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AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

stephvee.ca

191–200 of 439 posts

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#191
post #9

I'm glad this person found community, but I think they've been a bit starstruck by concentrated interest. At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. There are those people about smart phones, the Internet itself, even television. Meanwhile: the ability to poison models, if it can be made to work reliably, is a genuinely interesting CS ques…

I am so very tired of people who compare AI to smart phones or the Internet as large. There were never such wide scale and, above all, centralized efforts to coerce and shame people into using the Internet or smart phones in spite of their best efforts.

If you think that people starting to use computers in their jobs (or even in their personal lives) was a completely seamless and controversy-free affair, you must be pretty young (or I must be getting old, as I definitely remember it).

I mean, it's still ongoing! Tons of people prefer to do things the analog way, and it's certainly not for a lack of companies trying, as the analog way is usually much more expensive.

In their personal lives, everybody should of course be free to do what they want, but I also doubt that zero people have been fired for e.g. refusing to train to use a computer and email because they preferred the aesthetics of typewriters or handwritten memos and physical intra-office mail.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#192
post #17

This whole poisoning intent is so incredibly misappropriated, that I feel sad about it. First of all - there is enough content to train on already, that is not poisoned, and second - the other new content is largely populated in automated manner from the real world, and by workers in large shops in Africa, that are being paid to not produce shit. So yes, you can pollute the good old internet even more, but no, you ca…

Straight from the horse’s mouth: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

Yes, you _can_ but you probably wont.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#193
post #156
post #9

I'm glad this person found community, but I think they've been a bit starstruck by concentrated interest. At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. There are those people about smart phones, the Internet itself, even television. Meanwhile: the ability to poison models, if it can be made to work reliably, is a genuinely interesting CS ques…

> the ability to poison models, if it can be made to work reliably Ultimately, it comes down to the halting problem: If there's a mechanism that can be used to alter the measured behaviour, then the system can change behaviour to take into account the mechanism. In other words, unless you keep the poisoning attack strictly inaccessible to the public, the mechanism used to poison will also be possible to use to train…

This reduction to the halting problem looks too handwawy to me. I don't see as a given that the possibility of the system taking into account the attack follows from the existence of the attack.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#194
post #95

The only thing more cringe than the seething anger in this blog is the technical illiteracy revealed by an earnest belief that any of these attempts at "poisoning" will have any negative impact whatsoever on model training.

Lol I find the opposite to be cringe to be honest: people using chatgpt to write messages, emails, resumes for them, professional software developers vibe coding entire apps, talking about AGI coming from LLMs. Please. That is the cringe.

What is tragic is that LLMs are learning how to use the word "cringe" improperly.

If we're going to have AI overlords, it'd be great if they spoke with proper grammar.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying Winner Take All Capitalism doesn't have an exclusionary mechanism for the rich. The system exists for the sole purpose of serving the already-rich. The vampires are an inevitability baked into the system from the start.

[flagged]

I think you just want to make a comparison of copyright to slavery.

Property classes are born and die everyday. You can own the rights to publish an arcade video game, but that class of rights would have been way more valuable 45 years ago. NFTs were born and died just recently. You can own digital assets worth real money in an online game that simply shuts down.

Some people may read this and say "these don't qualify as a property class", to which I will remind you that property class used in this way is a brand new term, which I think is invented solely to be able to compare the limitations on human freedom associated with slavery to the limitations on human freedom associated with intellectual property.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#197

I'm old enough to remember a time when the primary hacker cause was DRM, the DMCA, patent trolls, export controls for PGP, etc. All things that made it difficult to use information when you want to. "Information wants to be free." It's wild to see the about face. Now it's: > If [companies] can’t source training data ethically, then I see absolutely no reason why any website operator should make it easy for them to st…

Those people where trying to build a sharing/gift economy. They weren't able to keep bad actors out of their sharing economy. They are bitter that their utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers. Why is that wild?

> utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers

Such is the fate of all utopian dreams.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#198
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet Chinese models will be much harder to poison and the fact the Chinese populace is much more pro-AI than the West.

> the fact the Chinese populace is much more pro-AI than the West. Is it? Honest question. Frankly the answer smells off. Similar to thinking US sentiment about AI is accurately reflected by people in Silicon Valley. Feels like we're getting biased views.

I just returned from a trip to Taiwan where my wife's family works frequently in China (they run an import/export business) and they asked me to demonstrate some AI and OpenClaw stuff because they said everyone they know in China is using a Clawbot. There is a lot of enthusiasm there for this stuff.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#199
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems like a wasted effort when AI will primarily learn the majority consensus view and not one-off misinformation. We have evidence to the contrary. Two blog articles and two preprints of fake academic articles [0] were able to convince CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity AI of the existence of a fake disease, against all majority consensus. And even though the falsity of this information was made public…

> Two blog articles and two preprints of fake academic articles [0] were able to convince CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity AI of the existence of a fake disease, against all majority consensus Wrong. There are no 'majority consensus' against 'bixonimania' because they made it up , that was the point. It's unsurprisingly easy to get LLMs to repeat the only source on a term never before seen. This usually works;…

The LLMs didn't only talk about the disease when prompted by the neologism. They also brought it up when asked about the symptoms. From the article:

> OpenAI’s ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms amounted to bixonimania. Some of those responses were prompted by asking about bixonimania, and others were in response to questions about hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure.

And yes, sure, in this example the scientific peer-review process may have eventually criticised and countered 'bixonimania' as a hoax were the researcher to have never revealed its falsity—emphasis on 'may', few researchers have the time and energies to trawl through crap papermill articles and publish criticisms. Either way, that is a feature of the scientific process and is not a given to any online information.

What happens when false information is divulged by other means that do not attempt to self-regulate? And how do we distinguish one-off falsities from the myriad of obscure true things that the public is expecting LLMs to 'know' even when there is comparatively little published information about them and therefore no consensus per se?

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#200
post #95

The only thing more cringe than the seething anger in this blog is the technical illiteracy revealed by an earnest belief that any of these attempts at "poisoning" will have any negative impact whatsoever on model training.

I wouldn't be so confident that poisoning won't work. https://www.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/comments/1so9wf1/c...
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