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

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

#201

Post by goosejuice »

i_love_retros wrote: post #134
caesil wrote: 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.

Let's say an NGO has done the work to formally specify a software product that would improve outcomes or people reached by I dunno 30%. They send out RFPs to a number of consultancies who provide a quote and guaranteed delivery meeting their specifications by the desired date. Only one fits in the budget, and by quite a margin. It's a consultancy that openly "vibe codes".

Should they hire them?

Yes the specification is holding a lot of weight here. Assume it's comprehensive and all consultancies offer the same aftercare support. Otherwise we're just handwaving and bike shedding over something that's not measurable.

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

#202

Post by BeetleB »

zoogeny wrote: post #25

I often question my own bias on this because in my interactions with local non-tech people, the adoption of AI has pretty much affected everyone I know and it is by my estimation a majority positive reaction. I live in a fairly rural part of the PNW. So when I read "People hate what AI is doing to our world." it honestly feels like either I am completely deluded or the author is. It feels like a high school bully say…

The bulk of the anti-AI sentiment I see is from people who spend a huge amount of time online (or on HN). Not regular folks.

Most people don't care if something is written by an AI as long as it is reasonable, and reflects the intent of the human who prompted the AI.

If consuming material online (videos, web sites, online forums) is not something you do a lot of, you're relatively unimpacted by LLMs (well, except the whole jobs situation...).

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

#203

Post by jumploops »

I've noticed this trend most heavily on Reddit.

Some communities are very pro-AI, adding AI summary comments to each thread, encouraging AI-written posts, etc.[0]

Many subreddits are AI cautious[1][2], and a subset of those are fully anti-AI[3].

Apart from these "AI-focused" communities, it seems each "traditional" subreddit sits somewhere on the spectrum (photographers dealing with AI skepticism of their work[4], programmers mostly like it but still skeptical[5]).

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/isthisAI/

[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/

[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/

[4]https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/1q4iv0k/what_d...

[5]https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1s6mtt7/ai_has_suck...

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

#204

Post by coldtea »

slibhb wrote: post #94
coldtea wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody hasen't been paying attention in the past 40 years, and especially the last 20.

Yeah, it's you. Real purchasing power is up over the past 20 years.

Yeah, just not in anything that matters, like rent/housing, education, and healthcare.

And increasingly not even for basics like food, with inflation eating away that PP.

But hey, you can buy tech gadgets cheaper than in the 1990s.

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

#205

Post by cyanydeez »

tptacek wrote: 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…

If you can get 70 million people to vote for trump, you can poison models.

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

#206

Post by GaryBluto »

ginko wrote: post #189
GaryBluto wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Information wants to be free, but only be used by people I wholly endorse." is the motto. You'll see young people singing the praises of piracy but then use "piracy" as an excuse for hating LLMs.

Corporations are not people.

Who works at corporations and benefits from their actions?

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

#207

Post by lxgr »

jordanb wrote: post #112
larodi wrote: 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…

There may be plenty of content out there but everyone with any content on the internet is struggling to keep AI crawlers that they never authorized out. In many cases, people are having to do so just to protect their infrastructure from request spamming. Since AI crawlers don't obey any consent markers denying access to content, it makes sense for content owners who don't want AI trained on their content to poison it…

If you put something on the open web, as I see it, you only get so much say in what people do with it.

Yes, they can't publish it without attribution and/or compensation (copyright, at least currently, for better or worse). Yes, they shouldn't get to hammer your server with redundant brainless requests for thousands of copies of the same content that no human will ever read (abuse/DDOS prevention).

No, I don't think you get to decide what user agent your visitors are using, and whether that user agent will summarize or otherwise transform it, using LLMs, ad blockers, or 273 artisanal regular expressions enabling dark/bright/readable/pink mode.

> it makes sense for content owners who don't want AI trained on their content to poison it if possible. It's possibly the only way to keep the AI crawlers away.

How would that work? The crawler needs to, well, crawl your site to determine that it's full of slop. At that point, it's already incurred the cost to you.

I'm all for banning spammy, high-request-rate crawlers, but those you would detect via abusive request patterns, and that won't be influenced by tokens.

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

#208

Post by lxgr »

jordanb wrote: post #167
dspillett wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's possibly the only way to keep the AI crawlers away. Unfortunately that won't work. If you've served them enough content to have noticeable poisoning effect then you've allowed all that load through your resources. It won't stop them coming either - for the most part they don't talk to each other so even if you drive some away more will come, there is no collaborative list of good and bad places to scrape. The…

My point is that if crawlers have to worry about poison that may make them start to respect robots.txt or something. It's a bit like a "Beware of Dog" sign.

How would that become a strong, stable signal, if both highly valuable and highly slopified content will use robots.txt?

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

#209

Post by lepus »

vidarh wrote: post #156
tptacek wrote: 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…

It's a very comparable game of cat and mouse to spam email filtering. People also tried to claim that spam was over because for a time companies like Google cared enough to invest a lot in preventing as much as possible from getting through. If you've noticed in recent years the motivation to keep up that level of filtering has greatly diminished.

Whether model poisoning becomes a bigger issue depends on the incentives for companies to keep fighting it. For now in comparison to attackers the incentives and resources needed to defend against model poisoning are huge so it's just temporary setbacks. Will that unevenness in their favor always be the case?

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

#210

Post by aksss »

xg15 wrote: post #58
zoogeny wrote: post #25

I often question my own bias on this because in my interactions with local non-tech people, the adoption of AI has pretty much affected everyone I know and it is by my estimation a majority positive reaction. I live in a fairly rural part of the PNW. So when I read "People hate what AI is doing to our world." it honestly feels like either I am completely deluded or the author is. It feels like a high school bully say…

> teachers Given all the borderline apocalyptic articles how students are using it to cheat and teachers have no way to stop them, I'd be honestly surprised by that.

There was an article about a year ago concerning the students' using AI to complete work, and teachers using AI tools to detect if AI tools were being used to complete the work, so (even a year ago) you found this absurd scenario where it was just robots checking the work of other robots. Did a quick search for said article but couldn't find it. Anyway, humorous. Coupled with the WaPo article today about people "speed-running" their degrees, it's wacky, wacky world for "education". https://archive.is/bPi82
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