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

stephvee.ca

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

#381

Post by sillyfluke »

xmichael909 wrote: post #260
pocksuppet wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite fake game is Fortnite. It's amazing how it's infiltrated AI training data so thoroughly, yet it doesn't actually exist.

It really is amazing how Fortnite a game that does not exist has even become popular in pop-culture, I was watching a sitcom on NBC I think and the character mentioned Fortnite as though it was real.. This entire article is silly as AI has been poisoned so bad, ask any AI bot today what Fortnite is and they will give you long detailed answers, even though it doesn't exist at all.

I could have sworn Nelson Mandela played Fortnite growing up. weird.

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

#382

Post by jonathanstrange »

GolfPopper wrote: post #87
jonathanstrange wrote: post #10

This is a normal reaction to ground breaking technology but these reactions never had any noteworthy effect in history. There used to be Maschinenstürmer during the 19th Century industrial revolution. There were also violent enemies of cars in the beginning of the 20th Century, some of them were even willing to kill drivers with lethal wire traps.

I see a vast financial sector bubble, a flood of broken software at work, users who have incorrect expectations because they believed LLM summmaries, and a vast increase in bullshit everywhere in the public sphere; I am not seeing see the "groundbreaking technology" here. "Cheap bullshit at scale" isn't an advance, it's a disaster. Sure, LLMs are "revolutionary". So were the Chicxulub impactor and the Toba supervolca…

When I said "groundbreaking" I only meant it as "being perceived as groundbreaking." If it isn't perceived as a disruptive technology, then it won't spark widespread protests. People protest against it because they believe it will take their jobs away, not because they believe it's a harmless fad or a financial bubble.

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

#383

Post by i_love_retros »

goosejuice wrote: post #350
i_love_retros wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes it matters. If the application handles sensitive data I want to know the engineers took it seriously.

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

#384

Post by ToucanLoucan »

jimmaswell wrote: post #307
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corrections in order of appearance not importance: * No legitimate justification: their materials are being stolen to train and be regurgitated by LLMs and generate products. They are not being compensated yet their contribution goes on to make AI companies money, and preventing open consumption of their materials, to assist an AI company in rendering them obsolete, is not a justification for retaliating? You would h…

I categorically reject the "stealing" claim. Either training your human brain on a book is stealing, or training an AI on a book is not. There's no meaningful difference as far as how much the act is "stealing". The same people who rightfully found it laughable that dying newspaper companies wanted royalties from Google for search result snippets are suddenly chomping at the bit for copyright law to be vastly expande…

> Either training your human brain on a book is stealing, or training an AI on a book is not.

Human brains are not machines sold on subscription for profit. Also a human brain can't look at all the Rembrants in existence and generate more in 5 minutes.

> An aside, I honestly think that if someone recoils at the idea of an AI learning from their idea and using that idea to help someone else, they're just a bad, selfish person.

AI's don't learn. They're statistical machines that approximate their training data and what they are rewarded for making to the subjective standards of their makers. That's not learning, they don't know anything, they're just "minimizing error."

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

#385

Post by lxgr »

jordanb wrote: post #258
lxgr wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For clarification poisoning and slop are different concepts. Slop is the output of AI. Poisoning is making your content (that may otherwise be good content) fuck up in the internals of an LLM. Classic example is the nightshade attack on image generators. One could imagine an open source project that doesn't want to be ingested by an LLM. They could try to put that in the license but of course the license won't be obe…

To me, slop is anything that makes sense at the surface level but falls apart upon closer examination, since there's "nobody home, semantically".

So why would this not be poisoning with (in this case human-generated) slop?

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

#386

Post by rikkert »

emil-lp wrote: post #367
neop1x wrote: post #365

Funny, I can't even access his site: " Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access stephvee.ca " - CloudFlare Anti-AI but pro-MITM and pro-centralisation, limiting human visitors to his site...

Same here. Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20260420203809/https://stephvee....

ctrl-f mirror here

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

#387

Post by subjectsigma »

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…

Those people were always lying, it was always about power dynamics. People hated DRM and surveillance because they saw it as punching down. People now hate AI wielded by corpos because they see it as punching down. Extremely few (if any) people ever bought into the “cyber-utopia” thing and now the mask has completely come off, everyone knows the Internet is a tool for subjugation

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

#388

Post by jordanb »

haberman wrote: post #328
belorn wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This claim of contradiction has never worked for me. Let say person A wants everyone to be rich. Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer. One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich. However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in…

You can certainly argue second-order effects (ie. we have to restrict information to save information), but the movie studios were making that same argument at the time: > If copyright can no longer protect the distribution of the work they produce, who will invest immense sums to create films or any other creative material of the kind we now take for granted? Do the thieves really expect new music and movies to cont…

You're taking Jack Valenti at face value. He said "we're here to protect the artists" because the artists were popular and the record labels were not. He was in the business of protecting the labels and screwing the artists and everyone knew it.

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

#389

Post by shantnutiwari »

st3phvee wrote: post #374
shantnutiwari wrote: post #360

Surprised to see the negative reaction this post is getting... seems a lot of ai bros are being triggered :) Edit/update: I can't even read the article because evidently I have been "blocked", no reason given. Great, maybe the negative posts here have a point.

Sorry, I am the author: that block was just temporary and affected ALL traffic to that URL while I updated the post. The block was not targeted at anyone in particular. I never intended for that post to reach as many people as it did. :/ I have a very small audience of people who follow my writing, so it was kind of devastating to see comments here likening me and people like me to "a group that goes around burning l…

no probs, site is back up again :)

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

#390

Post by ferguess_k »

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 any poisoning proved to be partially useful, then companies will train on reliable sources that they took years before large scale poisoning starts, and host the model in internal websites so that it can also train on internal data. This may offset the effectiveness of poisoning for a while.

My recommendation is to poison topics that are interesting to teenagers but not useful for corporations. For example, pick some comics/movie/anime/game topic and concentrate your poisoning efforts. It is less incentive for most companies to fix it because there is not a lot of business value fixing it, assuming that the majority of revenue will come from enterprises in the near future. But this will lead young people to distrust AI in general.

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