AI Generated Spam

Just got our first AI spammer, on this thread:

I deleted the account, but I wanted to post this to raise awareness. Look at the quality of the post. It’s well written, sounds like a real person, with intelligent remarks - until the last two sentences give it away. Why would you tell someone to check out online forums, when you’re already on one?

We’ll want to be extra vigilant with new posters for awhile.

Quick lesson in AI content. Notice the first section, is a reaction (that’s really interesting), summarizing the input (you are building a boat, etc). The next section picks out interesting bits from the input, like the 150 HP, engine not running all the time. Then it makes a couple recommendations, very bland (use a 350 Chevy, make space for the woodgas system, and for fuel) and refers you to next steps, in this case go read online forums.

This formula is present in the majority of AI responses. Learn to recognize it, because you’ll probably see a lot more of it around the internet. Let’s keep it out of DOW.

Again, what to look for:

  1. A reactionary intro
  2. Summarizing the input
  3. Picking out interesting bits for comment
  4. Making recommendations
  5. Next steps / disclaimers (defer to the experts).

There is a flag icon next to every post, if you see one of these postings, please flag it. I will confirm and deal with them if it’s an AI post.

I’m also updating the rules, to specifically ban AI generated content posts. The exception will be if it is clearly marked as AI generated, such as “Look what ChatGPT wrote today”. Trying to pass it off as a human will not be tolerated. We are here for real human interaction, to learn and share. AI has no place in that.

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I warned people stop addopting this technology. It will start all good and great but people will be people adn people do bad things

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Terms of Service have been updated.

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One thing I really dislike about AI is when it doesn’t have enough information to sample from it fills in the blanks with made up junk. Advice from an AI could get people hurt.

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Oh you guys havnt seen anything yet. Its close to AGI and once past this pandoras box will be openned; it will start the learning at a much fast rate. It can already write code; Ive used it and it can do it better than most.

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Yeah, that is why I call AI = politician… it tells you what you want to hear.

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That is one thing we might consider, re-writing code in assembler language with AI… seems one could really fine tune the code with that.

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It has been a very long time since I hand assembled machine code for an 8-bit processor. I’m not sure my semi-fossilized brain could still do that sort of thing. But I do remember the satisfaction of knowing what that code was doing, and how it was doing it. At some point, when you’ve made enough mistakes, you begin to see where and how to improve your code. I wonder if you can really do that effectively by asking AI systems to “make it better (or faster).” If you know the details, maybe you could do it. And maybe AI can go find workable code to “borrow” more quickly than a human, I don’t know. It gives the illusion of saving time, and time is money, but as a wise gentleman once said, “What are you saving it for?” More time to stare at your phone, going where Google or YouTube leads you, may not be all that good for us. I should go outside and work on the garden :slightly_smiling_face:.

Pardon the rant. It irritates me when our car tells me to pull over and rest whenever a passing lane ends, and the thought of that happening in other areas of life isn’t particularly cheerful. Maybe they aren’t related.

Edit: In a flash of irony, the “system” edited this post for me. I had quoted Mart’s short post at the beginning of mine, and the system didn’t seem to appreciate the waste of memory and bandwidth, so it deleted it. At least it was thoughtful enough to let me know what it did. It’s probably right, but it does illustrate my point :slightly_smiling_face: :slightly_frowning_face:.

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Actually a couple of the compilers today generate more optimized and better performing assembly then they did 10 years ago. There is a lot less need for optimization. Some of the ‘tricks’ you used to do in C to generate faster code, over more verbose methods to do the same thing, end up getting optimized to the same assembly now.

Never hurts to know how to use assembly though. :slight_smile:

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That was a good catch. I didn’t think about it being AI generated. It seemed off so I didn’t bother to go back and re-read it to see if there was something I could add to help.

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I have started to see the need to optimize code for multiple cores…

I found this video interesting in comparing different code and the speed it executed…

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That is a huge problem. The Go language was designed to help make it easier to split tasks for multiple cores. It has built-in concurrency and a semi-sorta c-like syntax.

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Yeah, I figured there was a way to use all of those cores, it is hard to change your thinking once you have been doing it for so long…

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The pandoras box is already open. This video popped up about China, and as a segment about how much they spy on people with their surveillance system to calculate your ‘social score’. It is pretty freaky.

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It can be. You should try Go. There are a few free introductory videos on it.

Instead of using threads and forks and locks and all that crap, it is more or less built-in, and it has garbage collection. You are less likely to fall into traps.

Like python, never intended to added threading, it was intended to replace basic as a starter language, but people never jumped from the starter language. because OMG python is easy, and everyone should use it, rather then realize some of the very basics faults of the language that makes people struggle are by design to get into good programming habits before they jump to another language. If python is easy, and they struggled with parts of it, then other languages will be much harder so they don’t switch.

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I started with Basic, then moved to pascal, dabbled a little into C ++ hit my head against a wall trying to learn assembly language but back then on a farm there was no one to ask how to program it or what the registers ment… I gave up back then…

But now I am just looking at the bigger picture, and I am starting to see AI may take out the pain of programming. and introduce far more bigger problems :slight_smile:

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I was looking at a scene in China where people were lined up by a generator where power had gone out… You can’t buy anything there without your phone… so the phones had to be charged… Not a place i would want to be.

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Everyone hits their head against a wall trying to learn assembly, and assembly varies between architectures. I don’t think it is a bad thing to know. but you can look at the assembly generated from C/C++ quite easily. At this point, I would probably pick ARM if I was going to learn an assembly language. But this describes how to do it with Gcc.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/137038/how-do-you-get-assembler-output-from-c-c-source-in-gcc

Editing the assembler is possible, but there is nothing left to catch memory leaks. :slight_smile:

I wouldn’t want to be in China either. Of course I am interested to see what happens in China if the tariffs stay in place. I have heard discussions about Xi stepping down because of ‘health’ reasons. I don’t know how true those are, but with everyone monitored so closely, you don’t really know what the impact of the tariffs currently is as regards to the stability of the country.

There was another video that was showing how China is exporting to malaysia and indonesia, then having it repackaged to say made in those countries to bypass tariffs. One of the two just cracked down on how they get the ‘origin approval’ stamps. They centralized it to get rid of the bribery of the local officials. But according to the video which may or may not be true, they were able to run ads to advertise their businesses that took care of all those details.

it will be interesting to see what happens this weekend. But honestly, I don’t think China can go very long without a trade deal without facing severe civil unrest, but everything is monitored by AI now, so we won’t even know what the tensions are.

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Thats pretty funny lol bout how I feel :slight_smile:

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