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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

#241

Post by scythe »

lepus wrote: post #209
vidarh wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 incentiv…

>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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...

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

#242

Post by rockskon »

tptacek wrote: post #238
rockskon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, yeah, no, definitely super easy to have been a professional software developer over the last 20 years whilst conscientiously objecting from using the Internet.

And was there this massive, aggressive effort by a tiny handful of companies to mandate software developers use the Internet? Because I seem to recall people generally willingly choosing to use it as opposed to the aggressive efforts by blue chip tech companies to force the public at large to use it.

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

#243

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

lxgr wrote: post #216
jordanb wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's highly debatable whether, in case of an information sharing/gift economy, the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense. The information is still there, as is the community that you've built, the joy that you get out of sharing the information, everything you've learned... Why is any of that diminished, just because some people or entities that…

It's diminished because the hard reality is that you need money to live.

The end result of major tech companies sweeping in, taking everyone's creative work, outcompeting the originals with AI derivatives, and telling every artist on the planet "fuck off, send a job application to McDonalds" is significantly less art.

Copyright was invented to prevent exactly this scenario.

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

#244

Post by Fraterkes »

tptacek wrote: post #238
rockskon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, yeah, no, definitely super easy to have been a professional software developer over the last 20 years whilst conscientiously objecting from using the Internet.

Very intellectually lazy reply.

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

#245

Post by Groxx »

pocksuppet wrote: post #218
Groxx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate. I don't think it's all that complex tbh. The freeing from labor, both in the past and now, has been achieved largely by firing people, abandoning them to starve while power concentrates in the already-powerful. This is the exact same thing the Luddites were taking issue with. Because they partly succeeded, w…

We have labor laws today because people kept killing their bosses until the bosses agreed to some sort of compromise. Sadly, such a thing is happening again today, like with the toilet paper warehouse fire.

When there's enough of a power imbalance, said bosses sometimes choose to make that the only option, yes

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

#246

Post by Legend2440 »

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…

I don't think this traffic is actually coming from crawlers for training.

Think about it, why would a training scraper need to hit the same page hundreds of times a day? They only need to download it once.

I think this is LLMs doing web searches at runtime in response to user queries. There's no caching at this level, so similar queries by many different users could lead the LLM to request the same page many times.

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

#247

Post by xg15 »

viccis wrote: post #231
slibhb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marx pretty clearly envisions a future society where necessary labor is reduced to a minimum due to technology. The fact that modern leftists are (often) anti-technology is puzzling.

Key there is future. I don't think he ever claimed such an automated communist utopia was the immediate progression after capitalism. >The fact that modern leftists are (often) anti-technology is puzzling. Not puzzling at all when the world has experience earth shattering advances in technology in the past 30-40 years, and the economic gains it has brought have not been reflected in similar reductions in labor for th…

Yeah, I'm baffled how hard this seems to be to understand for many tech people: Everyone raves on about the massive increases in productivity we archieved in the last decades thanks to technological progress - meanwhile wages and living conditions of many have become worse in the same period, while some techbros have amassed otherworldly levels of wealth and see themselves as the new masters of the universe. So that's the glorious future that technology is bringing us towards?

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

#248

Post by jordanb »

noosphr wrote: post #190
jordanb wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney is all-in on AI. They are thrilled. The folks fighting perpetual copyright were not fighting to make it possible for Disney to fire creatives. In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney.

Disney is all in because all their characters are entering the public domain over the next 5 years. They can't fight like it's 1998 because youtube is now worth more than they are. > In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney. We were doing nothing of the sort. It was "Information wants to be free" not "we want to provide a perpetual job for a subset white collar workers". sprinkles holy wate…

Well I was in that cohort and none of us were thinking we were helping megacorps create the content slop machine from 1984.

Our concern was that corporations were expanding the definition of intellectual property to the extent where you couldn't make a movie or song or write a book as an individual without some corporation with a massive "IP" warchest coming after you and declaring it derivative. You couldn't write some software without a corporation with a massive repository of junk patents claiming you infringe.

We wanted to insure that individual creators could continue to have a voice, and not get sued out of existence by an IP Legal/Industrial Complex that was forming causing arms races between megacorps and SLAPs against everyone else.

If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that.

And by the way Disney is all in on AI for the same reason they were all in on perpetual copyright. In the perpetual copyright world, having a massive library of content you no longer have to pay residuals on was a source of massive amounts of "free" revenue. You could just keep re-releasing and re-making stuff. You did not have to do the messy, expensive work of paying people to come up with really good new stuff.

In the AI world, the money-printing capital asset is the trained model that grinds out slop 24/7 and you -emdash- again -emdash- don't have to pay actual people to create anything new.

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

#249

Post by skyberrys »

cortesoft wrote: post #80

I am hoping at some point we can move towards having more nuanced conversations about AI and the role it should play in our world. It seems like currently the only two camps are at either extreme. Isn't there somewhere between removing AI from the world entirely and just sitting back and letting it take over everything? I want to talk about responsible AI use, and how to mitigate the effects on society, and to accoun…

This is my take too. When we were imagining AI what were the use cases we had in mind back then? They are these grand visions of AI will take care of major problems. We should be pushing for responsible AI deployment, starting on low risk areas and moving up to more serious uses once we know the tools work for less catastrophic situations.

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

#250

Post by Tanoc »

platinumrad wrote: post #102
james2doyle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out "model collapse". It seems that an abundance of content, that is more and more AI generated these days, may not be a viable option. There is also a vast amount of data that is increasingly going private or behind paywalls

People love harping on this one, but model collapse hasn't turned out to be an issue in practice.

There's been symptoms of it that have shown up such as the colloquially called "piss filter" and the the anime mole nose problem, but so far they've been symptoms rather than a fatal expression of a disease. That they are symptoms however shows they can be terminal if exploited properly and profusely. So far we haven't seen anyone capable of the "profusely" part.
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