In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”
“It insists she’s the mafia.”
“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”
“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.
Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
I hate to do this, but we’ve been struggling something fierce for the last few weeks and basically blowing through credit to feed ourselves. we’ve exhausted all our funds until the seventh, and what we get then won’t last us very long.
gist of the situation is, me and my mother in law are disabled, Kyle is working and makes just enough to pay bills, and our food stamps were cut repeatedly. we get like $100 a month on the seventh to pay for food, because they expect Kyle to be able to pay for food for all of us. he can’t. and most of the time, won’t, even if he can manage to get funds spare. we’ve been using whatever credit we can put hands to in order to keep ourselves fed, but our accounts are basically in the red and we’ll have minimum payments due near the end of the month.
if anyone can toss a few bucks our way so we can have something to eat until, or after, we get our food stamps, that would be much appreciated. if anyone can boost this so it gets to more folks, I’d also appreciate that. if you’ve read to this point, thank you.
Pornhub’s entire business model revolves around stealing content made by
sex workers without their consent and profiting off it with no
compensation to the workers who generate the content they steal.
Sex
workers are an incredibly vulnerable and stigmatised class of workers, mostly women,
mostly younger, mostly not rich, with little recourse, socially or legally, against a massive
corporation like Pornhub.
Pornhub relies on this, on how little you care about sex workers, to maintain a business
based on stealing their livelihoods.
Stop applauding a
corporation that literally exists to steal from marginalised workers just
because they have a competent PR department.
Fucking thank you
I’m not defending them but isn’t that true of all porn sites?
Yes.
This is going around again because Pornhub have apparently been billing themselves as an alternative to Tumblr for artists and sex workers and it was made originally because as they say, Pornhub has a very clever PR department (I’m thinking in particular of the snow plowing stunt last year) and people have a tendency to fall for it.
Pornhub pays 69 cents per 1k views while Youtube pays $7.60 for the same amount of traffic.
If someone steals your porn and uploads it, Pornhub requires that you doxx yourself to the uploader.
the new batch of love for john mulaney here on tumblr has got me thinking how critical costume design is once again. john mulaney is a good comedian, but so much of his power comes from how his humor plays off how he’s dressed. we don’t expect a man dressed like a 1960s news announcer, all clean scrubbed and tight-wound professional, to describe in minute detail the visit where a doctor shoved a hand up his ass. imagine any iconic john mulaney set but given in jeans and a t-shirt, and is it as funny? i don’t think so. his humor spreads like wildfire on this website because the image of a man in a buttoned-up shirt and a tie and slicked back hair with fairly narrow lapels on his three-piece suit is fucking hysterical when paired with “years later I’d be in college about to go down on some
rockin’ twink and i’d be like what would leonard bernstein do”
well I do recall a comedian telling about how he accidentally joined the russian mafia on a school trip in college, and this was made more believable by the fact that he was shirtless with a beer belly while telling this story
cguard 