AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by GaryBluto » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #9

I'm glad this person found community, but I think they've been a bit starstruck by concentrated interest. At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. There are those people about smart phones, the Internet itself, even television. Meanwhile: the ability to poison models, if it can be made to work reliably, is a genuinely interesting CS ques…

> At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it.

I can guarantee there will be at least a few small ones, especially in the wake of the Sam Altman attacks and the "Zizian" cult. I doubt they'll be very organized and they will ultimately fail, but unfortunately at least a few people will (and have already) die(d) because of these radicals.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/18/sam-altma...

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/17/tech/anti-ai-attack-sam-a...

https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/mar/0...

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

#152

Post by sidrag22 » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #80

I am hoping at some point we can move towards having more nuanced conversations about AI and the role it should play in our world. It seems like currently the only two camps are at either extreme. Isn't there somewhere between removing AI from the world entirely and just sitting back and letting it take over everything? I want to talk about responsible AI use, and how to mitigate the effects on society, and to accoun…

kinda surprised to see this type of take out of someone who participates on this website. I feel like this is the place where I have seen that middle ground surface the most. Just the overall shift in the past year from semi handwaving to feeling like it must be embraced, and identifying the problems it creates and how to address them. I feel this is all exactly what you are mentioning.

I think AI as a proper utilized tool, is amazing, I think our lack of restraint when just throwing it into everyone's hands without understanding of the tools they are using, is horrifying. I'd imagine a lot of the community here echos that same sentiment, but maybe not, and i am just making assumptions.

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

#153

Post by mitthrowaway2 » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #138

drcode wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. Then I have good news for you: If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence, there actually will no longer "be an active community of people who loathe AI and work to obstruct it"

>If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence This is either a misunderstanding of the anti-AI crowd or an intentional attempt to discredit them. The majority of anti-AI people don't actually fear this because that belief would require that this person has already bought into the hype regarding the actual power and prowess of AI. The bigger motivator for anti-AI folks is usual…

It is not a misunderstanding; the anti-AI crowd is heterogeneous.

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

#154

Post by dspillett » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

jordanb wrote: post #112

larodi wrote: post #17

This whole poisoning intent is so incredibly misappropriated, that I feel sad about it. First of all - there is enough content to train on already, that is not poisoned, and second - the other new content is largely populated in automated manner from the real world, and by workers in large shops in Africa, that are being paid to not produce shit. So yes, you can pollute the good old internet even more, but no, you ca…

There may be plenty of content out there but everyone with any content on the internet is struggling to keep AI crawlers that they never authorized out. In many cases, people are having to do so just to protect their infrastructure from request spamming. Since AI crawlers don't obey any consent markers denying access to content, it makes sense for content owners who don't want AI trained on their content to poison it…

> It's possibly the only way to keep the AI crawlers away.

Unfortunately that won't work. If you've served them enough content to have noticeable poisoning effect then you've allowed all that load through your resources. It won't stop them coming either - for the most part they don't talk to each other so even if you drive some away more will come, there is no collaborative list of good and bad places to scrape.

The only half-way useful answer to the load issue ATM is PoW tricks like Anubis, and they can inconvenience some of your target audience as well. They don't protect your content at all, once it is copied elsewhere for any reason it'll get scraped from there. For instance if you keep some OSS code off GitHub, and behind some sort of bot protection, to stop it ending up in CoPilot's dataset, someone may eventually fork it and push their version to GitHub anyway thereby nullifying your attempt.

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

#155

Post by philipkglass » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

kmeisthax wrote: post #115

madamelic wrote: post #11

I do understand people's dislike / hatred for AI but I am equally baffled. I feel like the same people that shout "Capitalism sucks, free us from our labor" are the exact same types that hate AI. The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate. The "cyber psychosis" thing is overblown just like the "Tesla ignites its passengers" is. The only reason it gets i…

There is no path from the current set of cloud-focused AI hyperscalers to the kind of fully automated luxury gay space communism you seem to be gesturing at. The economics don't work out. OpenAI, Google, and/or Anthropic are supposed to invent magic superintelligence that makes all human labor obsolete or uncompetitive and... just host it for free? Like, that's not how the game is played. Them producing and hosting a…

The only way you get the capital to train and host models at this scale is if you have a story to sell to investors that ends with "and then we become an economic chokepoint and extract rents from everyone else".

I agree that this dream of huge returns is luring investors.

I don't think that it will actually work that way. The barriers to making a useful model appear to be modest and keep getting lower. There are a lot of tasks where some AI is useful, but you don't need the very best model if there's a "good enough" solution available at lower prices.

I believe that the irrational exuberance of AI investors is effectively subsidizing technological R&D in this area before AI company valuations drop to realistic levels. Even if OpenAI ends up being analogous to Yahoo! (a currently non-sexy company that was once a darling of investors), their former researchers and engineers can circulate whatever they learned on the job to the organizations that they join later.

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

#156

Post by vidarh » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #9

I'm glad this person found community, but I think they've been a bit starstruck by concentrated interest. At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. There are those people about smart phones, the Internet itself, even television. Meanwhile: the ability to poison models, if it can be made to work reliably, is a genuinely interesting CS ques…

> the ability to poison models, if it can be made to work reliably

Ultimately, it comes down to the halting problem: If there's a mechanism that can be used to alter the measured behaviour, then the system can change behaviour to take into account the mechanism.

In other words, unless you keep the poisoning attack strictly inaccessible to the public, the mechanism used to poison will also be possible to use to train models to be resistant to it, or train filters to filter out poisoned data.

At least unless the poisoning attack destroys information to a degree that it would render the poisoned system worthless to humans as well, in which case it'd be unusable.

So either such systems would be insignificant enough to matter, or they will only work for long enough to be noticed, incorporated into training, and fail.

I agree it's an interesting CS challenge, though, as it will certainly expose rough edges where the models and training processes works sufficiently different to humans to allow unobtrusive poisoning for a short while. Then it'll just help us refine and harden the training processes.

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

#157

Post by GaryBluto » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

rockskon wrote: post #140

tptacek wrote: post #9

I'm glad this person found community, but I think they've been a bit starstruck by concentrated interest. At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. There are those people about smart phones, the Internet itself, even television. Meanwhile: the ability to poison models, if it can be made to work reliably, is a genuinely interesting CS ques…

I am so very tired of people who compare AI to smart phones or the Internet as large. There were never such wide scale and, above all, centralized efforts to coerce and shame people into using the Internet or smart phones in spite of their best efforts.

Nobody is "shaming" anybody into using AI but their jobs may require use of it. It's the same as all the secretaries who found themselves having to make the jump from the typewriter to the computer.

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

#158

Post by zoogeny » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

rmdashrfv wrote: post #127

zoogeny wrote: post #25

I often question my own bias on this because in my interactions with local non-tech people, the adoption of AI has pretty much affected everyone I know and it is by my estimation a majority positive reaction. I live in a fairly rural part of the PNW. So when I read "People hate what AI is doing to our world." it honestly feels like either I am completely deluded or the author is. It feels like a high school bully say…

I'd say that the molotov cocktails being thrown at the house of an AI company CEO being met with mostly praise and a little bit of apathy is a good hint you might actually be in a bubble

I don't agree, in fact I would say if I was surrounded by people glorifying violence that would suggest I was in an extreme minority.

It reminds me of similar late-stage-capitalism like activity, from the assassination of the insurance company CEO, the fire-bombing of Tesla's, etc. It is hard to disentangle hate that is based on economic inequality or power imbalance from hate directed explicitly at AI. That is especially true since one narrative suggests that both types of inequality (economic and power) may be accelerated by an unequal distribution of access to AI.

So we might end up in an argument over whether the hate that drives the violence is towards AI at all, or if that is merely a symptom of existing anti-capitalist sentiment that is on the rise.

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

#159

Post by concinds » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #138

drcode wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. Then I have good news for you: If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence, there actually will no longer "be an active community of people who loathe AI and work to obstruct it"

>If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence This is either a misunderstanding of the anti-AI crowd or an intentional attempt to discredit them. The majority of anti-AI people don't actually fear this because that belief would require that this person has already bought into the hype regarding the actual power and prowess of AI. The bigger motivator for anti-AI folks is usual…

There are many different groups of anti-AI people with different beliefs.

This attempt to "reframe and reclaim" (here, paraphrased: "significant existential risks from AI is actually marketing hype by pro-AI fanatics") is a rhetorical device, but not an honest one. It's a power struggle over who gets to define and lead "the" anti-AI movement.

We may agree or disagree with them but there are rational anti-AI arguments that center on X-risks.

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

#160

Post by hbarka » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #117

izend wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet Chinese models will be much harder to poison and the fact the Chinese populace is much more pro-AI than the West.

> the fact the Chinese populace is much more pro-AI than the West. Is it? Honest question. Frankly the answer smells off. Similar to thinking US sentiment about AI is accurately reflected by people in Silicon Valley. Feels like we're getting biased views.

Peter Steinberger presented at a Ted Talk a few days ago and he shared a few interesting anecdotes of OpenClaw now a fact of daily life at work in China.

https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_steinberger_how_i_created_op...