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Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

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Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#101

Post by BlueTemplar »

Bjartr wrote: post #31

> Imagine applying for a job, only to find out that an algorithm powered by artificial intelligence (AI) rejected your resume before a human even saw it The article says this like it's a new problem. Automated resume screening is a long established practice at this point. That it'll be some LLM doing the screening instead of a keyword matcher doesn't change much. Although, it could be argued that an LLM would better…

Good point : like when a killing is done by a machine that wasn't directly operated, the perpetrator might be found guilty, but for manslaughter rather than murder ?

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#102

Post by BlueTemplar »

beloch wrote: post #82

>* "AI decision making also needs to be more transparent. Whether it’s automated hiring, healthcare or financial services, AI should be understandable, accountable and open to scrutiny." You can't simply look at a LLM's code and determine if, for example, it has racial biases. This is very similar to a human. You can't look inside someone's brain to see if they're racist. You can only respond to what they do. If a hu…

Not sure why you used the example of a human when those actually have legal responsibility and, as you suggest, are unique ?

Rather, why would LLMs be treated any differently from other machines ? Mass recall of flawed machines (if dangerous enough) is common after all.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#103

Post by BlueTemplar »

lacker wrote: post #2

I think most people who want to "opt out of AI" don't actually understand where AI is used. Every Google search uses AI, even the ones that don't show an "AI panel" at the top. Every iOS spellcheck uses AI. Every time you send an email or make a non-cryptocurrency electronic payment, you're relying on an AI that verifies that your transaction is legitimate. I imagine the author would respond, "That's not what I mean!…

Yes, yet another example why the word 'AI' should be tabooed : use 'machine', 'software', "software using neural networks" (or another specific term) instead.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#104

Post by BlueTemplar »

hedora wrote: post #46

Maybe people will finally realize that allowing companies to gather private information without permission is a bad idea, and should be banned. Such information is already used against everyone multiple times a day. On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! This tradeoff has basically nothing to do with recent advances…

> On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it!

> This tradeoff has basically nothing to do with recent advances in AI though.

I am surprised someone on HN would think this, especially considering the recent examples of DDoS via LLM crawlers compared to how websites are glad to be crawled by search engines.

For the first part : why do you think that robots.txt even exists ? Or why, say, YouTube constantly tries (and fails) to prevent you to use the 'wrong' kind of software to download their videos ?

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#105

Post by JKCalhoun »

Bjartr wrote: post #31

> Imagine applying for a job, only to find out that an algorithm powered by artificial intelligence (AI) rejected your resume before a human even saw it The article says this like it's a new problem. Automated resume screening is a long established practice at this point. That it'll be some LLM doing the screening instead of a keyword matcher doesn't change much. Although, it could be argued that an LLM would better…

> The article says this like it's a new problem.

I suspect though there might be something different today in terms of scale. Bigger corporations perhaps did some kind of screening (I am not aware of it though — at Apple I was asked to personally submit resumés for people I knew that were looking for engineering jobs — perhaps there was automation in other parts of the company). I doubt the restaurants around Omaha were doing any automation on screening resumés. That probably just got a lot easier with the pervasiveness of LLMs.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#106

Post by BlueTemplar »

yoko888 wrote: post #89
chii wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> silence is interpreted as consent silence is indeed concent (of the status quo). You need to vote with your wallet, personal choice and such - if you want to be comfortable, choosing the status quo is the way, and thus consent. There's no possibility of a world where you get to remain comfortable, but still get to have a "choice" to dictate a choice contrary to the status quo.

[dead]

Quite a lot of people try(ied) to buy it with blood and still fail(ed) :

https://samzdat.com/2017/06/01/the-meridian-of-her-greatness...

(Note how depending how one (mis)reads what you wrote, this is human nature, and there no escaping it, and you would likely be miserable if you tried.)

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#107

Post by mjburgess »

poslathian wrote: post #83
tkellogg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere in 2024 I noticed that "AI" shifted to no longer include "machine learning" and is now closer to "GenAI" but still bigger than that. It was never a strict definition, and was always shifting, but it made a big shift last year to no longer include classical ML. Even fairly technical people recognize the shift.

I’ve worked in this field for 20+ years and as far as I can tell the only consistent colloquial definition of AI is “things lay people are surprised a computer can do right now”

AI has always been a marketing term for computer science research -- right from the inception. It's a sin of academia, not the public.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#108

Post by jdietrich »

chii wrote: post #65
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an underlying assumption there that is certainly incorrect. So many stupid comments about AI boil down to "humans are incredibly good at X, we can't risk having AI do it". Humans are bad at all manner of things. There are all kinds of bad human decisions being made in insurance, health care, construction, investing, everywhere. It's one big joke to suggest we are good at all this stuff.

The fear is that by delegating to an ai, there's no recourse if the outcome for the person is undesirable (correctly or not). What is needed from the AI is a trace/line-of-reasoning to which a decision is derived. Like a court judgement, which has explanations attached. This should be available (or be made as part of the decision documentation).

The EU has already addressed this in the GDPR. Using AI is fine, but individuals have a right to demand a manual review. Companies and government agencies can delegate work to AI, but they can't delegate responsibility.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#109

Post by drivingmenuts »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #61
drivingmenuts wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just not sure I see where AI has made my search results better or more reliable. And until it can be proven that those results are better, I'm going to remain skeptical. I'm not even sure what form that proof would take. I do know that I can tolerate non-deterministic behavior from a human, but having computers demonstrate non-deterministic behavior is, to me, a violation of the purpose for which we build compute…

[flagged]

Sure, but at least with encryption, someone can demonstrate how the result was reached, since the result is based on a formula. With AI, people seem perfectly happy to be building a black box and just hoping for good result.

We also don't abdicate our decision-making to encryption processes.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#110

Post by Coffeewine »

roenxi wrote: post #100
kazinator wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad decisions in insurance are, roughly speaking, on the side of over-approving. AI will perform tirelessly and consistently at maximizing rejections. It will leave no stone unturned in search for justifications why a claim ought to be denied.

That isn't what the incentives point too; in a free market the insurers are aligned to accuracy. An insurer who has a reputation of being unreasonable about payouts won't have any customers - what is the point of taking out a policy if you expect the insurer to be unreasonable about paying? It'd take an odd customer to sign up for that. If they over-approve they will be unprofitable because their premiums aren't high…

But I expect my insurer to be unreasonable about paying today.

It’s just that A) I didn’t choose this insurer, my employer did and on balance the total package isn’t such that I want a new employer and B) I expect pretty much all my available insurance companies to be unreasonable.

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