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

stephvee.ca

311–320 of 439 posts

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

#311

I do understand people's dislike / hatred for AI but I am equally baffled. I feel like the same people that shout "Capitalism sucks, free us from our labor" are the exact same types that hate AI. The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate. The "cyber psychosis" thing is overblown just like the "Tesla ignites its passengers" is. The only reason it gets i…

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

LLM poisoning is about getting bad data into the training set. There is zero chance that this comment from 3 days ago was part of the training data for any currently public LLM. Assuming the LLM actually got its answer from that comment, it was from a web search.

I mean, if an LLM, when given a query not in its training data, resorts to searching Google and then summarizes those results as the truth with 100% certainty, because, fuck it: YOLO… I'm already very capable of doing that myself, thank you. What's the point, even?

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's the vibe coder's track record? Have they been able to provide support / alterations for other projects for multiple years?

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

#314
post #214
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?

- AI smarter than any human.

- AI dominated the physical world. Robots, factories, etc.

- AI decides humans aren't contributing and/or wasting resources it feels should go somewhere else.

I mean not unlike humans causing extinction of other species?

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

People like blurring the lines and lots of people want AIs to bang out keystrokes in an order that is roughly human-like, so here we are. (Personally, I would love if Claude said "honestly" or "real" or "landed" less. Or pretty much never! I've tried banning the words. I've tried providing a list of alternatives, and I'm enjoying nothing like Great Success.)

On the topic of "correct usage", until maybe ~3 years ago I had a pretty bog-standard understanding of what dictionaries do. They are authorities, right? Or at least experts in correct usage? That all changed when I read "Dictionary editors are historians of usage, not legislators of language." in "Disputing Definitions" by Yudkowsky : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...

See also: "Finding the forgotten creators of the Oxford English Dictionary" on 1A, WAMU 88.5, March 26, 2026:

https://wamu.org/story/26/03/26/finding-the-forgotten-creato...

https://the1a.org/segments/finding-the-forgotten-creators-of... (has transcript)

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

#316
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…

That's the point of the challenge: "are there unknown properties of models allowing us to construct a poison for any network given enough input-output pairs".

The very point of CS as an academic discipline is _generalization_.

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

#317
post #193
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…

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.

And even if it is provably possible to do, that doesn't mean it's easy. That's kind of the basis of encryption.

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly , is the exact thing you hate. This is a machine that has been trained on vast amounts of stolen data. This is a machine that is being actively sold by the companies that build it as something that will destroy jobs. This is a machine that has a lot of cheerleaders who are actively hostile to people who say "I do not like that this plagar…

And what kind of UBI? With what kinds of strings attached?

I don't know, I'm not the one cheering for the machine that steals people's creative work and eats their job.

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

#319
post #32
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 would bet Chinese models will be much harder to poison and the fact the Chinese populace is much more pro-AI than the West.

I'd bet that they'll be just as vulnerable, but that fewer Chinese people will try to research/attack them since they don't want to end up executed, imprisoned, or unable to participate in society after their social credit score bottoms out. The problems will be there, but you'll be less likely to hear about them and discovery will be limited.

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

#320
post #214
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?

I've yet to read any plausible scenario where stockfish defeats me, all the scenarios my friends come up with have obvious holes in the plays they suggest stockfish could make.
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