chemotherapy, at least not yet.
#22
Politics, Society and News. / Re: Simple Known Dangers with ...
Last post by buster - June 08, 2025, 06:15:51 PMOne of my main concerns, because I like art, music, novels, and films, is the encroachment of the commercial empire into what has always been primarily, up to the last, say half century, the primacy of the individual artist in the creation of art. In many cases the story, or paintings, or music, cannot be judged by the number of sales. If this were true, MacDonald's would be judged the best cuisine in the world. Sometimes the most popular film is rubbish. Only time tells us what is best in literature.
I am afraid publishers will simply get AI to check what sells, call up the software, and imitate those books, ignoring the unique awareness that some great writers have to see the world differently. They may not sell a lot, but they last forever. We will lose the artists.
We will lose uniqueness, and gain commercial sameness.
I am afraid publishers will simply get AI to check what sells, call up the software, and imitate those books, ignoring the unique awareness that some great writers have to see the world differently. They may not sell a lot, but they last forever. We will lose the artists.
We will lose uniqueness, and gain commercial sameness.
#23
Politics, Society and News. / Re: Simple Known Dangers with ...
Last post by buster - June 07, 2025, 02:09:02 PMHealth insurance for prescriptions and teeth disappears for teachers when they retire. So many of us join an association of teachers and we pay with monthly premiums. This, though exorbitantly expensive, covers 80% of our costs. Seldom did I have to phone them, but a year or two ago I needed an explanation of coverage.
There was no person at the other end but a voice giving me five numbers I could choose for different types of issues. I got through to the 'department' I needed and got a lovely male voice that asked,
'Please state as clearly as you can what your inquiry concerns.'
You know when you are talking to a machine, but this seemed easy enough. I would duplicate my question for you but I can't remember what it was. And after I asked I got a response, I replied as clearly and concisely as I could. The voice answered,
'Please restate your concern more clearly please.'
After the third failure I did my poke about trick, hitting the O key on my phone.
A human answered, to which I exclaimed, 'A living person!' and at least got a laugh. We chatted a bit about the machine answering. She told me I had to learn how the machine processes information as you talk to it, and I thought, though didn't say, 'That is totally ass backwards."
When I repeated my original question, she had the answer for me immediately. Human brains are astonishing devices, needing only bits of info to fill in the rest. And if this machine 'brain' was improved, this lovely, clever woman would lose her job.
There was no person at the other end but a voice giving me five numbers I could choose for different types of issues. I got through to the 'department' I needed and got a lovely male voice that asked,
'Please state as clearly as you can what your inquiry concerns.'
You know when you are talking to a machine, but this seemed easy enough. I would duplicate my question for you but I can't remember what it was. And after I asked I got a response, I replied as clearly and concisely as I could. The voice answered,
'Please restate your concern more clearly please.'
After the third failure I did my poke about trick, hitting the O key on my phone.
A human answered, to which I exclaimed, 'A living person!' and at least got a laugh. We chatted a bit about the machine answering. She told me I had to learn how the machine processes information as you talk to it, and I thought, though didn't say, 'That is totally ass backwards."
When I repeated my original question, she had the answer for me immediately. Human brains are astonishing devices, needing only bits of info to fill in the rest. And if this machine 'brain' was improved, this lovely, clever woman would lose her job.
#24
Politics, Society and News. / Simple Known Dangers with AI, ...
Last post by buster - June 05, 2025, 05:43:58 PMI'm not speculating on this technology taking over the world, but am including, to start with, some simple day to day occurrences of AI use that has led to problems. And here is a simple one to start.
A prof I meet sometimes while walking told me the story of a student who wanted to stay away from school on a certain day, the day when the test was. Instead of phoning him, or texting, she sent him a detailed email that he could tell, though I don't know how, was AI generated. He described her actions as stupid and thick headed. I never found out what he did about it.
Example two is also from a university, Carleton though rather than Trent. A granddaughter supplements her income by marking undergraduate assignments while working on her Doctorate. She says you can recognize AI writing pretty well immediately, but to reprimand the culprit, you have to be sure you can prove AI was used, though they do have software to scan essays to find tell tale signs. If we never learn to distinguish real from AI, people will graduate and the BA will come to have no commercial value. There would be no proof the graduate knows anything, such as how to write well.
Another granddaughter at university explained that the bots can find every thing on the Internet, but cannot easily verify the truth of an article, so an essay can have some glaring errors of common sense or even known misinformation.
And my final example is the horrible scam of cloning a child's voice, and using it in the background to demand money be sent to sent with a pretext of helping the youngster, or declaring a hostage situation. The computer program could say whatever the scammer told the program to say, or simple said into the software, but it would sound like the child's voice.
I hope some of the readers will recount some personal examples of danger or worry, or maybe something you read recently. Later we can get into the societal issues that might rip apart the world our fragile culture has constructed. But personal experiences would be interesting.
I have one I like as an example about phoning a medical company to gather some information I wanted and not talking to a human. Maybe tomorrow.
A prof I meet sometimes while walking told me the story of a student who wanted to stay away from school on a certain day, the day when the test was. Instead of phoning him, or texting, she sent him a detailed email that he could tell, though I don't know how, was AI generated. He described her actions as stupid and thick headed. I never found out what he did about it.
Example two is also from a university, Carleton though rather than Trent. A granddaughter supplements her income by marking undergraduate assignments while working on her Doctorate. She says you can recognize AI writing pretty well immediately, but to reprimand the culprit, you have to be sure you can prove AI was used, though they do have software to scan essays to find tell tale signs. If we never learn to distinguish real from AI, people will graduate and the BA will come to have no commercial value. There would be no proof the graduate knows anything, such as how to write well.
Another granddaughter at university explained that the bots can find every thing on the Internet, but cannot easily verify the truth of an article, so an essay can have some glaring errors of common sense or even known misinformation.
And my final example is the horrible scam of cloning a child's voice, and using it in the background to demand money be sent to sent with a pretext of helping the youngster, or declaring a hostage situation. The computer program could say whatever the scammer told the program to say, or simple said into the software, but it would sound like the child's voice.
I hope some of the readers will recount some personal examples of danger or worry, or maybe something you read recently. Later we can get into the societal issues that might rip apart the world our fragile culture has constructed. But personal experiences would be interesting.
I have one I like as an example about phoning a medical company to gather some information I wanted and not talking to a human. Maybe tomorrow.
#25
Website & Forums / Re: New board added: "Running ...
Last post by fox - June 03, 2025, 07:07:30 PMI agree.
#26
Running Linux on Mac / Re: A "new" take on Linux-on-i...
Last post by fox - June 03, 2025, 02:25:31 PMJust a quick update. I continue to use my 2019 iMac as a Linux-first computer. Ubuntu is my main driver, and I am up to date with version 25.04. I have updated to every new version without a problem. I have also tried Mint, openSuse and Manjaro; all run well on this iMac. Unfortunately, I never found a solution for the native wifi, speakers and microphone, but I have the equivalent with plug-in devices. I have no immediate plans to replace this iMac with an Apple Silicon version. Apparently, one can run Linux on M1, M2 and M3 with some limitations, but mainly Fedora which I'm not interested in running.
#27
Website & Forums / Re: New board added: "Running ...
Last post by ssfc72 - May 30, 2025, 07:30:30 AMYes, that is a good idea.
#28
Website & Forums / New board added: "Running Linu...
Last post by Jason - May 29, 2025, 08:55:03 PMWe have a new board under the Linux category where you can make or reply to posts about your experiences running Linux on Mac devices. You can find it here:
https://plugintolinux.ca/forum/index.php/board,21.0.html
I'm going to move Fox's excellent related posts over the next few days as I find them. If you find any I've missed, post the links here or Topic heading. What do you think of this new board? Is it a useful addition?
https://plugintolinux.ca/forum/index.php/board,21.0.html
I'm going to move Fox's excellent related posts over the next few days as I find them. If you find any I've missed, post the links here or Topic heading. What do you think of this new board? Is it a useful addition?
#29
Articles, Tutorials and Tips / Running Windows 10 or 11 in Li...
Last post by ssfc72 - May 25, 2025, 11:35:15 AMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN1MWBa3yiw
This appears to be a very good video tutorial on Youtube from Explaining Computers presenter.
It shows how to do this for both Intel based computers and AMD Rysen based computers.
This appears to be a very good video tutorial on Youtube from Explaining Computers presenter.
It shows how to do this for both Intel based computers and AMD Rysen based computers.
#30
General Discussion / Re: Windows 10 support ends in...
Last post by Jason - May 23, 2025, 11:51:28 AMKal, I noticed in your signature that you're running Linux on a Mac. You and Fox should share notes. 
I wonder if we should have a specific section for running Linux on Macs.
I wonder if we should have a specific section for running Linux on Macs.