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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

#391

Post by rpdillon »

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…

For what it's worth, I've generally sort of been on the "information, wants to be free" side of things, and I still am. I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it -- those folks were pretty quiet when their source code was being indexed by Google. But I suppose that's because Google was sending traffic their way with they could then monetize. So this is much less about any kind of philosophical argument and much more about who's getting money, which I don't really care about. I view one of the core values of open source software as being something that we can learn from, whether that's through AI or otherwise.

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

#392

Post by rpdillon »

belorn wrote: post #297
lxgr wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would take up that debate. Attribution is seemingly a central part of a information sharing/gift economy, and especially in a information sharing/gift community. It is part of the trust that connects people and without it the community falls apart, and with that the economy. AI by its very nature removes attribution. Accuracy of information is a second critical aspect of information sharing and communities that are…

I make very heavy use of sources that Gemini sites when I use it. I tend to use AI as sort of a mega search engine where I get a little bit of discussion, but if I care even a little bit about the topic, I end up reading the source material anyway.

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

#393

Post by dspillett »

lxgr wrote: post #385
jordanb wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I may be picking nits on nits here, but… If slop indicates content with no reasoning, then deliberate slop isn't slop as it is generated with both reason and purpose known to, and understood by, the creator. Though if someone deliberately uses a generative model to create slop that line of reasoning might eat itself…

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

#394

Post by lpcvoid »

autoexec wrote: post #327
phainopepla2 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. A surprisingly high number of people are already being tricked into supporting things that clearly threaten their ability to survive in this economy, and even their ability to survive period. I wouldn't trust the general public to…

Why is this downvoted? Rednecks in the Flyover states voted against their interest for the last 30 years.

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

#395

Post by DamnInteresting »

rpdillon wrote: post #391
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…

For what it's worth, I've generally sort of been on the "information, wants to be free" side of things, and I still am. I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it -- those folks were pretty quiet when their source code was being indexed by Google. But I suppose that's because Google was sending traffic their way with they c…

> I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it

The key word there is "license." Open source often has strings attached--an obligation to credit the source, an obligation to release derivative code under the same license, etc. LLMs seldom respect the license, they just quietly and extensively plagiarize everything.

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

#396

Post by goosejuice »

i_love_retros wrote: post #383
goosejuice wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This assumes they aren't taking it seriously.

Perhaps the ever changing definition of vibe coding is the issue here. I'm referring to heavily AI assisted development. I'm not referring to a lack of planning, reviewing, and testing.

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

#397

Post by Lockal »

st3phvee wrote: post #376
Lockal wrote: post #357

Here is a bit of meta humor. When I open https://stephvee.ca I see: Sorry, you have been blocked. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Did I ever open this website? I guess no. D…

That is a standard Cloudflare response when a URL is blocked. It was a temporary block affecting ALL traffic to the URL while I updated the post, not a block targeted at anyone in particular.

No, I am still blocked (for every page on https://stephvee.ca/). "Cloudflare Ray ID: 9efd477aef431473", if it helps somehow. My IP is not in any common blocklist, I experience no errors with other Cloudflare protected websites (using standard Chrome on Linux). It is very likely that stephvee.ca is configured excessively strict (rejecting by OS, or by large IP ranges, or idk)

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

#398

Post by pocksuppet »

slibhb wrote: post #306
pocksuppet wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you calculate that?

I looked it up on FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/MEHOINUSA672N

Are you aware that the government manipulates numbers to make itself look better? It's been vastly understating inflation, for example, by insisting that cheaper TV inches and RAM gigabytes cancel out more expensive houses and food.

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

#399

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Based on observations of other people using it, "AI" is already "poisoned" with too much low quality training material I'm not interested in searching

The idea of intentionally "poisioning" an "AI" model seems to be the logical evolution of so-called "user-generated content" (UGC). It makes sense that non-cooperation is the eventual outcome of exploiting internet subscribers through coerced intermediation. For years now companies in Silicon Valley and Redmond, and other so-called "tech" companies elsewhere, have been generating revenue by using free information and UGC as bait for surveillance ad targets but without the licensing or production costs

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

#400

Post by jhbadger »

gopher_space wrote: post #346
tptacek wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, just as there are rational reasons to dislike Bayer/Monsanto's influence on the business of agriculture without being hysterical about "Frankenfood", you can be against OpenAI, etc. without thinking AI is going to destroy civilization or whatever.
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