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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

#341

Post by tomhow »

rockskon wrote: post #324
tomhow wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't fulminate or post snarky comments on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. If an argument has merit, it can be presented thoughtfully and persuasively, rather than belligerently. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How am I supposed to respond to someone who directly contradicts their own argument immediately after making it? "I'm not shaming! Not embracing AI is comparable to people who didn't embrace smart phones or the Internet though". This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented by OpenAI and similar organizations for the past four years. "AI is the future. If you don't embrace it you will be left behind". It's…

First, the guidelines apply no matter who or what you are replying to. If it were okay to ignore the guidelines any time we found a particular comment unpalatable, there'd be no point having them.

Second, your participation in the thread began as fulmination, with “I am so very tired of people who...”, and then continues in this belligerent style right through to your reply to me...

> This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented

> It's intellectually insulting to be subject to as it relies primarily on fear to convince

This style of argumentation is beneath what we're hoping for on HN, as it paints a simplistic conspiracy theory or narrow commercial incentive as the only plausible explanation for a trend. Things are never that simple, and arguments like that shut off curiosity, when the primary purpose of HN is to cultivate more curiosity.

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

#342

Post by kennywinker »

ofjcihen wrote: post #337
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. On the one hand I agree with you but on the other sometimes I wonder just how insulated we are in the tech community and especially in sites like this. At some point in the last few months I realized that my friend group is basically a bubble of people making mid 6 figures that all work in tech…

From my experience, which is of course anecdotal, a large chunk of the population is still in the “impressed” phase, where they are wowed by all the tricks and impressive demos chatgpt has.

And a large chunk, typically the younger and more online / political aware - they absolutely loathe ai. For stealing from artists, ruining online spaces with slop, spreading misinformation, deepfake porn, and of course screwing the economy, destroying jobs, and polluting the world so a few ultra rich people can get richer, and a few more people like you can make mid-six figures while everybody else has to cope.

If the trend i see continues, i would expect the second group will get very big very soon. Either because the hype is real and ai is taking jobs, or because the hype wasn’t real and they feel lied to.

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

#343

Post by periodjet »

> people seem to loathe AI, and are actively resisting it

Maybe this person doesn’t care, but this observation they’ve made is almost certainly informed by an extremely narrow set of personal experiences, and is unlikely to reflect the wider truth.

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

#344

Post by bostik »

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…

> unless you keep the poisoning attack strictly inaccessible to the public

This is likely impossible. As the in-vogue breed of model extraction methods ("distillation attacks") demonstrates, you can infer the underlying training and/or fine-tuning of a model with a series of carefully constructed prompts.

Another name of model poisoning? Adversarial fine-tuning.

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

#345

Post by xpe »

BeetleB wrote: post #339
xpe wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

All those links are cringe. And Less Wrong is, well, only for a certain crowd :-)

If you are serious, I'm not quite sure how to infer what your definition of cringe is. I have no shame... I even checked urban dictionary.

Re: LW: yeah, you nailed the stereotype. I've probably said something similar myself (this is not a compliment). I'll bet many people on HN could find many interesting & useful discussions there. Here are some more takes with my commentary.

1. "LW has such a insider set of lingo and ideas and tenets". True imo, but these aren't hidden: they are easy to find.

2. The LessWrong "canon" is often weird and/or useless. I can confirm the feeling. Each new weird idea takes time to weigh. Take Newcomb's Paradox. Why the obsession with it? Until it clicks, it feels like you've walked into some kind of die-hard tabletop gaming session. So most normal people find ways to leave. Don't. Stay. What better do you have to? I'm seriously asking. If it matters, go do that instead. But if you have free time, you could do worse. How often do you really get your brain challenged?

3. The articles are too long. Yep, sometimes they are. One needs to like reading. A lot. So people with short attention spans might have trouble. This is my top criticism.

4. Intellectual depth and openness is off the charts. I put LW at the "best I've seen anywhere online, ever" level. Not the kind of permanent openness to anything. Openness to new ideas is a great starting posture. But the goal is to be able to get somewhere with them. As a particular idea loses plausibility, don't expect it to get much airtime. Bad ideas don't deserve as much consideration until/unless something changes to prompt a reconsideration.

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

#346

Post by gopher_space »

tptacek wrote: post #340
ofjcihen wrote: post #337

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. On the one hand I agree with you but on the other sometimes I wonder just how insulated we are in the tech community and especially in sites like this. At some point in the last few months I realized that my friend group is basically a bubble of people making mid 6 figures that all work in tech…

This came up on a thread last week. I participate in a couple communities like this, and then my other major community is local politics (a seriously effective way to meet all your neighbors) --- I'm a housing activist. The local politics forums I'm on are populated almost entirely by people who don't work in technology. I see way more fascination with AI there than I do any anti-AI sentiment. Tech hosts a particular…

You need a 'pro-AI but anti-every-AI-company' category or you'll spin out like a GMO debate.

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

#347

Post by solaire_oa »

haberman wrote: post #88

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…

If you're implying that it's a violation of the original hacker ethos, I disagree.

"Information wants to be free" is a small part of the hacker ethos venn diagram. There are many hacker ethos traits that aren't about cracking, specifically.

Also, the server "information" isn't free (as in beer) to begin with, it costs server availability. Coming up ways to penalize greedy actors is not only well within the server operator's perogative, it's an interesting tit-for-tat problem that could pique any hacker's interests.

A bonus hacker trait is that these poisoning responses are individualistic, i.e. the government doesn't get involved, where certainly more aggressive anti-AI sentiments could (wrongly) call for that.

So I'd say this type of LLM-resistance falls squarely in the original hacker ethos, even though it incidentally counteracts one minor aspect of "information availability". Though I'd certainly agree that the picture today is a lot different than it was. Ironic even.

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

#348

Post by goosejuice »

coldtea wrote: post #333
goosejuice wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. People live a reality everyday, "hard to measure" or not, and that's not about the "quality difference of housing and healthcare" increasing dramatically, it…

Define stratospherically and then compare against outcomes across generations from the silent generation to today.

Life expectancy, cancer mortality, heart disease mortality, infant mortality, infectious disease, high school and college completion, social safety nets, houses w/ a/c, indoor plumbing, w/d, refrigeration... Life for those in the lowest quintile of income is arguably better today than it has ever been despite raging inequality.

Just because things were historically cheaper as a percentage of income, which isn't clearly true across all categories in that timeline, it doesn't mean quality of life was materially better.

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

#349

Post by goosejuice »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #313
goosejuice wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Assume experience is the same across all agencies.

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

#350

Post by goosejuice »

i_love_retros wrote: post #334
goosejuice wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the product anything more than a crud app? If so, no they should not hire them.

Does it matter if the outcome is the same? It's a black box that meets the specification.
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