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Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

blog.yaros.ae

161–170 of 174 posts

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accessibility isn't optional, so what do you propose?

I propose using the internet the way it was designed: Open and readable by everything (including bots). Scraping is a legal issue. There is no technical prevention mechanism that isn't theater.

A better technical solution imo is more P2P hosting -- say content addressing. Something designed to deal with the scrapers -- and maybe even make them bear infrastructure costs.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#162
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as a user of LLMs I also find it annoying, the agents gather information on my behalf, they save me time and money. Are we splitting humanity? Those with info accessible to agents and those who only use their human sense directly? This whole distinction is futile imho. And no, I'm not Sam Altman. I mean training is one thing, you should honor people's licenses, but browsing and gathering information? Why force…

Honestly, I'll take it a step further: what's wrong with training? Having principles means applying them uniformly -- even to large entities or those you hate (it's fine if the principles themselves have size bounds in them, though -- versus them being implicitly glued on -- but then you need a universal justification for why that size. Which is possible and valid.) I think that one should use the best algorithms, th…

I agree. As soon as I understood the gist of how modern models do what they do, I found it unreasonable to apply any stricter standards to their "learning" than we do to humans. Humans learn by reading ideas and looking at images, then go on to have ideas and draw images based on that training.

We have definitions of plagiarism and copyright infringement that apply to people based on what they put out into the world, not how they trained themselves to get there[0]. Artists literally trace art and study specific examples in detail to learn, and that's not a bad thing. Humans can also accidentally plagiarize or make things identical to past works - it's easy to think a great guitar riff just came to you when it was really based on a song you heard years ago that stuck in a part of your mind but you don't even consciously remember the influence, for example.

It would certainly be nice for AI output to provide citations if it realizes it's using a significant chunk of an idea from its training that has a clear source (or many), though this is difficult in the same way it would be difficult for me to cite where I learned about the Towers of Hanoi. The AI frequently does web searches for specific resources to get ideas from these days, which are easy for it to cite.

However, it would have a chilling effect on progress as a whole if we all started jealously guarding our ideas so close to our chest that machines couldn't read them and only a select few humans who passed some kind of gate (or even paid us) were allowed to see them. We would be nowhere close to where we are if we had always had such a mindset.

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[0] We use proven absence of viewing certain material as a legal shield against copyright infringement e.g. clean room engineering, but this isn't strictly necessary, and possibly even discouraged with modern precedent: https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21740

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#163
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualitative assessment etc not just metrics. How do you propose to asses “overall benefit to humanity” with metrics?

Qualitative metrics are also metrics. You have to have a spectrum in order to weigh things against each other qualitatively, even if the spectrum is just a 2-point binary.

Qualitative assessment and qualitative metrics are different things.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#164
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? Better that than putting all eggs in one basket.

Because the effect of the technological measures is an arms race; presumably, universally so. It's a net negative. The article captures the principle in a nutshell.

> Because the effect of the technological measures is an arms race; presumably, universally so. It's a net negative. The article captures the principle in a nutshell.

It's not that simple. What you say may be true, but the reason arms races happen is the alternative is surrender and domination of you or your people. You can't unilaterally choose to not participate without accepting those consequences.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#165
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualitative metrics are also metrics. You have to have a spectrum in order to weigh things against each other qualitatively, even if the spectrum is just a 2-point binary.

Qualitative assessment and qualitative metrics are different things.

Qualitative assessment is the overall process of using qualitative metrics to evaluate something.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#166

> 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 agree this stuff isn't encryption, which means it'll always be possible to circumvent the obfuscation, but it could raise the cost. Hopefully that can be done to the point where it's just not worth the bother. Did it work for non-cryptographic DRM? (Broadcast flag, Macrovision, deliberately miswritten floppy sectors, port dongles, physical manual challenge-response...)

> Did it work for non-cryptographic DRM? (Broadcast flag, Macrovision, deliberately miswritten floppy sectors, port dongles, physical manual challenge-response...)

Yes?

Did those measures stop piracy completely? No. Did they raise the cost of piracy so there was less of it? Probably.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the comment baited you, maybe it's because you're holding onto a popular but nonsensical belief system, and you're experiencing painful cognitive dissonance.

Are you intentionally being rude, or is this just how HN raised you to think?

It is not rude to point out that an insubstantial comment, which in particular falls foul of Hackernews guidelines, likely comes from a sublogical mental process. I regret my apparent failure to promote introspection or further inquiry into the issue, but I suppose the rockheadedness to which I reacted would prevent this anyway for the foreseeable future.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#168
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualitative assessment and qualitative metrics are different things.

Qualitative assessment is the overall process of using qualitative metrics to evaluate something.

I feel like both viewpoints are valid ways of determining what you personally view as "good", and I don't want to take away from that diversity of opinion

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#169
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualitative assessment and qualitative metrics are different things.

Qualitative assessment is the overall process of using qualitative metrics to evaluate something.

The important distinction is it covers a wider range of analysis than qualitative metrics alone.

This matters due to the difference between a hypothetical perfect analysis covering every possibility and one than can actually take place in the real world.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you hopelessly naive or are you just Sam Altman ?

Well, as a user of LLMs I also find it annoying, the agents gather information on my behalf, they save me time and money. Are we splitting humanity? Those with info accessible to agents and those who only use their human sense directly? This whole distinction is futile imho. And no, I'm not Sam Altman. I mean training is one thing, you should honor people's licenses, but browsing and gathering information? Why force…

My biggest fear with AI is that it basically devalues the production of knowledge. They’re a continued march away from actually showing people the original information, and the people doing that writing get less and less credit.

The companies themselves know they depend on this knowledge but have no plan to fund or replace the work done on sites like Wikipedia, stack overflow, or blogs like acoup.blog

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