AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by rightbyte » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 5:19 PM UTC

rsyring wrote: post #16

IMO: make all the laws you want. They generally won't be enforced and, if they are, it will take 5-10 years to make it's way through the courts. At best, the fines will be huge and yet account for maybe 10% of the revenue generated by violating the law. The incentives are all wrong. I'm fundamentally a capitalist because I don't know another system that will work better. But, there really is just too much concentrate…

> I'm fundamentally a capitalist

Being a capitalist is decided by access to capital not really a belief system.

> But, there really is just too much concentrated wealth in these orgs.

Please make up your mind? Should capital self-accumulate and grant power or not?

Portraying capitalism as some sort of force of nature that one doesn't "know another system that will work better" might be the neoliberals biggest accomplishment.

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

#62

Post by sacul » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 5:19 PM UTC

mejutoco wrote: post #44

sacul wrote: post #41

I think the biggest problem with chatbots is the constant effort to anthropomorphize them. Even seasoned software developers who know better fall into acting like they are interacting with a human. But a llm is not a human, and I think OpenAI and all the others should make it clear that you are NOT talking to a human. Repeatedly. I think if society were trained to treat AI as NOT human, things would be better.

> I think if society were trained to treat AI as NOT human, things would be better. Could you elaborate on why? I am curious but there is no argument.

Yeah, thanks for asking. My reasoning is this:

That chatbot you're interacting with is not your friend. I take it as a fact (assumption? axiom?) that it can never be your friend. A friend is a human - animals, in some sense, can be friends - who has your best interests at heart. But in fact, that chatbot "is" a megacorp whose interests certainly aren't your interests - often, their interests are at odds with your interests.

Google works hard with branding and marketing to make people feel good about using their products. But, at the end of the day, it's reasonably easy to recognize that when you use their products, you are interacting with a megacorp.

Chatbots blur that line, and there is a huge incentive for the megacorps to make me feel like I'm interacting with a safe, trusted "friend" or even mentor. But... I'm not. In the end, it will always be me interacting with Microsoft or OpenAI or Google or whoever.

There are laws, and then there is culture. The laws for AI and surveillance capitalism need to be in place, and we need lawmakers who are informed and who are advocates for the regular people who need to be protected. But we also need to shift culture around technology use. Just like social customs have come in that put guard rails around smartphone usage, we need to establish social customs around AI.

AI is a super helpful tool, but it should never be treated as a human friend. It might trick us into thinking that its a friend, but it can never be or become a friend.

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

#63

Post by citizenpaul » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

Lets not forget that Gabereial Weinburg is a two faced ghoul or wolf in sheep clothing. He has literally said he does not believe people need privacy yet that supposedly is the duckduckgo's main selling point. He has made all kinds of tracking deals with other companies so duckduckgo "is not tracking you" just their partners are.

Most of the controversial stuff he has done is being whitewashed from the internet and is now hard to find.

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

#64

Post by philipallstar » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #49

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…

Maybe it banned you because you used a comma splice[0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice

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

#65

Post by esseph » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

alphazard wrote: post #27

dataviz1000 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that goes against the business model. Not if you are selling hardware. If I was Apple, Dell, or Lenovo, I would be pushing for local running models supporting Hugging Face while I full speed developed systems that can do inference locally.

Local models do make a lot of sense (especially for Apple), but it's tough to figure out a business model that would cause a company like OpenAI to distribute weights they worked so hard to train. Getting customers to pay for the weights would be entirely dependent on copyright law, which OpenAI already has a complicated relationship with. Quite the needle to thread: it's okay for us to ingest and regurgitate data wi…

There is no moat.

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

#66

Post by quectophoton » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 5:29 PM UTC

yupyupyups wrote: post #34

Wrong. Excessive data collection should be banned.

But this is not excessive, it's Legitimate Interest and absolutely needed to provide a good service /s

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

#67

Post by koolala » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

pwython wrote: post #53

cousin_it wrote: post #14

This is a great point. Everyone who has talked with chatbots at all: please note that all contents of your past conversations with chatbots (that already exist now, and that you can't meaningfully delete!) could be used in the future to target ads to you, manipulate you financially and politically, and sell "personalized influence on you specifically" as a service to the highest bidder. Just wanted to make sure y'all…

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.

If I'm going to be psychologically manipulated, I want my psychological profile to be tracked and targeted specifically to my everyday behaviors.

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

#68

Post by FollowingTheDao » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

I cannot understate how afraid I am of the use of AI Surveillance. The worst thing is there is nothing you can do about it. It does not matter how private I am online, if the person I am sending things to is not privacy conscious and, say, uses AI to summarize emails, then I am in the AI database. And then there is just the day to day data being scraped, like bank records, etc.

I mean a PARKING LOT in my town is using AI cameras to track and bill people in a parking lot! The people of my town are putting pressure on the parking lot owner to get rid of it but apparently the company is paying him too much money for having it in his lot.

Like the old video says "Don't talk to the Police" [1], but now we have to expand it to say "Don't Do Anything", because everything you do is being fed into a database that can possibly be searched.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

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

#69

Post by FollowingTheDao » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

jazzyjackson wrote: post #59

pwython wrote: 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.

I wish I could fund an as campaign to free people from the perception that ads are to sell you products Ads are there to change your behavior to make you more likely to buy products, e.g., put downward pressure on your self esteem to make you feel "less than" unless you live a lifestyle that happens to involve buying X product They are not made in your best interest, they are adverserial psycho-tech that have a side…

This, yes, thank you. Advertising is behavioral modification. They even talk about it out in the open, and if you are unconvinced, hear it from the horse's mouth:

https://brandingstrategyinsider.com/achieving-marketing-obje...

"Your ultimate marketing goal is behavior change — for the simple reason that nothing matters unless it results in a shift in consumer actions"

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

#70

Post by dyauspitr » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

You through enough identifiers into the mix and even low level employees will be able to get a summary of your entire past in seconds. It’s a terrifying world and I feel bad for gen z and beyond.