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by halosghost 446 days ago
I am afraid your “human in the loop” isn't [0].

You acknowledge the problem of AI slop up-front, but seem to have chosen to plow forward anyway. Please do consider your actions and their effects carefully [1]. You are in a position of potential influence; try not to squander it.

All the best,

-HG

[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/

[1]: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/radical.pdf

3 comments

"plow forward" and implying they didn't consider their actions and their effects seem ungenerous, given the list of precautions in the comment you're replying to.

You can disagree on whether the measures are effective, of course, but they're clearly not thoughtless.

It was the equivalent of vibe coding:

> The polygons the algorithm had drawn were consistently of poor quality with stray nodes and nodes far outside the pool boundaries, and the imports hadn't been discussed with local communities.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43448498

That too seems an ungenerous characterisation, and the GP could not have deduced that from the OP. I'm glad the author is constructively incorporating criticism and working to turn this into a useful tool that OSM users will benefit from, because they wouldn't have been the first to get overly defensive after their work was interpreted in the worst light possible.
Tracing satellite data is really boring to do but easy to check. I would describe AI acting as a centaur here, or perhaps a pairing of equals.
I believe your critique would be more valuable if you've actually uncovered cases where the human in the loop missed these issues and bad or "wobbly" data ended up in the OSM database: did this happen? (the other comment from another person confirms it has)

Otherwise, you are discounting their effort based on a prejudice — others might be unable to supervise an AI, but someone who's actually developed it might have a better chance of success.

The screenshot in the article shows wobbly data. You may need to zoom in and look closely to notice.