This is going to end with me having to click another GDPR-style banner on every website, isn't it?
Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected
51–60 of 152 posts
Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected
#52Maybe people will finally realize that allowing companies to gather private information without permission is a bad idea, and should be banned. Such information is already used against everyone multiple times a day. On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! This tradeoff has basically nothing to do with recent advances…
> On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it!
There's a difference between reading something and ripping it off, no matter how you launder it.
Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected
#53Maybe people will finally realize that allowing companies to gather private information without permission is a bad idea, and should be banned. Such information is already used against everyone multiple times a day. On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! This tradeoff has basically nothing to do with recent advances…
> On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! There's a difference between reading something and ripping it off, no matter how you launder it.
I think the line is actually much blurrier than it might seem. Realistically everything is a remix of things people have done before; almost nothing is truly brand new. So why specifically are people allowed to build on humanity's past achievements, but not AI?
Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine the author would respond: "That's what I said" "Opting out of AI is no simple matter. AI powers essential systems such as healthcare, transport and finance. It also influences hiring decisions, rental applications, loans, credit scoring, social media feeds, government services and even what news or information we see when we search online."
Okay, then I guess they’ll agree to paying more for those services since they’ll cost more to deal with someone’s boutique Amistics.
It's not even about paying more. Think of email. Every time you send an email, there's an AI that scans it for spam.
How could there be a system that lets you opt out, but keep sending email? Obviously all the spammers would love to opt out of spam filtering, if they could.
The system just fundamentally does not work without AI. To opt out of AI, you will have to stop sending email. And using credit cards. And doing Google searches. Etc etc etc...
Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just not sure I see where AI has made my search results better or more reliable. And until it can be proven that those results are better, I'm going to remain skeptical. I'm not even sure what form that proof would take. I do know that I can tolerate non-deterministic behavior from a human, but having computers demonstrate non-deterministic behavior is, to me, a violation of the purpose for which we build compute…
"I'm just not sure I see where AI has made my search results better or more reliable." Did you prefer Google search results ten years ago? Those were still using all manner of machine learning algorithms, which is what we used to call "AI".
Even 20 years ago, it wasn't using AI for the core algorithm, but for plenty of subsystems, like (IIRC) spellchecking, language classification, and spam detection.
Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected
#56Maybe people will finally realize that allowing companies to gather private information without permission is a bad idea, and should be banned. Such information is already used against everyone multiple times a day. On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! This tradeoff has basically nothing to do with recent advances…
> On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! There's a difference between reading something and ripping it off, no matter how you launder it.
>There's a difference between reading something and ripping it off, no matter how you launder it.
Yes but that argument cuts both ways. There is a difference, and its not clear that training is "Ripping off"
Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans can be held accountable. Machines can't. AI dilutes responsibility.
How fortunate that AIs are tools operated by humans, and can't cause worse responsibility issues than when a human employee is required to blindly follow a canned procedure.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm...
GenAI interfaces are rolled out as chat products to end users, they just evaporate this last responsibility that remains on any human employee. This responsiblity shift from employee to end user is made on purpose, "worse responsibility issues" are real and well designed to be on the customer side.
Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected
#58Maybe people will finally realize that allowing companies to gather private information without permission is a bad idea, and should be banned. Such information is already used against everyone multiple times a day. On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! This tradeoff has basically nothing to do with recent advances…
> On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! There's a difference between reading something and ripping it off, no matter how you launder it.
Just like there is a difference between genuine and disingenuous.
Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean held accountable? No HR human is going to jail for overlooking your resume. If you mean that a human can be fired when they overlook a resume, an AI system can be be similarly rejected and no longer used.
No, not really. If a single HR person is fired, there are likely others to pick up the slack. And others will likely learn something from the firing, and adjust their behavior accordingly if needed. On the other hand, "firing" an AI from AI-based HR department will likely paralyze it completely, so it's closer to "let's fire every single low-level HR person at once" - something very unlikely to occur. The same goes w…
If the system is built externally by vendor, you can change the vendor and it would create pressure on the vendor ecosystem to not create bad system.
If it is built internally you need people to be responsible to create reliable tests and someone to lead the project. In a way it's not very different than if your external system is bad or crashing. You need accountability in the team. Google can't fire "Google Ads" but doesn't mean they can't expect Google Ads to reliably give them money and people to be responsible for maintaining quality.
Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected
#60> Imagine applying for a job, only to find out that an algorithm powered by artificial intelligence (AI) rejected your resume before a human even saw it The article says this like it's a new problem. Automated resume screening is a long established practice at this point. That it'll be some LLM doing the screening instead of a keyword matcher doesn't change much. Although, it could be argued that an LLM would better…
> It also influences hiring decisions, rental applications, loans, credit scoring, social media feeds, government services and even what news or information we see when we search online. I think, more frighteningly, the potential for it to make decisions on insurance claims and medical care.
There is an underlying assumption there that is certainly incorrect.
So many stupid comments about AI boil down to "humans are incredibly good at X, we can't risk having AI do it". Humans are bad at all manner of things. There are all kinds of bad human decisions being made in insurance, health care, construction, investing, everywhere. It's one big joke to suggest we are good at all this stuff.