🧩 A math puzzle. 🚗 A solar car. 🌪️ Natural-disaster insurance. ⚡ Electricity oversupply in Kyushu.

These were four very different questions put to ClimateGPT 4.3, a specialized climate model, during a recent Internet Archive tour. The results were a mix of useful answers, wrong turns & outright refusals.

📖 Learn more about the experiment ➡️ https://erasmus.ai/?p=875

@internetarchive read the fucking room

@internetarchive like seriously, what am I supposed to feel here, IA?

you exposed a bunch of kids to a technology that leads to cognitive surrender

it gave them a bunch of fucking useless answers

training it fucked over a bunch of poor people and had a severe environmental cost

the fuck am I supposed to be feeling?

@internetarchive oh how cool you lazily fed a bunch of climate data someone else came up with to llama, a non-open “open weight” model whose training, again, fucked over a bunch of poor people and did a bunch of environmental damage. and the results from doing this were really fucking bad.

and just this in, of course it’s also a fucking cryptocurrency scam: https://www.eci.io/about what in the fuck is wrong with you

@internetarchive

Delete this.

And stop promoting the use of automated plagiarism machines that have ruinous environmental impacts.

@internetarchive the fucking what

@internetarchive

You're taking the piss surely?

@pikesley @internetarchive I hope GPT stands for Gustavo, perhaps Troy; some guys in some room somewhere who know a lot about climate but are also prone to telling lies.

@internetarchive This reduces my trust in the Internet Archive and makes me stop donating.

@zzt @internetarchive Why don't they ask a shipping company, an oil company, and a concrete manufacturer to join them in their quest to fix global warming? Maybe Turkmenistan could contribute.

If only there were people, maybe ones attached to the UN, who knew how to stop our atmosphere heating up, perhaps we could have asked them instead?

@jonpsp @internetarchive we asked SecondHandSmokeGPT, funded by Marlboro, about lung cancer. the results were a mix of useful answers, wrong turns & outright refusals.

@internetarchive Hopping into bed with a technology pushed by the people who have spent the past two decades making the internet near impossible to archive, first through the Web3 push to paywall off the commons, then the abusive scraping that killed many small sites and caused others to hide their content behind defensive walls.

Then there's the goddamned gall to promote a CLIMATE themed LLM as the infrastructure needed to train and maintain these things adds multiple small Western nations worth of usage to an already strained planet. Chunks of the world were literally on fire this year, did that just pass you by?

@internetarchive This goes directly against the Internet Archive's mission of facilitating preservation of media & knowledge for the future. There is no point in doing so if you also promote the use of a technology which damages people's ability to learn.

Also, a LLM is the wrong "tool" for the job of climate & long term weather analysis. Not even close. When you want something like this you should always ask a professional, in this case a climatologist.

Does anyone know another general media archival project I can share things with that might use that data more responsibly than Internet Archive is very clearly about to? I don't feel comfortable sharing media with an archive that has embraced such a destructive technology.

@internetarchive how about no?

@zzt @internetarchive FFS when are we going to get NAMES?

Who are the SPECIFIC PEOPLE in IA, EFF, etc. telling the people working for them to do fashy shit?

And why are the fucking cowards going along with it rather than whistleblowing all the shit from their bosses?

@internetarchive

How about you don't promote this planet-heating bullshit-excreting garbage and focus on being an Internet Archive instead?

@dalias IA’s founder has some, ah, interesting prior history with cryptocurrencies

@teun @internetarchive I'm not "all LLMs are evil" camp, but seriously "Using AI, blockchain, ... to protect the planet." raises some serious red flags.

@Rycochet @internetarchive It's like the leaders of these orgs are determined to demonstrate their power by showing they can openly spite our interests. 🤬

@dalias @zzt they’re Libertarians, they love fashy shit without anyone telling them

@iain @zzt The leadership may be, but I don't think everyone working there is.

@Rycochet @internetarchive "The public who supports our cause universally hates my precious AI, and I am going to show them I am big powerful man by gloating about how we've spent their money running propaganda for the AI industry"

🤡 🤡 🤡

@dalias @zzt @internetarchive Brewster Kahle tried to start a credit union that got smacked down by the SEC when they tried investing their members' money in Bitcoin

@teun @internetarchive And there are some rather dark patterns on those webpages, too.

@internetarchive good lord. we already have the answer to all the climate questions (quit burning fossil fuel) and it does not involve asking a fucking genAI

@internetarchive what is wrong with everyone today holy fuck

@internetarchive hey @brewsterkahle what the hell

@internetarchive goddamnit.
No matter what you train an LLM on, it is a text extruder. It fundamentally cannot be a climate model. Arrrrgh

@internetarchive You could stop with this shit any time now

@internetarchive please stop this

@amoroso @internetarchive no kidding. "oh look what the LLM trash generator spewed up" is a dishonorable category of non-informative tech news that's very disheartening coming from the Internet Archive

@internetarchive hey, uh, what the fuck

ClimateGPT is an oxymoron, and exposing children to an LLM is unethical as fuck

@internetarchive this sucks. im not donating to this

@internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org you really expect us to believe a chat bot will provide answers or solutions to climate change? No. It is a problem caused solely by the wealthy elite who only believe in an Earth worth exploiting. The only solution is to name and shame those elite. Anything else is playing into the lie that everyday people can somehow reverse this pattern of exploitation.

@internetarchive just want to pile on and say that this pile-on is far kinder than it could deservedly be. Thanks for the valuable work you do, now please put down the *fascist* poop dispensing machine and go wash your hands.

@internetarchive

Monthly giving circle donation canceled. Thanks.

@internetarchive I'm stopping my donations. Fuck this.

@internetarchive ah yes. let's have one of the only bastions of accurate archiving of the digital world start spewing out bullshit at random.

who asked for this? why would anyone think wasting energy on 'climateGPT' would be a good move?

ok it's an experiment a trial a proof of concept. did anyone stop to ask if it was worth trying? if the concept had any merit to prove? because it's not and it doesnt.

keep the llm shit as far away from your operations as possible. please. so there's some chance of maintaining an accurate record of this period in history. which is supposed to be your whole thing.

@internetarchive First I thought I would write some sort of response along the lines of "WTF are you doing?", but I'm actually just too tired.

You are all grown-ups and you are literally working in a place that stores the world's knowledge. If you can't see why you, of all people, feeding knowledge into OpenAI's word blender and expecting new insights to appear is an useless exercise, then nothing I say can help you.

@internetarchive dudes, generative ai is CRINGE

Do not worry about those kids, they already wrote paper about LMs. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=UNUrWUYAAAAJ&hl=en

CC: @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org

@zzt @jonpsp @internetarchive We need a movie named Thank You For Prompting

The best time to delete this post is before I cancel my eight-year-running monthly donation to the Internet Archive, which leaves you about 10 minutes or so.

@swiftyshq @internetarchive
@zzt

@internetarchive

@swiftyshq
@zzt

@internetarchive Everyone, I brought more popcorn, who ran out already?

#neverslop

CC: @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org

@internetarchive Did you even read the blog you 247 commenters? Or you did not understood it well or you've decided the cure for AI scraping is to delete the historical record.
You're not "protecting your content from AI." You're erasing history..
Blocking ia_archiverbot doesn't stop AI companies. They'll find other sources. But the public record? Gone.
You're collateral damage to your own cause. The Internet Archive isn't an AI company. It's a nonprofit that's preserved the web for ~30 years. You're not fighting AI. You're fighting a library.
~40% of websites vanish after 10 years. Without the Archive, your "content" won't be protected from AI > > > it'll just be gone.

@internetarchive To point out the idiocy of the masses..

@internetarchive wow this is so disappointing, I really expected better from yous...

@internetarchive LLMs?!?! Seriously?

This is disgusting - these chatbots cause AI psychosis in their users, are built on the misuse of people's work against their wishes, and are horrendously computationally inefficient, meaning they are awful for the climate and water usage

Cancelling my monthly donation - I'm not sending money towards LLMs

@internetarchive this post still exists after hours of pile on, why?

This is green washing shit and you know it.

@klausi @internetarchive No, no. Keep it up. The hall of shame needs exhibits.

@internetarchive

Please give the AI bollocks a rest. Seriously.

Read the room. The world does not need this and you definitely don't want to be seen as AI shills.

Stop. Now. Before you tank your hard won reputation.

@tsturm @internetarchive

Agreed. The more I read about LLM, the more it seems like turbocharged computerized Mad Libs.

@nyrath @internetarchive What frustrates me is not that people are excited about a machine that talks like a person. I get that. We all saw Star Wars. Cool.

What really kills me is that people expect these LLMs to produce INSIGHTS. Like, somehow by randomly combining all the texts in the world we get new ideas.

That's not how ideas work. That is not how thinking works.

@internetarchive thanks for being here and sharing these stories.

@internetarchive and thanks for bringing attention to the use of AI in climate change mitigation. As someone who worked in climate data for four years, I can say that LLMs provide a lot of help in identifying and comparing projects for reducing emissions and adapting to a changing world. ClimateGPT looks like a great project to share.