Hunters are not allowed to use drones to locate their prey. It is seen as an anti-competitive measure or an unfair practice. While “real” hunters who chase their future prey for fun aren’t allowed drone usage, what about those who hunt to eat meat because it is their way of living? Is it still forbidden?

Now, let’s do a parallel with LLM-derived tools like ChatGPT. Is it ok for fun but not ok for actual work? When are the lines crossed? Is the content the only determining factor?

Warning: it’s not about the Apple Vision Pro headset, which many people think will bring a touch of a dystopian future to our life. Something else more serious will.

I read this week somewhere that, to get climate back into the normality zone🌪️ to ensure the sustainability of the human race and life in general, everyone on earth would need to live in an oppressive world where everything would be controlled by laws and government all the time and for decades. From buying food to cars to travelling to entertainment services, we would be under constant quotas, which would bring our quality of life much lower than we currently enjoy. In fact, developed countries’ quality of life would join the much lower quality of life of the vast majority of the earth’s population in less developed countries. This would be the only way to get around this climate crisis. Not convinced? The COVID pandemic brought massive and repetitive confinements that weren’t enough to bend many climate change indicators downwards. It lasted two years, more or less. 😱

Oh, and should we talk about forced birth control everywhere? Because we should, even if this is a taboo subject.

Are we ready for this dystopian world? 😷

I can see a great Vision Pro use case right here where people watch daylong movies about what used to be a much more enjoyable world in 3D. 😒

What an intense morning.

I learned about the existence of iTelescope, thanks to this blog post from Christopher Curtis, a service where you can rent astronomical observation time from the comfort of your home.

I read about the Eternal Recurrence, thanks to a post from Gr36. I would be ok with the idea of reliving my life as is. Over and over again.

Thanks to this superb article about Fediverse from Glenn Fleishman for Tidbits, I learned that we could follow anyone on Mastodon using an RSS feed, which we could do with Twitter. I’ll be able to re-add accounts to Inoreader to get news in one place, just as I was doing when I was on Twitter. Cool.

All this because I was searching for ideas to write a few linkposts. I wrote none except this post, but I learned quite a lot. I updated my Digital Garden accordingly.

As reported by Om Malik, automation is the next evolution step for fast food chains. Should I care?

Am I missing anything? I think so, and this is where Rewind could help me a lot.

What about your morning?

Should I care if my content is used to train AI models? How is it different than someone who uses part of my content in a citation to write a linkpost, for example? Is it ok for a portion of my content to be used elsewhere as opposed to the full content? Should I be able to opt out of any AI training, just like we can opt out of search engines when posting content online?

I had a discussion about AI yesterday with my wife. She came back from a two-day conference in Toronto. One of the sessions was about the place of AI in society and how it is time to engage in promoting and organizing some AI regulations.

The more I read and learn about AI capabilities as exposed in tools like ChatGPT, the more I think we will eventually need some regulation. For example, one thing we discussed (and on which we couldn’t agree) is the introduction of a delay in AI training. What I’d like to see is that AI companies are imposed a 2 or 3 years delay for their model training. And why would this be necessary? How would it change the game?

Remember that current training is lagging simply because we lack the processing power to digest all the digital information produced daily. But, eventually, it will come, just like Google replaced Yahoo when index content was initially entered manually by a group of people and then by a community. Sooner or later, ChatGPT or similar tools will digest the web in near real-time. And this is where this is going to be even more scary and could really get out of control.

Imposing delay on models training would help public knowledge and content to settle down and let consensus emerge in any research field, for example. Short-term noise would be reduced. In my opinion, it would be more challenging for ChatGPT to be infected by bad actors who will eventually try to influence results with toxic data.

My wife and I couldn’t agree on the effectiveness of this simple measure. She thinks that it would make ChatGPT useless or less relevant. My take goes the opposite side where, like in real life, things like encyclopedias are still helpful even though they were written and got frozen as soon as they were printed. So there is a need for them, like there is a need for more dynamic knowledge content like Wikipedia.

More than ever, we need to define what makes us unique, how we protect how uniqueness and consider slowing things down a bit, so we can have more time to understand what is going on and where things could go if we let things go without proper framing.