Somebody objects and "the community" few if that many acts.
In the meantime, we can't object to being another AI training ground even when it's clearly being called out, it's "off topic" in the view of perhaps only one person but NOT the COMMUNITY in a large sense.
Let's see how long it takes to shut this thread down.
The suspicious looking accounts have absolutely nothing to do with training AI. The training AI companies obtain from Arduino Forum is achieved through passive scraping.
For the most part, malicious use of AI on Arduino Forum is done by spammers who are trying to create legitimate looking posts that have the sole purpose of hiding a spam link. There is absolutely no training involved in this activity. The spammers only use AI as a tool for efficiently creating plausible looking posts. Spammers are not affiliated with AI companies, with the exception that occasionally the product they happen to have been paid to advertise happens to be AI-related.
Another possible source of AI activity here is "agents". Some morons set up systems that allow AI agents to create accounts on websites and use those accounts to facilitate achieving some task assigned by the human. As with the spammers, this has absolutely nothing to do with training. The person managing the agent doesn't have any involvement with the AI companies who train models. I only recall seeing one instance of that here, so it is unlikely that such a system is the source of a given AI-looking post you might find.
I am very much aware of the increasing problem of malicious use of AI on our forum. I have been doing a lot of work to develop systems to allow the moderation team to more effectively address this challenge.
If you see activity you believe is harmful, the appropriate action is to flag the post. That will bring the matter to the attention of the moderation team.
The moderators care deeply about Arduino Forum. The moderation team works 24/7 to keep this place safe and clean. We are careful to avoid unjustly banning legitimate new users from our forum. New legitimate users are important to the health of our forum. In cases where we don't have sufficient evidence to conclusively determine malicious intent of a suspicious looking, we carefully monitor the activity of the suspect until we see something that warrants action.
Making off topic replies when you suspect an account participating in a discussion of being malicious only amplifies whatever harm their posts might have caused. And it wastes the time of the moderators who have plenty enough work already. When you want to discuss something off-topic, you must create your own topic for that discussion, as you have done here.
Give me a break. You've been here for 15 years. You should know very well that it is not our culture to "shut down" topics like this.
And getting replies they can use.
Of course it's not malicious to feed people a mix of info and drivel, has no effect at all until you're trying to straighten someone out or are that lost soul but don't say malicious when STUPID covers it.
Everything feed to or eaten by AI is training for the AI.
I'll say it again: The entities who make AI-generated posts on Arduino Forum do not do so for purposes of training AI, and have absolutely no involvement in training AI models.
"STUPID" is not the appropriate term for the activity I am referring to as "malicious". Spammers don't do what they do out of stupidity. They do it because they want to make money and don't have scruples regarding whether the way they make that money causes harm.
I did refer to the people who allow their AI agents to run free on platforms designed for humans as "morons", but that was more to express my distain for them rather than an assessment of their intelligence. I do think that some of those people do it out of stupidity, not being smart enough to evaluate whether the actions of their agent might cause harm. However, I'm certain that others are capable of understanding the harm, but are simply too selfish to care.
That is not relevant to the subject of the topic you created.
Yes, we get some bland, almost certainly AI generated posts and topics most likely intended for spam later. We also get some bland, probably not AI generated posts and topics from people who probably don't have very good English and probably don't know how to behave in a place like this. Some of the latter are genuinely looking for help. Not many, but some. Sometimes not easy to distinguish the AI spam posts from the ones made by genuine people from a world very different to the ones we know. In which case we have to make a judgement about keeping or deleting the posts. I know I get it wrong sometimes, but I just do the best I can with the information I have at the time. I suggest you do the same. Reply if you want to. Don't reply just watch what others do if you prefer. If you think it's spam then flag it. My judgement might be different to yours and different to another moderator. None of us is perfect.
What broke my cool was "the community feels" part that I know damned well is a few people at most catering to as few or fewer.
I 'feel' that hand calculators have resulted in fewer people with a decent grasp of mathematics too just as the boob tube has hurt average intelligence as was feared since before I was born. BTW, I hit 70 yesterday.
Congratulation!
Happy Birthday I hope.
When I hit a certain age, I switched to Celsius.
You be only 21! And aging slower.
a7
In a 25mph zone?
Calculator?
I never had the luxury of a calculator until I left school. Slide rule all the way.
No danger of AI then.
Struggling with a slide rule didn't do much for my maths and as far as I remember, the workings of it were never explained, like a lot of things. Put me off maths for years.
Many years later, I enjoy working with numbers. Often, when it's too late, you learn how to learn.
Well, if that's a measure of your golfing prowess, that's pretty impressive. However, if it's the number of senior citizens you ran over, not so much. So please, units of measure.
That's a shame. It adds logarithms. If you understand logs a slide rule is simple. If you understand a slide rule logs are simple.
Huh. We were taught how to use a slide rule, which included "how it works." That was essentially "just before" calculators became widely available, so we never ended up actually USING the slide rule for any classwork.
As time went on, I've become rather dumbfounded at the sort of accuracy that people put up with in those olden days. What: one or two digits from a side rule? Four or five digits in those Trig Tables in the back of the book? No wonder NASA had to hire "calculators" to do higher precision math.
(huh. Also an interesting example of the sort of "tools prevent familiarity with the basics" problem: Engineers and Scientists were taught to use a slide rule, and were "comfortable" with the resulting "approximate" answers, but were less able to do the full math. (or maybe, just too expensive to "waste" on the time it would take them to do the math on paper.)
(Also somewhat interesting in that Math Education (in the US, anyway) has taken steps away from rote accuracy, toward getting a more intuitive "close" answer.)
Born with eye defects, crap in both lenses, so I never got big with slide rules but they ARE fantastic and so is the math behind them, the power of 1/x!
But since 4th grade I did mental math and boy has it helped with text<==>value code work! The more simple you can make it, the faster it can run. You CAN process serial text as it arrives, Faster Than It Arrives which leaves cycles between arrived chars for other Short Step State Machines to get a step interleaved. It's like the translation isn't even there in that it doesn't slow or halt transmission to do its' thing when Buffer-Then-Process methods do.
Try making your own log table then.
Some of us in school got slide rules in 5th grade. It was 7 years of math classes later before some of us could make our own.
Simple seems a bit understated.
@GoForSmoke @westfw
Teaching in my secondary school was very much listen to what I say and keep quiet unless asked to speak.
The maths teacher in the final grades had a reputation for sterness that went before him. Swept in complete with black gown, class stand up. Many of the teachers had done national service to boot.
Couple that style of teaching with the lack of text books, learning anything was hard work. Corporal punishment was still in use.
Everything was different to teaching now.
Now, decades on, with the Internet as a resource I can start to get my head round things.
Of late, I make regular use of AI.
With time in short supply, it's a great help with spreadsheet work
When you are 16, 17, there's a lot going on.
No Logarithms for Dummies then.
I was lucky, Class of 75 had books and All Of The Stuff That King Reagan Took Away And NEVER GOT RETURNED.
I was lucky being in the top section that emphasized learning how to learn and critical thinking that The GOP Shut Down ASAP, handicapping public school students to inferiority of the Privo Babies.
if America is going to be about Freedom, Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness for US ALL, we have to throw off the Epstein Class of PARASITES.
i expect this to get flagged and a "community approaching Star Chamber size" declare this objectionable. What happens... meh.
The Epstein class.
It certainly caused some ripples in the UK. It starkly underlines the difference class, privilege and money makes for some, unfortunately in the wrong ways.
It has given some pleasure to see one member of the establishment brought to book and publicly disgraced, stripped of the plumage of pseudo high office.
Some of these people don't understand the meaning of hard anything.
I think what matters is to have some idea of the level of accuracy that is appropriate for the job in hand, and work to achieve that. No point having rainfall measured to 10 decimal places when you just want to know if there's going to be enough to keep your lawn green.
