genAI strategy

[erlend-sh]

The topic of genAI is on my mind a lot; how to talk about it, share materials derived from it and even make contributions with it.

I really appreciate everyone who actively engage with us in this community and I hate to see it cause so much division and antagonism. Having some ‘community guideline’ on AI-use in roomy/muni-town has been brought up as a useful artifact, so here’s the gist if it.

It’s tricky because we can’t simply enforce a blanket ban on all things genAI.

First of all there’s the general debate and necessary criticism about AI tech, which we must continue to have space for here to collectively develop our thoughts.

Then there is legitimate, production-use of genAI as it stands today, such as for spam-blocking and moderation.

Apparently Discourse has had very good results with LLM-based spam-detection, now far outperforming Akismet from Automattic: https://meta.discourse.org/t/configuring-and-managing-ai-powered-spam-detection-in-discourse/343541

I do know this:

• Muni Town is a fundamentally genAI-critical community because of the many external harms that the genAI industry (as with all of Big Tech) has not yet internalized.
• genAI derived work shared in our spaces will normally be met with skepticism and scrutiny, as the majority of us perceive of most AI-use as the equivalent of fishing with dynamite.
• Any primarily genAI-derived work is by definition a direct derivative of our Data Commons. As such, all primarily genAI-derived work must be shared back with the commons, under a permissively open source license.

We are not absolutely against any experimentation and exploration of AI tooling, but the burden of proof-of-usefulness is squarely on the AI tools, on account of their yet-accounted for massive negative externalities.

The Job

What does useful look like? For ever-more capable bots it’ll look like any kind of value-add in the form of code, docs, design-talk etc., eventually.

To start with, I’d love to let the prompt engineers loose on our all our Pages, such as Values. I wanna see what kinds of PRs the bots or bot-assisted authors can come up with.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/collective-constitutional-ai-aligning-a-language-model-with-public-input
https://www.inkandswitch.com/patchwork/notebook/07/

Personal posts

• https://blog.erlend.sh/big-ai-commons
• https://blog.erlend.sh/credit-your-genai
• https://blog.erlend.sh/earnest-ai

[bitfl0wer]

My moral compass on this consists of the question "what are the effects and consequences of widespread adoption of this technology on our society and planet?"

Does a 1-7b, locally running model used for moderating a website destroy our planets? Does it have a negative impact on the job market? I'd argue that the answer to both questions in this case is "No", and as such, I personally see no immediate problem with using genAI for this purpose—misalignment and training bias questions aside. Asking the same set of questions for genAI-powered image generators, the answer is different, in my opinion. The consequences of widespread use of this particular genAI tool are already known, and have manifested as mass-firings and an overall burden to the creative industry, including freelancers and artists. For each case where genAI based image generators may be of use as a part of a larger software, there are better, faster, more ethical alternatives available.

[erlend-sh]

Yeah, I cannot yet think of a sufficiently human/artist-aligned use of synthetic rich-media generators, except maybe some basic conversion stuff like ‘please convert these doodles I made into proper schematics’.