Comment by SCdF

For big corps yes.

For everyone else, chains.

It's not hard if the people in charge had any scruples at all. These machines never could have done anything if some human being, somewhere in the chain, hadn't decided that "yeah, I think we will do {nefarious_thing} with our new technology". Or should we start throwing up our hands when someone gets stabbed to death like "well, I guess knives don't have human values".

Human beings are doing this.

> How can you get a machine to have values?

The short answer is a reward function. The long answer is the alignment problem.

Of course, everything in the middle is what matters. Explicitly defined reward functions are complete, but not consistent. Data defined rewards are potentially consistent but incomplete. It's not a solvable problem form machines but equally likewise for humans. Still we practice, improve and middle through dispite this and approximate improvement hopefully, over long enough timescales.

That sounds like the valued-at-billions-and-drowning-in-funding company’s problem. The issue is they just go “there are no consequences for solving this, so we simply won’t.”

Maybe if we can't build a machine that isn't a sociopath the answer should be don't build the machine rather then oh well go ahead and build the sociopaths

I don't know, it feels odd to declare people wrote "because they enjoy it" and then get irritated when someone finds a way to monetize it retrospectively.

Like you're either doing this for the money or you're not, and its okay to re-evaluate that decision...but at the same time there's a whole lot of "actually I was low key trying to build a career" type energy to a lot of the complaining.

Like I switched off from Facebook aboutna years after discovering it when it increasingly became "look at my new business venture...friends". LinkedIn is at least just upfront about it and I can ignore the feed entirely (use it for job listings only).

Ah. My addresses are @gmail.com.

Perhaps the fact you paid got you marked as a likely gull :)

Maybe not equal but when I launch Gmail the page says "Google Workspace" and I get Gmail, Docs etc. as per https://workspace.google.com/intl/en_uk/resources/what-is-wo... .

Keep in mine I said "if well done". That was not meant to imply that I think the current AI offerings are well done. I'd take "well done" to mean that it performs the tasks it is meant for as well as human assistants perform those tasks.

> I never, now or in the future, want to use AI to generate or alter communication or expression primarily between me and other humans. [...] I do not want emails or articles summarised, I do not emails or documents written for me, I do not want my photos altered yassified.

That's fine, but generally the tools involved in doing those things are designed to be general purpose.

A word processor isn't just going to be used by people writing personal things for example. It will also be used by people writing documentation and reports for work. Without AI it is common for those people to ask subordinates, if they are high enough in their organization to have them, to write sections of the report or to read source material and summarize it for them.

An AI tool, if good enough to do those tasks, would be useful to those users, and so it makes sense for such tools to be added by the word processor developer.

Again, I'm not saying that the AI tools currently being added to basically everything are good enough.

The point is that

(1) a large variety of tools and products have enough users that would find built-in AI useful (even if some users won't) that it makes a lot of sense for them to include those tools (when they become good enough), and

(2) AI may be unique compared to prior advances/fads in how wide a range of things this applies to and the speed it has reached a point that companies think it has become good enough (again, not saying they have made the right judgement about whether it is good enough).

How about machine translation and fixing grammar in languages you're not very familiar with? That's the only use of "AI" I've found so far. I'd rather read (and write) broken English in informal contexts like this forum, but there are enough more formal situations.

>That's because they put their alerts in the gmail web interface :-/

I agree and that's what I meant by Google's "web apps" having promos about Gemini.

But in terms of accessing Gmail accounts via the IMAP protocol in Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail client, etc, there are no spam emails about Gemini AI. Google could easily pollute everybody's gmail inboxes with endless spam about Gemini such that all email clients with IMAP access would also see them but that doesn't seem to happen (yet). I do see 1 promo email about Youtube Premium over the last 5 years. But zero emails about Google's AI.

How is it transactional in any way? It looks to me like post-transaction upsell, pure and simple.

>This is not an issue in Europe, due to effective regulation.

This article's author complaining about Proton overriding his email preferences is from the UK. Also in this thread, more commenters from UK and Germany say companies routinely ignore the law and send unwanted spam. Companies will justify it as "oops it was a mistake", or "it's a different category and not marketing", etc.

Unrelated but interesting to think about terms like "queens English" now that the queen is gone. Will we be back to kings English some day? I suppose the monarchy might stay too irrelevant to bother changing phrases.