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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

#261

Post by xpe »

phainopepla2 wrote: post #235
xpe wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The easiest way to grow AI resistance is to get Dario Amodei and Sam Altman on TV and let them talk. Tell me more? I'm guessing you might say: neither connects with everyday people, they have misaligned incentives*, they (like most corporate leaders) don't speak directly, they have more power than almost any elected leader in the world, ... Did I miss anything? My take: when it comes to character and goals and ther…

You're overthinking the parent comment, I think. When Dario goes on TV he says things like "AI is going to put 50% of white collar workers out of a job in a few years". The average TV viewer who hears that doesn't know what AI alignment means, they just hear that this guy, whatever his intentions, is threatening their ability to survive in this economy.

> they just hear that this guy, whatever his intentions, is threatening their ability to survive in this economy.

Yep, Dario is straddling this sort of impossible line: he's the least-scary harbinger who is try to be one of the more transparent people to sound the alarm. But the funny thing about saying "don't shoot the messenger" is that it usually gets uttered well after the messenger has taken a bullet.

> You're overthinking the parent comment, I think.

Luckily, the phrase overthinking is on the way out. We really don't want any more Idiocracy Part II. In this day, we need all the thinking we can get. We often need (1) better thinking and (2) the ability to redirect our thinking towards other directions.

In my experience, 2026 is the year where almost all stigma about "talking AI" is out the window. I am nearly at the point where I say whatever I think needs to be said, even if I'm not sure if people will think I be crazy. So if Typical Q. Person asks me, I tell them whatever I think will fit into their brain at the time -- how AI works, why Dario is awkward, why superintelligence is no bueno, etc.

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

#262

Post by cortesoft »

sidrag22 wrote: post #152
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…

kinda surprised to see this type of take out of someone who participates on this website. I feel like this is the place where I have seen that middle ground surface the most. Just the overall shift in the past year from semi handwaving to feeling like it must be embraced, and identifying the problems it creates and how to address them. I feel this is all exactly what you are mentioning. I think AI as a proper utilize…

The overall sentiment on here might be in the middle, but I feel like that is more because half the posts and comments are railing against AI slop and half are about exciting new AI models or tools.

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

#263

Post by xmichael909 »

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…

Like the other commentor already pointed out, almost every AI bot out there thinks Fortnite is real, yet it is completely made up poison.

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

#265

Post by Aerroon »

drcode wrote: post #98
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…

> 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. Then I have good news for you: If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence, there actually will no longer "be an active community of people who loathe AI and work to obstruct it"

But AI isn't going to be unaligned. It's going to be aligned the same way we are because it learns from our data.

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

#267

Post by runarberg »

Legend2440 wrote: post #251
runarberg wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be underestimating the powers of trillions of parameters in a model. With this many parameters overfitting is inevitable. Overfitting here means you are plotting (or outputting) the errors in your data instead of interpolating (or inferring) any trends in the model. In fact, given this many parameters, poisoning should be relatively easy in general, but extremely easy on niche subjects. https://www.youtube.co…

>With this many parameters overfitting is inevitable. Nope. Go look up double descent. Overfitting turns out not to be an issue with large models. Your video is from a political activist, not anyone with any knowledge about machine learning. Here's a better video about overfitting: https://youtu.be/qRHdQz_P_Lo

I am not a professional statistician (only a BSc dropout) so I won‘t be able to gain the expertise required to evaluate the claim here: That double descent eliminates overfitting in LLMs.

That said, I see red flags here. This is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. My actual degree (not the drop-out one) is in Psychology and I used statistics a lot during my degree, it is only BSc so again, I cannot claim expertise here either. But this claim and the abstracts I scanned in various papers to evaluate this claim, ring alarm bells all over. I don‘t trust it. It is precisely the thing that we were told to be aware of when we were taught scientific thinking.

In contrast, this political activist provided an example (an anecdote if you will) which showed how easy it was for an actual scientist to poison LLM models with a made up symptom. This looks like overfitting to me. These two Medium blog posts very much feel like errors in the data set which the models are all to happy to output as if it was inferred.

EDIT: I just watched that video, and I actually believe the claims in the video, however I do not believe your claim. If we assume that video is correct, your errors will only manifest in fewer hallucinations. Note that the higher parameter models in the demonstration the regression model traversed every single datapoint the sample, and that there was an optimal model with fewer parameters which had a better fit then the overfitted ones. This means that trillions of parameters indeed makes a model quite vulnerable to poison.

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

#268

Post by coldtea »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #217
slibhb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is a tool to increase productivity. Productivity has increased greatly over the past century, yet it's easier to feed ourselves than ever, and we have far more leisure time.

Don't bother. They won't understand.

So much for "cynical"

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

#269

Post by goosejuice »

coldtea wrote: post #204
slibhb wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a hard time with this perspective. It's hard to measure. The quality difference of housing and healthcare in particular has increased dramatically in the US over the years and our minimum expectations have risen quite a bit as technology has progressed.

It's easier than ever to access quality education but that doesn't mean people will do it on their own accord. The cost of licensure or a diploma has certainly increased. Education for the disabled has improved dramatically.

Historical diseases of affluence now affect the poor more than the rich due to increased availability and affordability but costly procedures disproportionately favour the wealthy flipping the mortality picture. Despite that all cause mortality from cancer is down and survival rates are better. The disparity is real but it's not easy to attribute the cause in a neat package.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28408935/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

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

#270

Post by drcode »

oidar wrote: post #214
drcode wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Then I have good news for you: If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence, there actually will no longer "be an active community of people who loathe AI and work to obstruct it"

> If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence, I've seen people claiming that this could happen, but I've yet to read any plausible scenario where this might be the case. Maybe I lack the imagination, could you enlighten me?

https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/
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