411–420 of 631 posts
In case anyone is interested in a tiny bit of sabotage, I am under the impression I managed to 'drown' true information on my microblog by generating contradicting posts with LLaMa (tens of them for each real post) and invisibly linking them, so a human would not click through. You know, flood the zone with s***, Bannon-style ...
Open source licenses are no longer strong enough. The copyright laundering use case was not been anticipated when the licenses were written. All licenses need a clause like the following: This software is for humans. AI training is prohibited and carries a default penalty of $1 trillion.
Huh? FOSS licenses work exactly like designed! I'm literally using MIT because I don't give a fuck what people do with the code I publish, limiting it to "humans" or restricting the usage makes it very not FOSS. Sure, if you want to try to prevent AI training by licensing, do that, but it's no longer FOSS, so please don't call it that.
MIT license requires this:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Do the AI companies follow this requirement?
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> ... but for stuff which people put up thinking it is just going to be publicly visible ... I don't think these business owners really understand. Most normies just think everyone has a Facebook/Instagram account and can't even imagine a world where that is not the case. I agree with you that it is extremely frustrating.
>Most normies just think everyone has a Facebook/Instagram account and can't even imagine a world where that is not the case. The people without a basic internet presence aren't likely to be customers anyway so it's not a huge loss. It's trivial to setup a basic account for any site that doesn't contain any personal data you want to keep hidden, if you aren't willing to do that, you're in a tiny minority.
It's equally trivial for a restaurant to set up a custom domain with their own 2-page website (overview and menu) on any of a hundred platforms that provide this service.
Most of these services are not free like FB, but any business that can afford a landline phone can afford a real website.
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Huh? FOSS licenses work exactly like designed! I'm literally using MIT because I don't give a fuck what people do with the code I publish, limiting it to "humans" or restricting the usage makes it very not FOSS. Sure, if you want to try to prevent AI training by licensing, do that, but it's no longer FOSS, so please don't call it that.
> I'm literally using MIT because I don't give a fuck what people do with the code I publish MIT license requires this: > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Do the AI companies follow this requirement?
I haven't seen any LLMs being able to reproduce full copies or even "substantial portions" of any existing software, unless we're talking "famous" functions like those from Quake and such.
You have any examples of that happening? I might have missed it
The days of an open web are long gone. Every server will eventually have to require authentication for access, and to get an account you will have to provide some form of payment or social proof. Honestly, I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing.
If that was piggy-backed on ActivityPub, Matrix, Solid, or something else decentralised, and if I could say "this bot is acting as my agent, if it misbehaves then I personally get blocked" then there could be something in this. I don't see how to get around artificial identity farms though. That's also not something that payment or social proof fixes. If payment isn't trivial then you exclude genuine people; if it's…
I mean, at Communick I offer Matrix, Mastodon, Funkwhale and Lemmy accounts only for paying customers. As such, I have implemented payments via Stripe for convenience, but that didn't stop from getting customers who wanted to pay directly via crypto, SEPA and even cash. It also didn't stop me from bypassing the whole system and giving my friends and family an account directly.
Back when search engines caused this, the industry made an agreement and designed the robots.txt spec in order to avoid legal frameworks being made to stop them. Because of that, legal frameworks weren't being made. Now there's a new generation of hungry hungry hippo indexers that didn't agree to that and who feel intense pressure from competition to scoop up as much data as they can, who just ignore it. Legislation…
I’m not sure that I like this plan. We shouldn’t let the illegal AIs gain more knowledge and usefulness than the legal ones. There’s other options besides a blanket ban.
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> all Gnome developers should pay a small sum to be able to access it? There's access via (e.g.) the git protocol (git://....) and access via http. These attacks all happen via the latter, since the former is already access-controlled.
Offering read-only mirrors via git+ http:// might be a solution then, at least to shed the load if anything. It does remind me a bit about companies complaining about being scraped and trying to prevent it, instead of offering a API so no one would have to scrape them.
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Yep. And it is much more far reaching than that. Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. The entire vision is to remake the entire world into one where the owners of these companies own everything and are completely unconstrained. All intellectual property belongs to them. All labor belongs to them. Why would they need good will…
I have this line of thought as well but then I wonder, if we are all out of jobs and out of substantial capital to spend, how do these owners make money ultimately? It's a genuine question and I'm probably missing something obvious. I can see a benevolant/post-scarcity spin to this but the non-benevolant one seems self defeating.
This economic relationship can be collectively[1] described as "feudalism". This is a system in which:
- The vast majority of people are obligated to perform menial labor, i.e. peasant farmers.
- Class mobility is forbidden by law and ownership predominantly stays within families.
- The vast majority of wealth in the economy is in the form of rents paid to owners.
We often use the word "capitalist" to describe all businesses, but that's a modern simplification. Businesses can absolutely engage in feudalist economies just as well, or better, than they can engage in capitalist ones. The key difference is that, under capitalism, businesses have to provide goods or services that people are willing to pay for. Feudalism makes no such demand; your business is just renting out a thing you own.
Assuming AI does what it says on the tin (which isn't at all obvious), the endgame of AI automation is an economy of roughly fifty elite oligarchs who own the software to make the robots that do all work. They will be in a constant state of cold war, having to pay their competitors for access to the work they need done, with periodic wars (kinetic, cyber, legal, whatever) being fought whenever a company intrudes upon another's labor-enclave.
The question of "well, who pays for the robots" misunderstands what money is ultimately for. Money is a token that tracks tax payments for coercive states. It is minted specifically to fund wars of conquest; you pay your soldiers in tax tokens so the people they conquer will have to barter for money to pay the tax collector with[2]. But this logic assumes your soldiers are engaging in a voluntary exchange. If your 'soldiers' are killer robots that won't say no and only demand payment in energy and ammunition, then you don't need money. You just need to seize critical energy and mineral reserves that can be harvested to make more robots.
So far, AI companies have been talking of first-order effects like mass unemployment and hand-waving about UBI to fix it. On a surface level, UBI sounds a lot like the law necessary to make all this AI nonsense palatable. Sam Altman even paid to have a study done on UBI, and the results were... not great. Everyone who got money saw real declines in their net worth. Capital-c Conservative types will get a big stiffy from the finding that UBI did lead people to work less, but that's only part of the story. UBI as promoted by AI companies is bribing the peasants. In the world where the AI companies win, what is the economic or political restraining bolt stopping the AI companies from just dialing the UBI back and keeping more of the resources for themselves once traditional employment is scaled back? Like, at that point, they already own all the resources and the means of production. What makes them share?
[0] Depending on your definition of institutional continuity - i.e. whether or not Istanbul is still Constantinople - you could argue the Roman Empire survived until WWI.
[1] Insamuch as the complicated and ideosyncratic economic relationships of medieval Europe could even be summed up in one word.
[2] Ransomware vendors accidentally did this, establishing Bitcoin (and a few other cryptos) as money by demanding it as payment for a data ransom.
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Does the PoW make money via crypto mining? Or is it just to waste the caller's CPU cycles? If you could monetize the PoW then you could re-challenge at an interval tuned so that the caller pays for their usage.
It's to waste CPU cycles. I don't want to touch cryptocurrency with a 20 foot pole. I realize I'm leaving money on the table by doing this, but I don't want to alienate the kinds of communities I want to protect.
Say a hash challenge gets widely adopted, and scraping becomes more costly, maybe even requires GPUs. This is great, you can declare victory.
But what if after a while the scraping companies, with more resources than real users, are better able to solve the hash?
Crypto appeals here because you could make the scrapers cover the cost of serving their page.
Ofc if you’re leery of crypto you could try to find something else for bots to do. xkcd 810 for example. Or folding at home or something. But something to make the bot traffic productive, because if it’s just a hardware capability check maybe the scrapers get better hardware than the real users. Or not, no clue idk
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. And it is much more far reaching than that. Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. The entire vision is to remake the entire world into one where the owners of these companies own everything and are completely unconstrained. All intellectual property belongs to them. All labor belongs to them. Why would they need good will…
I have this line of thought as well but then I wonder, if we are all out of jobs and out of substantial capital to spend, how do these owners make money ultimately? It's a genuine question and I'm probably missing something obvious. I can see a benevolant/post-scarcity spin to this but the non-benevolant one seems self defeating.
Building things IS a contribution to society, but the people who build things typically aren't the ultimate owners. And even in cases where the builders and owners are the same, entitling the builders and all of their future heirs to rent seek for the rest of eternity is an inordinate reward.