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Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

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Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#91

Post by Retric »

infinite_spin wrote: post #83
r_lee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you mean benefit a private company training their AI model which they market to the public in order to get to their trillion dollar IPO?

That seems like an unfair equivalence. Lots of things you enjoy, including this very forum, benefit already wealthy private companies. That doesn't seem like it's a very good litmus test for whether something is overall a benefit to humanity.

> overall a benefit to humanity.

By that metric a complete ban on LLM’s might be on the table, which I don’t think is something you’re advocating for here.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#92

Post by satvikpendem »

r_lee wrote: post #81
jimmaswell wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also see no virtue in stopping an AI from reading something to begin with. If anything, I find it anti-social - hide your work from the machine trying to learn from it, taking nothing away from you in exchange for benefiting all of mankind?

you mean benefit a private company training their AI model which they market to the public in order to get to their trillion dollar IPO?

That's why one should advocate for open weight models.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#94

Post by kazinator »

I can tell right away that is stupid because one of the things I've used AI for was for deciphering someone's illegible handwriting, which it did amazingly. Once it figures out for you what is written, you can't unsee it, so you know it has to be right.

Illegible fonts will only create accessibility problems for humans, even ones with normal vision, high literacy and no cognitive defects (dyslexia), while AI will blow right through the text.

If this is done in electronic documents, where the AI won't even see the glyps becaue it's reading the underlying character codes, it's even stupider.

I can't believe anyone would even try this (and then believe it is working without putting their hypotheses to the test).

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#95

Post by BrenBarn »

palmotea wrote: post #68

> The public posts and discussions being had about this subject are already informing AI companies on how to train their multimodal models to get around these obfuscations, most of which have already been broken. I'd argue every new font and tech demo is effectively a benchmark, daring AI firms come up with solutions to sidestep them. And they will be sidestepped, one way or another. If a human can see the informatio…

I also don't like the fatalistic mindset, but I feel like we're better off trying to retaliate against the makers and operators of the bots, rather than getting into a technological arms race against the bots themselves. That is, the fight is one of policy, law, and morality, not of technology.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#96

Post by infinite_spin »

Retric wrote: post #91
infinite_spin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like an unfair equivalence. Lots of things you enjoy, including this very forum, benefit already wealthy private companies. That doesn't seem like it's a very good litmus test for whether something is overall a benefit to humanity.

> overall a benefit to humanity. By that metric a complete ban on LLM’s might be on the table, which I don’t think is something you’re advocating for here.

I'm advocating for a litmus test that can't be easily abused, and I'm advocating against unfair equivalences. I also am not calling "overall a benefit to humanity" a metric, it's more of a conclusion we could arrive at by an application of relevant metrics.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#97

Post by JodieBenitez »

jimmaswell wrote: post #77
danudey wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main argument against these fonts is that you are removing accessibility for humans permanently in exchange for removing accessibility for scrapers temporarily. It might raise the cost for some scrapers, to some degree, but it raises the cost to, effectively, infinity for anyone who needs to use a screen reader, a browser's 'reader' view, or any other assistive technology. Things like this just remind me of EA's…

I also see no virtue in stopping an AI from reading something to begin with. If anything, I find it anti-social - hide your work from the machine trying to learn from it, taking nothing away from you in exchange for benefiting all of mankind?

> taking nothing away from you

Hosting is not free.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#99

Post by dombiscoff »

Quite frankly I don't understand why the cat and mouse argument here is meant to serve as a shutdown for anti-AI methods. Whole industries entirely exist in a cat and mouse state (cybersecurity, anti-cheat, etc) and no one in those industries imply that any solution is or can be a permanent dunk. If anything, the very fact that theres no permanent dunk is what leads to such industries developing a competitive service based industry to begin with. Why can't a theoretical anti-AI industry develop into the same thing? These fonts just seem like the infancy steps for such.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#100

Post by Retric »

infinite_spin wrote: post #96
Retric wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overall a benefit to humanity. By that metric a complete ban on LLM’s might be on the table, which I don’t think is something you’re advocating for here.

I'm advocating for a litmus test that can't be easily abused, and I'm advocating against unfair equivalences. I also am not calling "overall a benefit to humanity" a metric, it's more of a conclusion we could arrive at by an application of relevant metrics.

> a conclusion we could arrive at by an application of relevant metrics.

That’s dangerous ground because of how you can arbitrarily change weights of different metrics. If the goal is the “overall benefit of humanity” then that’s what’s important not metrics.

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