Turn off/Block AI features

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by un_pogaz

This leads to a paradox: the people best suited to use AI are those who are already competent in their field, and in this case, supervising AI is a waste of time and energy.

(source)

[un_pogaz]

@mitsie, you missing the point of the ennonced paradox:

Originally Posted by un_pogaz

This leads to a paradox: the people best suited to use AI are those who are already competent in their field, and in this case, supervising AI is a waste of time and energy.

Else, I don't want to go into a full debat of what you ennonced (don't have the energy, just say I disagree).
But on your last point: Yes, some jobs only require supervised monkey, but my biggest problem is that all this AI frenzy try to replace every jobs, except precisely the ones who could require supervised monkey.

And good catch @ownedbycats, their is alway a xkcd

[mitsie]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Try telling that to people Vibe Coding with Claude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHWFF_pnqDk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OWurmg41tI

You now think I want to automate that task and get AI to write the code for the software that automates the task.. That image example is for a Human automating a task by coding by hand.

[meghane_e]

Originally Posted by mitsie

...:

"Find me the top 10 Vampire books in my collection and load them onto my Kindle, provide summaries and artwork to the ebooks if they don't have them"

Watch on your computer as the AI firest up the Chrome Browser, searches "Top 10 Vampire Novels" makes a list, opens up Calibre itself, checks the metadata for all the Vampire books in your collection. Downloads metadata and book covers then cross references everything to make sure it's correct. Any books it can't find a summary for, it opens the ebook and reads the full thing and types out a summary for you.. Embeds the metadata in the ebooks, then fires the books to your Kindle device, all while using the UI exactly like a Human would...

This biggest flaw with this kind of expectation is the fact that AI is very poor at catching one-offs. If you have multiple copies of a book for particular reasons (compression, original format had errors, or didn't do well on a particular reading device, or the user merged several individual books into a set, etc). Automated intelligence is clunky, error prone and as kludgy (or more so) than humans.

My long-term concern is AI/LLM platforms having free-reign of authors content, stealing author's content and being asked to produce poor, kludgy reading material based on stolen content. That is my long-term problem with AI integration of any kind with book management systems such as Calibre.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by meghane_e

My long-term concern is AI/LLM platforms having free-reign of authors content, stealing author's content and being asked to produce poor, kludgy reading material based on stolen content. That is my long-term problem with AI integration of any kind with book management systems such as Calibre.

AI can't steal. It's not alive. The ones stealing are the people who manage it, and people steal all the time anyway and have always done so. Thousands of people pirate ebooks every day. Should we ban ebooks for this reason and stick with paper?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by meghane_e

My long-term concern is AI/LLM platforms having free-reign of authors content, stealing author's content and being asked to produce poor, kludgy reading material based on stolen content. That is my long-term problem with AI integration of any kind with book management systems such as Calibre.

Perhaps you failed to notice the use of bit torrent to download terabytes of books to feed to LLMs? It's a bit late to worry about your calibre library being exposed unless you have a few thousand original books that might be of interest.

[rowe]

The majority of AI prompts go through Google, and their legal situation is different to the rest of the AI industry. It is not clear-cut that Google is stealing anything, because a 2015 fair use ruling already gave them the legal right to hold and index the massive Google Books archive without needing explicit permission from the authors.

[Sirtel]

To me it seems really strange that all sorts of people are hopping onto the "AIs are thieves!" bandwagon and refusing to use calibre for this reason, but have happily been using deDRM plugins for many years - apparently without stopping to think that pirates are using these same deDRM plugins to upload ebooks to file-sharing sites without their authors' consent, i.e. stealing. They aren't refusing to use calibre for supporting such thieves' tools, moreover, they're using said tools themselves. And yet they're raising hue & cry over stealing AIs. A bit of a contradiction here, isn't it?

[ovillo]

I'm not inherently anti-AI, but there is a difference between a tool that allows for illegal uses (like Calibre allowing users to share copyrighted media) and a tool that is built upon illegal activities (like an LLM that uses copyrighted media as training data). So I see no hypocrisy in drawing a line between them.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ovillo

I'm not inherently anti-AI, but there is a difference between a tool that allows for illegal uses (like Calibre allowing users to share copyrighted media) and a tool that is built upon illegal activities (like an LLM that uses copyrighted media as training data). So I see no hypocrisy in drawing a line between them.

That's actually a good argument.

Personally I don't much care. LLMs are not the only invention we use that was built upon illegal activity. Some medical solutions, for example, were built upon the experimentation that Nazi Germany and the Japanese conducted on prisoners during WWII. Often very sadistic experimentation. And yet these solutions have saved many lives later.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

LLMs are not the only invention we use that was built upon illegal activity. Some medical solutions, for example, were built upon the experimentation that Nazi Germany and the Japanese conducted on prisoners during WWII. Often very sadistic experimentation. And yet these solutions have saved many lives later.

The ethics of using any data at all from unethical experiments is, as you must know, incredibly controversial in scientific and medical fields.

On the Nazi concentration camp data specifically, the bulk of it was not actually quality, useful research in the first place. There's a pretty decent & readable summary of that here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistoria...utions_to_the/

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by meeera

The ethics of using any data at all from unethical experiments is, as you must know, incredibly controversial in scientific and medical fields.

On the Nazi concentration camp data specifically, the bulk of it was not actually quality, useful research in the first place. There's a pretty decent & readable summary of that here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistoria...utions_to_the/

Yes, I know. I'm not saying that the end always justifies the means and we should knowingly do harmful things to others because the end result is more important than the harm done. But neither do I think we should always refuse to use something merely because it was built upon something illegal or harmful. That would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But then, I'm a pragmatist. More idealistic people obviously have different opinions.