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AI is not your friend

gerrymcgovern.com

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Re: AI is not your friend

#81

Post by pksebben »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #60
pksebben wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

easy to live just fine when you bought your house prior to 2008. Just sayin'.

Kind of tangential don’t you think

not really. There's a difference in how much one needs to keep up with tech trends, because there's a difference in how reliant one is in getting and maintaining a job.

Despite being paid fairly well, it's unlikely that I'll be able to retire early, given the housing market. A massive amount of every dollar I make is going to quickly ballooning rent and attempting to chase an ever-distant target of home ownership.

I cannot afford to "get by just fine". Nor, I imagine, can many of the people in my cohort. Thus, I regularly familiarize myself with whatever it is that's new that offers the possiblity of working less and accomplishing more, because that's about the only place I find I can purchase some down-time for myself. It's certainly not coming in the form of personal equity and retirement.

edit to add: I realize my earlier comment was flippant, and I'm sorry for that. The conversation is better served by engagement and I was being crass.

Re: AI is not your friend

#82

Post by kazinator »

I've not been advertised to by any AI so far.

I've not had a product or service promoted to me by a chat answer, nor have I seen any advertising elements in an AI-generated image. The chat experience has been a lot better than, say, Google search, in terms of spam.

The claim would have to be that those promotional elements are there, but are subliminal, so as not to be consciously perceived, which is a stretch.

To be sure, there are likely developments coming which will bear out the concerns in the article.

Also, a lot of AI out there is paid. You get some limited free service, but must sign up and pay for a premium experience. That's the model, not ad support. Some of the sites are additionally ad supported, but in the regular way in that ads appear in the UI (easily blocked by a browser extension).

Re: AI is not your friend

#83

Post by autoexec »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #80
autoexec wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now suppose that it's open source and runs on your own device. I agree that AI could be a massive asset to people and help improve our lives if it worked for us and our interests. Sadly that's not how things seem to work out. Every piece of technology on offer today seems to work for someone else. Our phones, our cars, our TVs, our computers, our appliances, even our medical devices. All of our tech works for other…

> Every piece of technology on offer today seems to work for someone else. You can buy a commodity PC and install Debian on it. Some people do. > Even as the hardware requirements to run AI locally go down, we'll never compete with companies like facebook, google, and microsoft in terms of the size of the datasets they have to train with. Most of these datasets are public. > Worse I think we're starting to see effort…

> You can buy a commodity PC and install Debian on it.

But your motherboard will still be full of chips that are closed and proprietary and some of them will have their own OS with network/wireless access that you'll have no control over. You'll just have to trust that the Intel Management Engine backdoor and radio chipsets you have no access to aren't taking advantage of you.

> Most of these datasets are public.

Most of everything Google has indexed and cached is "public". Libraries are filled with the same books Google has already scanned. Good luck using the entire internet and your local library to train your own personal AI though.

Microsoft has access to an incredible amount of non-public data including the emails of corporations using outlook and the files on people's hard drive. If they were to fully leverage their access to train AI you'd have a hard time keeping up. Facebook has every post and "private" message ever sent on the platform including ones that were deleted years ago. We can't expect a few publicly released datasets to compare to what they're capable of getting.

Even if we had that kind of access to raw data, could we realistically process it? https://fortune.com/2024/04/04/ai-training-costs-how-much-is...

> But the "AI is bad" rhetoric only feeds into that. What do you expect an "AI is bad" bill to look like? It will be the one that restricts access to only large institutions.

There are a lot of different versions of "AI is bad". One is "AI is bad when it's only controlled by corporations", but that's not what the laws will be about. They're more likely to say that "AI is bad" because of terrorists and spammers and pedos or whatever other boogeymen they can summon up to scare the ignorant and provide some justification for keeping that power out of the public's hands.

Re: AI is not your friend

#84

Post by rustcleaner »

Anti-surveillance will be a basis in this millennium's new techno- religious systems. Removing hokus pokus folk spirituality for a moment, the psyche is effectively equivalent to the 'soul' insofar as surveillance and advertising systems are designed to attack their targets at their most spiritual level. Money is highly religious: it is the balancer of your behaviors and relationship with the social whole and the ecosystem. I quote nothing from any text, this is from occult knowledge one gathers on one's path toward enlightenment; you are little different from fields of soy or oats when it comes to marketing (growing the crop) and value extraction (harvest the crop), in minds of these systems. It's rarely "How do we make existence more tolerable for more minds, and possibly help awaken their minds;" and more "How do we maximize yield this quarter to increase our bonuses?" You have to protect yourself and your loved ones, you have to start getting paranoid about data which can be gleaned from your behaviors.

Re: AI is not your friend

#85

Post by nickpsecurity »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #55
autoexec wrote: post #22

> Not to worry. If you’re fairly well educated, reasonably sensible, not prone to addictions, and in good mental health, you’re probably ok, for now. AI will learn to target you when you are at your most vulnerable. It will learn what hours you're usually feeling tired. Which nights you tend to get less sleep. It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsivel…

The premise here is that the AI is operating at the behest of someone else. Now suppose that it's open source and runs on your own device. "It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsively" and then avoid presenting you with purchasing decisions at those times etc. It will digest both ad-laden blogspam and human psych research papers so it can present the i…

Most open models of useful size will be trained on lots of free data scraped from the Internet. Whatever patterns repeat the most show up in AI’s behavior. That includes advertising, political indoctrination, and trendy topics. Many open models are also trained by advertising companies. Most then have moral alignment built into them that reflects their creator’s values, not usually ours.

So, I think what you said can help. It’s definitely not the whole solution, though, since the pre-training and fine-tuning often have similar problems. We’ll need people curating the datasets to remove these problems. The open-source components are just a start.

Re: AI is not your friend

#86

Post by nickpsecurity »

kazinator wrote: post #82

I've not been advertised to by any AI so far. I've not had a product or service promoted to me by a chat answer, nor have I seen any advertising elements in an AI-generated image. The chat experience has been a lot better than, say, Google search, in terms of spam. The claim would have to be that those promotional elements are there, but are subliminal, so as not to be consciously perceived, which is a stretch. To be…

I’ll note that Google itself originally started where it was mostly serving its users. Many social media sites were like that. The Xbox Home Screen used to be like that.

They captured a huge market, figured out how to integrate ads, and then forced them on their users. AI made or used by ad companies might follow a similar path. I think they’ll mostly try to show you ads outside the AI itself, though. Maybe on the page or in the app where you interact with the AI. Or it stays as bait for their ad-driven services.

Re: AI is not your friend

#87

Post by non-chalad »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #64
non-chalad wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is also tech.

Ye olde squares are rectangles logic might apply here. Free open source software is a thing. Proprietary is the product of capitalists, yes, but not all techies are capitalist as proven by releasing FOSS.

[flagged]

Re: AI is not your friend

#88

Post by treyd »

bitwize wrote: post #47
Animats wrote: post #30

Advertising is not your friend. Use ad blockers.

"Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots." Obtaining ad-supported service while blocking ads is theft of service. Do not expect such theft to go unpunished.

Is it theft of service to mute my TV and look away when I watch OTA television?

Re: AI is not your friend

#89

Post by ofcourseyoudo »

This piece is so incomprehensible and poorly-written it seems like it was generated by an AI (and not even a good one).

The BLUF is: AI might be selling your interactions to advertisers. Second point, not original, much belabored is that nothing is truly "free" on the internet.

Re: AI is not your friend

#90

Post by kazinator »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #86
kazinator wrote: post #82

I've not been advertised to by any AI so far. I've not had a product or service promoted to me by a chat answer, nor have I seen any advertising elements in an AI-generated image. The chat experience has been a lot better than, say, Google search, in terms of spam. The claim would have to be that those promotional elements are there, but are subliminal, so as not to be consciously perceived, which is a stretch. To be…

I’ll note that Google itself originally started where it was mostly serving its users. Many social media sites were like that. The Xbox Home Screen used to be like that. They captured a huge market, figured out how to integrate ads, and then forced them on their users. AI made or used by ad companies might follow a similar path. I think they’ll mostly try to show you ads outside the AI itself, though. Maybe on the pa…

It will be interesting to see how AI gets deliberately enshittified, and whether those strategies will work.

I have a feeling (and I hope I'm right) that people will not tolerate bullshit AI interactions as much as they tolerated crap web search results.

My reasoning is due to these differences.

- Under web searching, the Ad results (sponsored links) are delineated. You can filter those out or skip them, and you know there is real search content after that.

- In the reach search content, there is spam. But there is a rhetoric that at least used to be plausible that the spam is not the search engine's fault. The search engine indexing and ranking follow some algorithm that is not highly intelligent, and is being gamed by the SEO bad guys. Not only did people make that excuse, but they knew that if they sift through the long tail of the search result, they may be able to find what they are looking for; i.e. that it's there, just outranked.

I suspect, people won't be willing to apologetic excuses on behalf of AI. If it's bullshitting them, they will end the conversation and go to another AI.

Google built an advantage in the search space through massive infrastructure. In AI, it's possible to wield market power through hardware also. All else being equal, people will go for the free, highly available, fast AI, compared to slow, paid, downtime-riddled AI.

There will probably be a battle among AIs for integration into applications and services. That's where a particular AI will be able to get a stranglehold on the users: AI integrated into apps for which there are no easy substitutes, and where you can't choose another AI.

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