Lol, no. The "doomers" you're talking about oddly all seem to work at ai companies.
Fediverse vs Disinformation
Pointing out, debunking, and spreading awareness about state- and company-sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.
Propaganda and disinformation are a big problem on the internet, and the Fediverse is no exception.
What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The inadvertent spread of false information is misinformation. Disinformation is the intentional spread of falsehoods.
By equipping yourself with knowledge of current disinformation campaigns by state actors, corporations and their cheerleaders, you will be better able to identify, report and (hopefully) remove content matching known disinformation campaigns.
Community rules
Same as instance rules, plus:
- No disinformation
- Posts must be relevant to the topic of astroturfing, propaganda and/or disinformation
Related websites
- EU vs Disinfo
- FactCheck.org
- PolitiFact
- Snopes
- Media Bias / Fact Check
- PEN America
- Media Matters
- FAIR
Matrix chat links
A(G)I is not a thing. What's confusing is that reputedly LLMs actually are, though very niche, very specialized ones, and in situations where they just get through the grunt work faster but still produce output that is supervised by a human.
The people who hype that LLM progress as if it were signs of an upcoming AGI also seem the least trustworthy (specifically in the area in which they use it - e.g. non-programmers excited that they can finally do the things like programmers have always been able to do), laziest people, or the most greedy people online (who I don't know irl).
Case in point: that recent math prize where OpenAI simply stole the answer from the competing team (which tbh at least some of the blame for that falls onto that other team as well...) then beat them to the finish line by pouring in literally millions of dollars worth of compute time. That's not what most people (I suppose C-suites aside) consider to be truly "winning", and even if it were, it still is not evidence that these LLMs are nearing some kind of "singularity" point.
Otoh, some people that I actually respect say that they are getting some use out of the LLMs. These are the type who refuse to trust them and instead rigorously inspect every iota of output from them. At which point I wonder why they bother to use it but... I do believe that at least in some cases the technology can be useful. Not when shoved down people's throats, and also the ethics are still a concern (but that can be somewhat mitigated as well - by running local models, trained locally as well), but perhaps sometimes it's not always, 100% a hype?
But then there's the money aspects on top of it, which does seem >99.9999% hype. The easiest way to tell a lie is to include as much of the truth as possible - like how Reddit is a good source to find information. Reddit sucks as a social media platform these days, with seemingly (far?) more bots than humans, and all the outright disinformation tactics that come with that (occasionally hilariously exposed, e.g. using tools that expose someone's account that they went to some trouble to make private, thinking that nobody could access that data - not even going to the trouble of making alts since they counted on people not being able to see it, so then when it gets exposed... HAHAHA!), but OTOH, where else could someone go for reliable information? Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin are mostly unknown or at least vastly greater numbers of people adamantly refuse to come here than show up and post. So if something is not here, then where? Facebook/Meta/Threads? Instagram? Tiktok? YouTube? Reddit is 🤮 still kinda great, sometimes, in comparison!? 🤮😰🤢🥶
And similarly, LLMs (reportedly) do have their uses.