You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online • Hacker News Board

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#101

Post by from-nibly » Sun, Oct 06, 2024, 2:59 AM UTC

theGnuMe wrote: post #46

_heimdall wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do schools actually manage requiring this? Is it required that all students have access to smartphones, tablets, the internet in general, etc? If a student doesn't have a device to install the crappy branded app on, what does the school do? I don't have kids yet though that time is likely coming, this goes firmly on the growing list of reasons why we'd choose to homeschool.

When you homeschool you will likely buy said crappy app (or another one) to help you actually school your kids...

Why would you need an app to homeschool your kids?

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#102

Post by em-bee » Sun, Oct 06, 2024, 2:21 PM UTC

_heimdall wrote: post #97

em-bee wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i agree that traditional schooling leaves a lot to be desired. it's not just public schools but private schools as well. it's the whole structure of lectures and boring homework and the inflexibility of the teaching material. but most of all, and i believe studies confirmed that (i vaguely remember there was a discussion about this here on HN) the primary factor for a good school experience is the quality of the teac…

> i am mainly thinking of the montessori education model. it has proven itself. and teacher training is not expensive. it only takes one year if done fulltime. My wife is a big fan of the Waldorf schools and has said she'd went to replicate a lot of their approach if we homeschooled. We actually lived a few blocks away from one in the Netherlands and had planned on sending kids there, but have since moved back to the…

Integration and socialization is definitely a challenge for homeschooling

it is possible to manage that. the problem is people intentionally avoiding socializing to prevent their children from learning alternative ideas.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#103

Post by moron4hire » Sun, Oct 06, 2024, 9:47 PM UTC

SirMaster wrote: post #100

moron4hire wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks, don't want to put my kids through my childhood

My point was simply it's a valid option. You can't just reject some valid options and then say that what's left is inescapable... Or at least I don't think that's a very strong argument.

I'm not on a good mentalspace to discuss this, I will admit. By most accounts, I'm consider a "success" of homeschooling. And in that, I have some resentment. A child shouldn't be a social experiment. A child should be prepared to live in the society in which they live. And that's where I think homeschooling failed me.

I don't blame my parents for this. At the time, 35+ years ago, it was "different". I guess. I don't know. I know my parents did what they thought was best. I just don't think they knew what was best. They were barely in their 20s when they had me. I was well into my 30s when we had our kids. So now, I'm here with them, and I don't want them to experience the pervasive loneliness that I did.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#104

Post by JohnFen » Mon, Oct 07, 2024, 2:11 PM UTC

_heimdall wrote: post #89

JohnFen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the web was widely scraped to train LLMs, I have to assume that the entirety of what I had up on the web was included. That's more than a "miniscule pinch". I consider it to be wholesale abuse. For me, money doesn't enter into it at all. However, there's literally nothing I can do about it aside from withdrawing from the public web -- which is what I've done, aside from writing comments here. Until/unless there…

There's never going to be a way to defend against crawlers and still have an open web. Good actors may respect conventions like a robots.txt file but that's ultimately just a polite request. You could get further trying to block by user agent headers, known crawler IPs, etc but then you're just taking up the same fight advertisers have with ad blockers.

> You could get further trying to block by user agent headers

That's a game of what-a-mole, though, and when the scraped data is being used to train LLMs, then a single miss is a really huge problem. That's why I gave up on that approach and took my sites off of the open web until some effective defense becomes possible.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#105

Post by JohnFen » Mon, Oct 07, 2024, 2:13 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #88

JohnFen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the web was widely scraped to train LLMs, I have to assume that the entirety of what I had up on the web was included. That's more than a "miniscule pinch". I consider it to be wholesale abuse. For me, money doesn't enter into it at all. However, there's literally nothing I can do about it aside from withdrawing from the public web -- which is what I've done, aside from writing comments here. Until/unless there…

The complaints I see are almost always aimed at the output of an LLM, and that only contains a significant amount of a work when it breaks. Going after the LLM itself, not the output, is a lot trickier. Anyone can make a big database of public website contents. And if they use it to make a search engine for example, that gets classified as entirely legitimate. If we're excluding the output of the LLM, what's the diff…

> Going after the LLM itself, not the output, is a lot trickier.

Exactly so, and this is why withdrawing from the open web is the only realistic solution at this time.