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AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

gabrielweinberg.com

191–200 of 236 posts

Re: AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm banned from a few subreddits for correctly pointing out that ricing is not a pejorative, and the history of the culture that led to extreme customization. You have malevolent third-party bots taking advantage of poor moderation to conflate similar/same word different context pairs to silence communication. For example, the reddit AI bots considers "ricing" to be the same as "rice boy". The latter definitely is pe…

Per the Linux Foundation it is inappropriate to speak of programs as "hung" due to the political and social history associated with hanging. What makes you think "ricing" would be considered acceptable language in today's context?

The Linux Foundation is a bunch of business suits trying to tell the grassroots FOSS community to follow corporate interests. I don't take them seriously.

Just look at their list of directors. It's the fortune 500 right there.

Re: AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

#192

It seems highly unlikely to me that it will be banned by congress in the next few years, if ever. So, what we really should be asking is how do we live in a world of pervasive surveillance, where everything we do and say is being recorded, saved, analyzed, and potentially used to manipulate us. As I write this, sitting in Peet's Coffee in downtown Los Altos, I count three different cameras recording me, and I'm using…

That’s the world Los Altos café-goers have, there’s lots of worlds out there to choose from.

Re: AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm suspended on reddit for, as best as I can tell, posting a DFhack bug fix script. For the uninitiated, this is a bug fix script for a program commonly used in Dwarf Fortress moderating, not anything illicit. If this kind of low-quality AI moderation is the future, I'm not sure if these major platforms will even remain usable.

That's hilarious given that Reddit is utterly overrun with blatant, low-quality LLM accounts using ChatGPT to post comments and gain karma, and several of the "text stories" on the front page from subs like AITA are blatant AI slop that the users (or other bots?) are eating up. I suspect sites like Reddit don't care about a few% false positive rate, without considering in context that bot farmers literally do not car…

> Don't worry, Reddit's day of reckoning comes when the advertisers figure out what percent of Reddit's traffic that they're paying to serve ads to are just bots.

No it won't, we'll all have to upload our IDs and videos of our faces just to register or use Reddit or any social media. They will know who is a real monetizable user or not.

Re: AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is usually a hot bed of experimentation in corporate malfeasance.

As an American, it's funny how ahead and "first world" the US can be in some things, but how backwards and "developing country" the US can be in other things. Medicine itself is very first-world. But medical insurance is one of those "worse than developing country" things. The fact that Americans need medical insurance at all is appalling to many countries, first world and otherwise. And of course, by funny I mean "I…

Which things are the US ahead in?

Re: AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American, it's funny how ahead and "first world" the US can be in some things, but how backwards and "developing country" the US can be in other things. Medicine itself is very first-world. But medical insurance is one of those "worse than developing country" things. The fact that Americans need medical insurance at all is appalling to many countries, first world and otherwise. And of course, by funny I mean "I…

Which things are the US ahead in?

Good question. Technology, for one. Is it the first in technology? Probably not. But when comparing first world countries with developing countries, technology is where the US's economic output is.

And also military, though I'm not sure if that's something to be proud of.

Re: AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

#197
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying issue here isn’t AI based policing, it’s the fact private entities have enough unregulated influence on peoples’ daily life that their use of these or any such policy mechanisms are undemocratically effecting people in notably significant ways. The Facebook example is, whatever, but what if it’s some landlord renting making a decision, some health insurance company deciding your coverage, etc. Now obvi…

We already live in this world for health insurance. The ai can make plausible sounding denials which a doctor can rubber stamp. You have no ability to sue the doctor for malpractice, you cannot appeal the decision. Medical insurance is quickly becoming a simple scam where you are forced to pay a private entity that refuses to ever perform its function.

Worth noting this isn't hypothetical. There was a story a while back where a health insurance company would hire real doctors to sit at computers all day clicking "accept AI resolution" over and over (they were fired if they rejected AI resolutions) because the law required that.

Re: AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

#198

I stopped using Facebook because I saw a video of a little Australian girl maybe 7 years old age wise holding a spider bigger than her face in her hand. I wrote the most internet meme comment I could think of “girl let go of that spider, we gotta set the house on fire” hit the button to post, only it did not post, it gave me an account strike. At the time I was the only developer at my employer who managed our Facebo…

I'm suspended on reddit for, as best as I can tell, posting a DFhack bug fix script. For the uninitiated, this is a bug fix script for a program commonly used in Dwarf Fortress moderating, not anything illicit. If this kind of low-quality AI moderation is the future, I'm not sure if these major platforms will even remain usable.

Reddit has been garbage since the effective private equity takeover.

I'm not sure if they actually got taken over by private equity, but they acted like it since about a year before the third-party app tantrum.

Re: AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

#199
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, retargeting/personalized ads have never bothered me. If I'm gonna see ads anyway, I'd much rather get ads that might actually interest me, versus wildly irrelevant pharmaceutical drugs and other nonsense.

The ads won't be for the product which will bring you maximum value. They will be for the product that will bring the advertiser maximum profit (for example, by manipulating you into buying something overpriced). The products which are really good and cheap, giving all their surplus value to you and just a little bit to the maker, will lose the bidding for the ad slot.

Right. I think ai on the user's side is going to be necessary soon. Then they can negotiate with the advertiser's AI to determine what to show. This will need to be on the platform level or the hardware level.

This solves the problem of seeing ads that are not best for the user.

Re: AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

#200
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not using Facebook doesn't help either though. My new co-worker didn't have one but needed it for his job so he made an account and was immediately flagged for suspicious activity.

What did he do that was deemed suspicious? Send a large number of friend requests very quickly after joining ( (LinkedIn ramped up anti-bot/inauthentic-user heuristics like that a few years ago. Sadly they are necessary. Near-impossible for heuristics to distinguish between real humans with inauthentic or suspiciously commercial behavior.)

If they suspect you're trying to ban evade they'll ban your account but their ban evasion detection is trigger happy.
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