M.C. Escher would appreciate this.

Yes, and while Charles Darrow, who became the first millionaire game inventor due to the game’s success, profited substantially from royalties, Lizzie Magie, the original creator of the game’s concept, sold her patent for just $500 and received no royalties.

I think the so-called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are a major problem of our time, because they are often defined incorrectly or misunderstood. All too often, decision-makers seem to think that the pure number of followers, for example, or engagement metrics such as likes would indicate that an account or post is successful. However, this is often not the case when other important metrics are taken into account. In e-commerce, for example, a large number of followers or high engagement figures in themselves mean nothing at all: it is not uncommon for e-commerce companies to invest a lot of money in social media management and for the KPIs of their accounts to rise accordingly - but still not sell anything via this channel (that means that the investment is not worth it, of course, because the costs are disproportionate to the sales generated; the ROI is often not good at all). I think a similar situation can be assumed for many science accounts on Mastodon, for example. Although the number of followers maybe not very high here because there are less active useres, the quality of comments can still be a lot higher. But unfortunately this cannot be quantified, or at least not easily. I therefore think that everyone should first think about what they want to achieve with their social media accounts. It then makes sense to define suitable KPIs instead of being impressed by what can be considered an indicator of success elsewhere and in a completely different context.

ChatGPT and basically any other powerful LLM is very likely trained on lots and lots of pirated data.

What about OpenAI?

Maybe the downvote counter maxed out and that’s the way it is displayed.

I’m sorry you’ve had a bad experience. Nevertheless, I think that a certain basic skepticism is important in social media, because it is simply a fact that many interest groups on the internet are fighting for sovereignty of interpretation and use enormous resources to assert themselves - even with very questionable methods. This of course makes it difficult to build trust and have an open discourse. The advantage of Lemmy, however, is that at least the platform itself does not interfere too much, like Meta, X or TikTok do. Therefore, it seems to me that there is a much higher probability that you will be heard with your opinion, message or whatever, if you can provide good arguments for your point of view. Sure, there are some viewpoints that users reject despite good arguments, but from my Lemmy experience so far, that seems to me to be the exception rather than the rule.

They even try to do this on Lemmy. I’ve seen a few accounts recently that were obviously created with the sole purpose of spreading right-wing propaganda.