Casual Conversation
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES (updated 01/22/25)
- Be respectful: no harassment, hate speech, bigotry, and/or trolling. To be concise, disrespect is defined by escalation.
- Encourage conversation in your OP. This means including heavily implicative subject matter when you can and also engaging in your thread when possible. You won't be punished for trying.
- Avoid controversial topics (politics or societal debates come to mind, though we are not saying not to talk about anything that resembles these). There's a guide in the protocol book offered as a mod model that can be used for that; it's vague until you realize it was made for things like the rule in question. At least four purple answers must apply to a "controversial" message for it to be allowed.
- Keep it clean and SFW: No illegal content or anything gross and inappropriate. A rule of thumb is if a recording of a conversation put on another platform would get someone a COPPA violation response, that exact exchange should be avoided when possible.
- No solicitation such as ads, promotional content, spam, surveys etc. The chart redirected to above applies to spam material as well, which is one of the reasons its wording is vague, as it applies to a few things. Again, a "spammy" message must be applicable to four purple answers before it's allowed.
- Respect privacy as well as truth: Don’t ask for or share any personal information or slander anyone. A rule of thumb is if something is enough info to go by that it "would be a copyright violation if the info was art" as another group put it, or that it alone can be used to narrow someone down to 150 physical humans (Dunbar's Number) or less, it's considered an excess breach of privacy. Slander is defined by intentional utilitarian misguidance at the expense (positive or negative) of a sentient entity. This often links back to or mixes with rule one, which implies, for example, that even something that is true can still amount to what slander is trying to achieve, and that will be looked down upon.
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I feel like people don't discuss it much, because it would mostly amount to "Capitalism, amiright?". It's not surprising that companies have no consideration for their actions, other than how it affects shareholder value.
I'm certainly not fond of artistic careers not being viable anymore, especially since LLMs hardly create new jobs to catch these people.
Also really not a fan of all the spam that killed internet search, nor the climate impact. For a moment, I felt like we had the IT industry back on track, after cryptomining folded. Nope, here's a way to burn tons of energy for you to generate some text or image that is unlikely to contribute much to anything.
At the same time, of course, there's some opportunities there. Mozilla is generating alt texts for images, so that visually impaired folks have a description to go off of. Like, that feels worth it.
If we switch to 100% regenerative energy and solve the unemployment problems (which I'm not holding my breath for), then I would also be onboard with having some fun with it. Then we can build videogames and have tons of texts in there, which get voiced by some AI.
Like, that's definitely where feeling comes in. If the ethics of it are garbage, then I cannot get excited about dicking aroubd with it. I know many people ignore the ethics, but that is just weird to me.
Personally I am hopeful about it. For a long time technology has been a factor in a bigger slow motion collapse of the economy being viable to sustain the lives of regular people, and the recent breakthroughs in machine learning do contribute to that collapse. But it's not totally monopolized, local models are becoming viable and a lot of the work is open sourced, so the power of this stuff goes to anyone who wants it and has an idea of what they would want to do with it. Massive change is inevitable, the question is just what direction it goes in.