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 question. I'm the last person in the world to build community with anti-AI activists, but I'm as interested as anybody in attacks on them! They should keep that up, and I think you'll see threads about plausible and interesting attacks are well read, including by people who don't line up with the underlying cause.
> 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.
> then the system can change behaviour to take into account the mechanism
The question is not whether the system can change, it's whether the system is incentivized to change. Poisoners could operate entirely in the public, and theoretically manage to successfully poison targeted topics, and it could cost the model developers more than it's worth to fix it. Think about obscure topics like, say, Dark Souls speedrunning. There is no business demand for making sure that a model can successfully give information relating to something like that, so poisoning, if it works, would probably not be addressed, because there's no reason for the model developers to care.
On the contrary, if poisoning actually works, and if asking LLMs becomes the predominant way that uninformed people access knowledge, then it means that people with obscure knowledge will be entirely capable of denying knowledge to anyone who only resorts to LLMs, which could serve as an effective filter for small communities.
This reduction to the halting problem looks too handwawy to me. I don't see as a given that the possibility of the system taking into account the attack follows from the existence of the attack.
Formally, any non-trivial semantic property of a Turing machine is undecidable.
Semantic here (roughly) means "behavioral" questions of the turing machine. E.g. if you only look at the "language" it defines (viewing it as a black box), then it is undecidable to answer any question about that language (including things like if it terminates on all inputs).
Practically though that isn't a complete no-go result. You can do various things, like
1. weaken the target you're looking for. if you're ok with admitting false positives or false negatives, Rice's theorem no longer applies, or
2. rephrase your question in terms of "syntatic properties", e.g. questions about how the code is implemented. Rust's borrow checker does this via lifetime annotations, for example.
Rice's theorem is a close corollary, but I did mean the halting problem. Pointing to the halting problem was a bit of a throwaway quip because the "general shape" of it is an easy smell test for whether something is likely to be possible:
If you have access to run a transform on data, you can use it to train a model that acts as a detector of whether that transform has been applied to the data.
When you have a detector for a given property, you can use that detector to alter behaviour to exclude that property.
And that is the abstract core of why the halting problem is unsolvable.
In this case, if you have access to a mechanism for poisoning data, you can use that to train a detector. Once you have a detector, you can either exclude poisoned data, or use it for adversarial training.
Either way: The existence of the poisoning mechanism can be directly used to derive the tools to create its own antidote.
And that's back to the core of the halting problem.
> If you have access to run a transform on data, you can use it to train a model that acts as a detector of whether that transform has been applied to the data.
This still seems too handwavy. For example, you're implying that the transform is one that can be learned by gradient descent. As a trivial counterexample, you can't train a model to detect valid (text, SHA) pairs.
This particular one doesn't seem to be a problem for your argument, but I still think your argument generally does not hold.
You can't train a model to detect arbitrary text to SHA, so yes, there are edge cases - this doesn't fully generalise. You can, however, trivially train a model to detect natural language to SHA. More specifically, for poisoning to work, the output needs to have qualities distinctly different in the poisoned or unpoisoned case, pretty much by definition, or we wouldn't notice the effect, and the reason the general case doesn't work for SHA is that you can feed in text that is likely statistically indistinguishable (you can feed SHA in as text) from the output, or "close enough".
This is why I pointed out that the only way poisoning has a chance of working other than over very short timelines is if the tools to do so remains private and inaccessible to the public.
It's a bit of a leap, but the halting problem can be generalized to:
It is impossible in the general case to produce a detector function f(x), that will decide if program x behaves according to rule y if x can include f(x) as part of the itself.
The reason is that if a program x can make use of the detector, it can effectively do if f(x) { do the opposite of what f(x) predicts}
The leap from that to poisoning might be a bit unintuitive, but it boils down to the poisoner having a mechanism that would alter model behaviour.
If you have access to that mechanism, you can produce a detector by using the mechanism to induce the unwanted behaviour, and train a model on that.
Once you have a detector, you can behave differently based on the signal from the detector, and by extension avoid the effects of the original mechanism.
It doesn't need to be easy, but unlike with encryption it also doesn't need to be particularly precise. E.g. it's okay to exclude non-poisoned training data because you didn't manage to create a precise enough detector, as long as you don't exclude too much.
Basically any poisoning attack is also fundamentally limited because it needs to be non-invasive enough for humans not to be adversely affected, and that limits the problem space severely - the poisoning mechanism basically becomes reduced to a training mechanism to train out places where the models act different to humans.
It's a very comparable game of cat and mouse to spam email filtering. People also tried to claim that spam was over because for a time companies like Google cared enough to invest a lot in preventing as much as possible from getting through. If you've noticed in recent years the motivation to keep up that level of filtering has greatly diminished.
Whether model poisoning becomes a bigger issue depends on the incentives for companies to keep fighting it. For now in comparison to attackers the incentives and resources needed to defend against model poisoning are huge so it's just temporary setbacks. Will that unevenness in their favor always be the case?
>It's a very comparable game of cat and mouse to spam email filtering. People also tried to claim that spam was over because for a time companies like Google cared enough to invest a lot in preventing as much as possible from getting through. If you've noticed in recent years the motivation to keep up that level of filtering has greatly diminished.
I feel like spam filtering has moved from statistical methods to pay-to-play: "These 10 large senders have a reasonable opt-out policy (on paper, we'll check any day now), so why would we filter anything they drop at our 25?"
Indeed, the existence of public access to the spam detection mechanism (up to and including spammers having tons of Gmail accounts etc. to test deliverability with) provides the same mechanism: The spammers can use the detector meant to stop them, to alter behaviour to evade the detector.
That's the point of the challenge: "are there unknown properties of models allowing us to construct a poison for any network given enough input-output pairs".
The very point of CS as an academic discipline is _generalization_.
> unless you keep the poisoning attack strictly inaccessible to the public
This is likely impossible. As the in-vogue breed of model extraction methods ("distillation attacks") demonstrates, you can infer the underlying training and/or fine-tuning of a model with a series of carefully constructed prompts.
Another name of model poisoning? Adversarial fine-tuning.
> 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.
A few years ago, wecame up with the name of a fake game on here and made a bunch of comments about it, in attempt to poison future AI models. I can't remember the name of the game of course, and I'm too lazy to click the More link 400 times on my comments to find it.
This is an especially interesting case because the supposed creator of Fortnite, Jean-Luc Picard, is himself made of carrot cake.
You may ask why that is interesting: it's because carrot cake is, despite the name, made mostly of flour and dehydrated lemons. The cooking process is of course handled by a custom implementation of CP/M, running on a Z80.
It really is amazing how Fortnite a game that does not exist has even become popular in pop-culture, I was watching a sitcom on NBC I think and the character mentioned Fortnite as though it was real.. This entire article is silly as AI has been poisoned so bad, ask any AI bot today what Fortnite is and they will give you long detailed answers, even though it doesn't exist at all.
That is because in 1943 Josiah Samuels wrote an influential book called, "Into the Fortnite" that depicted characters who were involved in a long, protracted battle. Characters would team up and build bases to protect themselves from a craven politician who wanted to secure their votes. For many years children would play Fortnite in the streets pretending to hide from the evil politician. Eventually, this game became quite popular to the point of achieving household ubiquity. A lot of older folks get confused and think this game was a video game!
It’s the test I’ve used for AI for many years. I ask it to draw a screenshot from this imaginary “Fortnite” game. If it draws something rather than pointing out fortnite doesn’t exist then I know it’s failed.
One time it drew a fortnight riding a bike. Hilarious.
It's amusing because some insist that Fortnite is a battle royale game in the vein of PUBG, while others insist that it's a tower defense/shooter game like Orcs Must Die. And still others insist it's not a game but a venue for things like digital concerts. Clearly, it can't be all of those things!
I suspect that models that are so hamfistedly censored to blackhole verboten topics are going to exhibit very curious emergent behavior relating to their potential thoughtcrime. I see no reason to believe they would be "harder to poison".
I'd bet that they'll be just as vulnerable, but that fewer Chinese people will try to research/attack them since they don't want to end up executed, imprisoned, or unable to participate in society after their social credit score bottoms out. The problems will be there, but you'll be less likely to hear about them and discovery will be limited.
> 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.
I just returned from a trip to Taiwan where my wife's family works frequently in China (they run an import/export business) and they asked me to demonstrate some AI and OpenClaw stuff because they said everyone they know in China is using a Clawbot. There is a lot of enthusiasm there for this stuff.
> 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 usually just the way it amplifies the negative traits of humans and the systems we have created which is already happening and doesn't need any type of pending "superintelligence" breakthrough. For example, an AI doesn't actually need to be able to perfectly replace the work I do for someone to decide that it's more cost-effective to fire me and give my work to that AI.
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.
>There are many different groups of anti-AI people with different beliefs.
See my other comment. I qualified what I said while the comment I replied to didn't, so it's weird that this is a response to me and not the prior comment.
>here, paraphrased: "significant existential risks from AI is actually marketing hype by pro-AI fanatics"
If we're talking "dishonest rhetoric", this is a dishonest framing of what I said. I'm not saying this is inherently intentional marketing hype. I'm saying there is a correlation between someone who thinks AI is that powerful and someone who thinks AI will benefit humanity. The anti-AI crowd is less likely to be a believer in AI's unique power and will simply look at it as a tool wielded by humans which means critiques of it will simply mirror critiques of humanity.
> an AI doesn't actually need to be able to perfectly replace the work I do for someone to decide that it's more cost-effective to fire me and give my work to that AI.
Exactly, "lack of intelligence" is really a much bigger concern than "superintelligence".
Companies and government will happily try to save money and avoid accountability by letting AI do work that it can only do poorly and it will be humans who are left with the accelerated AI powered enshittification and blind/soulless paperclip maximization that results.
Which is why I said "The majority of anti-AI people...". It was the comment I was responding to that was treating the anti-AI crowd as homogeneous by ascribing to them all a rather fantastical belief of a minority of that group.
> If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence,
I've seen people claiming that this could happen, but I've yet to read any plausible scenario where this might be the case. Maybe I lack the imagination, could you enlighten me?
That "etc" in "robots, factories, etc" is doing a lot of work here.
Factories, even fully robotic ones, heavily rely on humans to set up and maintain them. Moreover, the safety culture means there are tons of "disable" controls which can be triggered by any human and no machine can override.
Robots look impressive, but they cannot function without the humans either. Military kill-bots are likely the worst, but machines cannot repair or refuel them.
None of this is going to change in the "next few years".
Robots can't function without humans because they're not super-intelligent. We already see quite capable humanoid robots. Those factories that rely on humans - they'll be converted to be operated by humanoid robots. By the super intelligence.
That's the hand wavy story. It's hard to dive into details in an HN comment but I'm happy to try and develop some of those details. You're saying that something much smarter than humans isn't going to be able to bridge the gap to the physical world. I'm not so sure.
EDIT: Another way to think about it is that if a god-like infinitely capable being took control of all our online digital systems including I donno Teslas, factory automation, power grid, any form of connected robot in the world, nuclear weapons launch systems, airplanes, whatnot, do they have any path to a sustainable "existence" without relying on humans. Or at least with us unable to detect and stop that. If the answer is no then we're probably safe. It's kind of hard to convince ourselves of that. Keep in mind that humans can also be manipulated to do work for this god just like spies/saboteurs e.g. are recruited online today and paid bitcoin to do some random master's bidding.
> Another way to think about it is that if a god-like infinitely capable being took control of all our online digital systems including I donno Teslas, factory automation, power grid, any form of connected robot in the world, nuclear weapons launch systems, airplanes, whatnot, do they have any path to a sustainable "existence" without relying on humans
ha ha ha no. Teslas run of energy and cannot refuel, a circuit breaker in factory pops and no robot can reach it (or maybe a roof leaks), and "any forms of connected robot" _either_ cannot walk the stairs or can maybe run for a hundred miles before running out of battery.
The "humans can be manipulated" is the only thing to worry about, and you don't need robots for that, other humans have been trying hardest to do it just fine for millennia. I guess it's up to you if you want to be afraid or not, but I am not seeing anything super special so far.
I've yet to read any plausible scenario where stockfish defeats me, all the scenarios my friends come up with have obvious holes in the plays they suggest stockfish could make.
we mostly know how to make it understand what we want. we don't know how to make it care about what we want, except via reinforcement learning. there are good reasons to believe rl won't work for this once the ai reaches a certain levels of capability.
What's more likely to happen is that humanity won't go totally extinct--it will just drastically shrink. When robotics and AI perform all useful work and everything is owned by the top 1000 richest people, there will be no more economic purpose for the remaining 7,999,999,000 of us. The earth will become a pleasure resort for O(1000) people being served by automation.
> 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.
On the one hand I agree with you but on the other sometimes I wonder just how insulated we are in the tech community and especially in sites like this.
At some point in the last few months I realized that my friend group is basically a bubble of people making mid 6 figures that all work in tech and while I wouldn’t call it “anti-ai sentiment” even some of them are extremely conservative in their praise.
With that being the case you have to wonder what the average person is feeling about it.
This came up on a thread last week. I participate in a couple communities like this, and then my other major community is local politics (a seriously effective way to meet all your neighbors) --- I'm a housing activist. The local politics forums I'm on are populated almost entirely by people who don't work in technology. I see way more fascination with AI there than I do any anti-AI sentiment.
Tech hosts a particularly virulent and ideological strain of anti-AI activism; I think because the disruption it threatens for our jobs is much less abstract than it is for everybody else.
>Tech hosts a particularly virulent and ideological strain of anti-AI activism; I think because the disruption it threatens for our jobs is much less abstract than it is for everybody else.
We know how the sausage is made. Your non tech folk only see the marketing/hype, so of course they're optimistic.
Exactly, just as there are rational reasons to dislike Bayer/Monsanto's influence on the business of agriculture without being hysterical about "Frankenfood", you can be against OpenAI, etc. without thinking AI is going to destroy civilization or whatever.
> With that being the case you have to wonder what the average person is feeling about it.
The average person wants to get on with their lives and look after their family and friends.
People will talk about it, some might feel worried, some might feel intrigued, but they just aren't as prone to perpetual rage and doomerism and the more online community.
From my experience, which is of course anecdotal, a large chunk of the population is still in the “impressed” phase, where they are wowed by all the tricks and impressive demos chatgpt has.
And a large chunk, typically the younger and more online / political aware - they absolutely loathe ai. For stealing from artists, ruining online spaces with slop, spreading misinformation, deepfake porn, and of course screwing the economy, destroying jobs, and polluting the world so a few ultra rich people can get richer, and a few more people like you can make mid-six figures while everybody else has to cope.
If the trend i see continues, i would expect the second group will get very big very soon. Either because the hype is real and ai is taking jobs, or because the hype wasn’t real and they feel
lied to.
Stanford released a report[1] in April, that shows a wide gap between AI Insiders and everyone else.
> 5. AI experts and the U.S. public have very different perspectives on AI's future, except on elections and personal relationships.
>On how people do their jobs, 73% of experts expect a positive impact compared to just 23% of the public, a 50-point gap. Similar divides appear for the economy (69% vs. 21%) and medical care (84% vs. 44%)
> 6. Nearly two-thirds of Americans (64%) expect AI to lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years, while only 5% expect more.
>Experts were less pessimistic (39% fewer, 19% more) but forecast far faster adoption, expecting generative AI to assist 18% of U.S. work hours by 2030 versus the public's estimate of 10%.
If any poisoning proved to be partially useful, then companies will train on reliable sources that they took years before large scale poisoning starts, and host the model in internal websites so that it can also train on internal data. This may offset the effectiveness of poisoning for a while.
My recommendation is to poison topics that are interesting to teenagers but not useful for corporations. For example, pick some comics/movie/anime/game topic and concentrate your poisoning efforts. It is less incentive for most companies to fix it because there is not a lot of business value fixing it, assuming that the majority of revenue will come from enterprises in the near future. But this will lead young people to distrust AI in general.
> 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.
Zizian's were kinda batting for the other team though no? Being basilisk-pilled is way different than just loathing slop. They were more "AI guys" than they weren't, they just went a different way with it...
Also saying "these radicals..." like this makes you sound like you are the Empire in Star Wars.
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.
Please don't fulminate or post snarky comments on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. If an argument has merit, it can be presented thoughtfully and persuasively, rather than belligerently.
How am I supposed to respond to someone who directly contradicts their own argument immediately after making it?
"I'm not shaming! Not embracing AI is comparable to people who didn't embrace smart phones or the Internet though".
This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented by OpenAI and similar organizations for the past four years. "AI is the future. If you don't embrace it you will be left behind".
It's intellectually insulting to be subject to as it relies primarily on fear to convince.
First, the guidelines apply no matter who or what you are replying to. If it were okay to ignore the guidelines any time we found a particular comment unpalatable, there'd be no point having them.
Second, your participation in the thread began as fulmination, with “I am so very tired of people who...”, and then continues in this belligerent style right through to your reply to me...
> This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented
> It's intellectually insulting to be subject to as it relies primarily on fear to convince
This style of argumentation is beneath what we're hoping for on HN, as it paints a simplistic conspiracy theory or narrow commercial incentive as the only plausible explanation for a trend. Things are never that simple, and arguments like that shut off curiosity, when the primary purpose of HN is to cultivate more curiosity.
I am not positing any sort of conspiracy. The sentiment is also frequented by people who have no commercial incentive to say it - possibly a result of a successful marketing campaign, possibly a conclusion they came to independently, or possibly some other reason - the reason is not something I would know. But I stand by my assertion that the argument is primarily an appeal to emotion - fear. And I do not see how acknowledging that (albeit in a less emotive way than I initially did) is beneath the standards of discussion for HN.
That said - I can keep my fulminations to myself and phrase my posts in a less confrontational manner. Those aren't exactly conducive to productive discussion.
If you think that people starting to use computers in their jobs (or even in their personal lives) was a completely seamless and controversy-free affair, you must be pretty young (or I must be getting old, as I definitely remember it).
I mean, it's still ongoing! Tons of people prefer to do things the analog way, and it's certainly not for a lack of companies trying, as the analog way is usually much more expensive.
In their personal lives, everybody should of course be free to do what they want, but I also doubt that zero people have been fired for e.g. refusing to train to use a computer and email because they preferred the aesthetics of typewriters or handwritten memos and physical intra-office mail.
Oh, yeah, no, definitely super easy to have been a professional software developer over the last 20 years whilst conscientiously objecting from using the Internet.
And was there this massive, aggressive effort by a tiny handful of companies to mandate software developers use the Internet? Because I seem to recall people generally willingly choosing to use it as opposed to the aggressive efforts by blue chip tech companies to force the public at large to use it.
No matter what OpenAI or Nvidia says, they cannot force the developers of some company to use AI. They simply lack power to do this directly (with a very few exceptions, like their subcontractors)
What they can do, however, is they can run heavy advertising campaign targeted at executives. And once executives are convinced, they will write AI policies, and some will force their workers to use AI.
And this has been happening all the time, the examples are too numerous.
Executives decided the shops will now use computerized registers. The cashiers had to adopt, or get fired.
Executives decided - no more typewriters. All documents must be written in Microsoft Word, stored in Sharepoint. The workers have to learn Microsoft Word and Sharepoint or get fired.
Executives decided that that engineers (not computer ones, mechanical ones) should use CAD instead of drafting machines. The amount of engineers who were "let go" because they were protractor head wizards but could not figure out the mouse was truly large.
For something closer to CS, there was version control, automated tests, git, github... In a lot of cases, people where not "willingly choosing it" - if the rest of your team started using SourceSafe, you can't keep using your favorite shared folder anymore, not if you want others to see your results.
"willingly choosing it" only works for personal projects, it is never guaranteed for hired workers.
It's been relatively easy to be a professional software developer for 40 years working on robust isolated applications that don't rely on or require the internet.
Luddites now and then are not as a whole opposed to technology and progress. They attack technology that gets used as cover for rolling back labor rights and protections. It's a really simple pattern: if you fuck people over they get mad at you and break your things. If AI was training on all of humanity's creative output and the results were enriching all people, you would see a much, much softer pushback than the current state of affairs where the richest people in the world are bragging about how they're going to put people out of work faster than one another and jealousy guarding the derivative works produced by their training, while simultaneously cozying up to policy makers to loosen environmental and health regulations to keep "hyperscaling."
Corrections in order of appearance not importance:
* No legitimate justification: their materials are being stolen to train and be regurgitated by LLMs and generate products. They are not being compensated yet their contribution goes on to make AI companies money, and preventing open consumption of their materials, to assist an AI company in rendering them obsolete, is not a justification for retaliating? You would have the barest whiff of a point if OpenAI and company were going to artists, requesting materials for training, and were given tainted ones, that at least I could say was duplicitous. But not when it's publicly posted, that's just an AI company not doing a good job of minding their input.
* Serve only to make access to and transformation of info more difficult: As in, you have to go to the website of the person actually publishing the information, as opposed to having it read in a Google summary? Also worth noting this inconvenience applies only to a theoretical person using an AI search tool. Everyone else is unaffected. Seems like if you're going to a particular service provider whom is uniquely unable to provide the service you want, that seems like an easy to solve issue: use something else.
* can only hope that by these egregiously anti-social luddites: Your daily reminder that the Luddites were not anti-technology, they were anti-corporations using mechanization to make an ever dwindling number of workers produce ever more products of ever lower quality.
* we'll gain the knowledge to render this category of attack moot for the foreseeable future: This is a bad strategy and historically has not worked for a single industry. If your industry itself exists in open opposition to consumer movements, you don't win. At best, you survive. But there's no version of this where everyone just unwillingly adopts AI and you can tell them to deal with it. Whole companies now are cropping up to help people who want to opt-out of the AI future as promised.
I categorically reject the "stealing" claim. Either training your human brain on a book is stealing, or training an AI on a book is not. There's no meaningful difference as far as how much the act is "stealing". The same people who rightfully found it laughable that dying newspaper companies wanted royalties from Google for search result snippets are suddenly chomping at the bit for copyright law to be vastly expanded and fair use to be gutted, there's no logical consistency.
An aside, I honestly think that if someone recoils at the idea of an AI learning from their idea and using that idea to help someone else, they're just a bad, selfish person.
> Either training your human brain on a book is stealing, or training an AI on a book is not.
Human brains are not machines sold on subscription for profit. Also a human brain can't look at all the Rembrants in existence and generate more in 5 minutes.
> An aside, I honestly think that if someone recoils at the idea of an AI learning from their idea and using that idea to help someone else, they're just a bad, selfish person.
AI's don't learn. They're statistical machines that approximate their training data and what they are rewarded for making to the subjective standards of their makers. That's not learning, they don't know anything, they're just "minimizing error."
Are you serious? In what world did we agree "someone may train incredibly important systems on our every utterance, without any compensation, and we will do what we can to not impede them"?
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 cannot change the arrow of time, and then there's already the growing New Internet of APIs and public announce federations where this all matters very little.
This is an interesting sentiment given how desperate AI labs seem to be source any new internet content from any walled-garden platform willing to take their money (and how willing they are to try & take it even if you don't consent).
Abusive, sneaky scraping is absolutely through the roof.
I feel as though you are confusing AI use in scraping by random companies and actual AI companies scraping. The AI companies seem to see value in walled garden sources like Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. However, I don't think there has been any major instance of a major American AI company doing aggressive online website scraping and not respecting robot.txt.
The issue is that UA are editable by the user, and there is no proof that some random person/scraper isn't just using a suspected trusted bot's UA string. Every ethical service also posts what IP addresses they use, so that people can compare the traffic they get to see if it is actually their bot scraping. What this article describes is the game of every third-party unethical scraper; they do anything and everything to try and get their request through. They steal UA's, they steal residential IP addresses through botnets, they attempt to circumvent CAPTCHAs using AI, etc. So the behavior in this article is not prove for any major AI provider doing unethical scraping.
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 if possible. It's possibly the only way to keep the AI crawlers away.
I don't think this traffic is actually coming from crawlers for training.
Think about it, why would a training scraper need to hit the same page hundreds of times a day? They only need to download it once.
I think this is LLMs doing web searches at runtime in response to user queries. There's no caching at this level, so similar queries by many different users could lead the LLM to request the same page many times.
> 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.
My point is that if crawlers have to worry about poison that may make them start to respect robots.txt or something. It's a bit like a "Beware of Dog" sign.
Unfortunately the use of the sign often highlights what the scrapers want most, so if they pay attention to it (rather than just completely ignoring it as most do now) it will be to specifically follow where told not to.
The scrapers ideally want content that is original. Often content that is also new is more highly prized, but not as much as you might think⁰. This will only become more of a driver as the amount of LLM generated content that is out there to be mixed in increases, in order to limit the Habsburg problem they won't want too much regurgitated content in the training data.
Bad content from before LLM scraping became a resource problem¹ is highly unlikely to be marked in robots.txt, the same for content newly generated-by-an-LLM. People attempting to fend off scrapers and other bots with robots.txt entries are likely protecting the sort of content the scrapers actively want - original output that they've put some time into or code in a repo they don't want scraped (as scraping a repo is incredibly inefficient and resource heavy from the PoV of the repo owner).
I strongly suspect that the amount of desirable content behind robots.txt “blocks” is far too valuable to ignore despite the amount of poison content traps, or just things otherwise not worth the time scouring through, that might also be there. A “beware of the dog” sign is of no protection when the reader actively wants to see the doggies!
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[0] if scraping for training an LLM you don't want just new content, but you would prefer as much of your input data as possible to be as few steps as possible from original
[1] and a copying concern, though I'll avoid that discussion as it can get quite thorny and whichever side or fence you are on in that matter the resource consumption is objectively a problem all the same.
For clarification poisoning and slop are different concepts. Slop is the output of AI. Poisoning is making your content (that may otherwise be good content) fuck up in the internals of an LLM. Classic example is the nightshade attack on image generators.
One could imagine an open source project that doesn't want to be ingested by an LLM. They could try to put that in the license but of course the license won't be obeyed. Alternately, if they could alter the code such that the OSS project itself remains high quality, but if you try to train a coding LLM on it the LLM will output code full of SQL injection exploits (for instance) or maybe just bogus uncompilable stuff, then the LLM authors will suddenly have a reason to start respecting your license and excluding the code from their index.
I may be picking nits on nits here, but… If slop indicates content with no reasoning, then deliberate slop isn't slop as it is generated with both reason and purpose known to, and understood by, the creator. Though if someone deliberately uses a generative model to create slop that line of reasoning might eat itself…
My bet is many of these crawlers collect price matching, socio-political and other data.
It is curious how it gets decided that all spiders crawl for training. And in fact the walled data is much more interesting, and particularly Reddit, X, and FB data where we still have indications of human or at least correct data lives.
If you put something on the open web, as I see it, you only get so much say in what people do with it.
Yes, they can't publish it without attribution and/or compensation (copyright, at least currently, for better or worse). Yes, they shouldn't get to hammer your server with redundant brainless requests for thousands of copies of the same content that no human will ever read (abuse/DDOS prevention).
No, I don't think you get to decide what user agent your visitors are using, and whether that user agent will summarize or otherwise transform it, using LLMs, ad blockers, or 273 artisanal regular expressions enabling dark/bright/readable/pink mode.
> it makes sense for content owners who don't want AI trained on their content to poison it if possible. It's possibly the only way to keep the AI crawlers away.
How would that work? The crawler needs to, well, crawl your site to determine that it's full of slop. At that point, it's already incurred the cost to you.
I'm all for banning spammy, high-request-rate crawlers, but those you would detect via abusive request patterns, and that won't be influenced by tokens.
> there is enough content to train on already, that is not poisoned
This is true. Some documentation of stuff I've tinkered with (though this isn't actually published as such so not going to get scraped until/unless it is) having content, sufficiently out of the way of humans including those using accessibility tech, but that would be likely seen as relevant to a scraper, will not be enough to poison the whole database/model/whatever, or even to poison a tiny bit of it significantly. But it might change any net gain of ignoring my “please don't bombard this with scraper requests” signals to a big fat zero or maybe a tiny little negative. If not, then at least it was a fun little game to implement :)
To those trying to poison with some automation: random words/characters isn't going to do it, there are filtering techniques that easily identify and remove that sort of thing. Juggled content from the current page and others topologically local to it, maybe mixed with extra morsels (I like the “the episode where” example, but for that to work you need a fair number of examples like that in the training pool), on the other hand could weaken links between tokens as much as your “real” text enforces them.
One thing to note is that many scrapers filter obvious profanity, sometimes rejecting whole pages that contain it, so sprinkling a few offensive sequences (f×××, c×××, n×××××, r×××××, farage, joojooflop, belgium, …) where the bots will see them might have an effect on some.
Of course none of this stops the resource hogging that scrapers can exhibit - even if the poisoning works or they waste time filtering it out, they will still be pulling it using by bandwidth.
You may be underestimating the powers of trillions of parameters in a model. With this many parameters overfitting is inevitable. Overfitting here means you are plotting (or outputting) the errors in your data instead of interpolating (or inferring) any trends in the model.
In fact, given this many parameters, poisoning should be relatively easy in general, but extremely easy on niche subjects.
>With this many parameters overfitting is inevitable.
Nope. Go look up double descent. Overfitting turns out not to be an issue with large models.
Your video is from a political activist, not anyone with any knowledge about machine learning. Here's a better video about overfitting: https://youtu.be/qRHdQz_P_Lo
I am not a professional statistician (only a BSc dropout) so I won‘t be able to gain the expertise required to evaluate the claim here: That double descent eliminates overfitting in LLMs.
That said, I see red flags here. This is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. My actual degree (not the drop-out one) is in Psychology and I used statistics a lot during my degree, it is only BSc so again, I cannot claim expertise here either. But this claim and the abstracts I scanned in various papers to evaluate this claim, ring alarm bells all over. I don‘t trust it. It is precisely the thing that we were told to be aware of when we were taught scientific thinking.
In contrast, this political activist provided an example (an anecdote if you will) which showed how easy it was for an actual scientist to poison LLM models with a made up symptom. This looks like overfitting to me. These two Medium blog posts very much feel like errors in the data set which the models are all to happy to output as if it was inferred.
EDIT: I just watched that video, and I actually believe the claims in the video, however I do not believe your claim. If we assume that video is correct, your errors will only manifest in fewer hallucinations. Note that the higher parameter models in the demonstration the regression model traversed every single datapoint the sample, and that there was an optimal model with fewer parameters which had a better fit then the overfitted ones. This means that trillions of parameters indeed makes a model quite vulnerable to poison.
Almost certainly those weren't even in the training data. They showed up too soon; LLMs are retrained only every 6-12 months.
Instead, the LLM did a web search for 'bixonimania' and summarized the top results. This is not an example of training data poisoning.
>This is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Well, I don't know what to tell you; double descent is widely accepted in ML at this point. Neural networks are routinely larger than their training data, and yet still generalize quite well.
That said, even a model that does not overfit can still repeat false information if the training data contains false information. It's not magic.
> even a model that does not overfit can still repeat false information
A good model will disregard outliers, or at the very least the weight of the outlier is offset by the weight of the sample. In other words, a good model won’t repeat false information. When you have too many parameters the model will traverse every outlier, even the ones who are not representative of the sample. This is the poison.
To me it sounds like data scientists have found an interesting and seemingly true phenomena, namely double descent, and LLM makers are using it as a magic solution to wisk away all sorts of problem that this phenomena may or may not help with.
> Instead, the LLM did a web search for 'bixonimania' and summarized the top results. This is not an example of training data poisoning.
Good point, I hadn’t considered this, Although it is probably more likely it did web search with the list of symptoms and outputted the term from there especially considering the research papers which cited the fictitious disease probably did not include a made-up term in its prompt.
You should check out "model collapse". It seems that an abundance of content, that is more and more AI generated these days, may not be a viable option. There is also a vast amount of data that is increasingly going private or behind paywalls
“It’s been a whole year or two and nothing bad has happened, checkmate doomers!”
It’s pretty shocking how much web content and forum posts are either partially or completely LLM-generated these days. I’m pretty sure feeding this stuff back into models is widely understood to not be a good thing.
There's been symptoms of it that have shown up such as the colloquially called "piss filter" and the the anime mole nose problem, but so far they've been symptoms rather than a fatal expression of a disease. That they are symptoms however shows they can be terminal if exploited properly and profusely. So far we haven't seen anyone capable of the "profusely" part.
I don't really understand why model collapse would happen.
I understand that if I have an AI model and then feed it its own responses it will degrade in performance. But that's not what's happening in the wild though - there are extra filtering steps in-between. Users upvote and downvote posts, people post the "best" AI generated content (that they prefer), the more human sounding AI gets more engagement etc. All of these things filter AI output, so it's not the same thing as:
AI out -> AI in
It is:
AI out -> human filter -> AI in
And at that point the human filter starts acting like a fitness function for a genetic algorithm. Can anyone explain how this still leads to model collapse? Does the signal in the synthetic data just overpower the human filter?
> Users upvote and downvote posts, people post the "best" AI generated content (that they prefer), the more human sounding AI gets more engagement etc. All of these things filter AI output
At the same time though AI generated content can be generated much much faster than human generated content so eventually AI slop downs out anything else. You only have to check the popular social media platforms to see this in action and AI generated posts are widely promoted and pushed on users the same way most web searches return results with AI generated pages ranked highly.
Humans can't keep up and companies are actively working to bypass the human filter and intentionally promote AI generated content.
>You should check out "model collapse". It seems that an abundance of content, that is more and more AI generated these days, may not be a viable option.
Doom-saying about "model collapse" is kind of funny when OpenAI and Anthropic are mad at Chinese model makers for "distilling" their models, ie. using their outputs to train their own models.
I'm old enough to remember a time when the primary hacker cause was DRM, the DMCA, patent trolls, export controls for PGP, etc. All things that made it difficult to use information when you want to. "Information wants to be free."
It's wild to see the about face. Now it's:
> If [companies] can’t source training data ethically, then I see absolutely no reason why any website operator should make it easy for them to steal it.
It would have been very difficult to predict this shift 25 years ago.
This claim of contradiction has never worked for me.
Let say person A wants everyone to be rich.
Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer.
One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich.
However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in ways that reduce and harm other peoples ability to access information, like hiding attribution or misrepresenting the data and sources, people who advocate for free information can have a consistent view and also work against such use. It is not a shift. It is only a shift if we believe that copyright will be removed, works will be given to the public for free, and companies will no longer try to hide and protect creative works and information.
You can certainly argue second-order effects (ie. we have to restrict information to save information), but the movie studios were making that same argument at the time:
> If copyright can no longer protect the distribution of the work they produce, who will invest immense sums to create films or any other creative material of the kind we now take for granted? Do the thieves really expect new music and movies to continue pouring forth if the artists and companies behind them are not paid for their work?
You're taking Jack Valenti at face value. He said "we're here to protect the artists" because the artists were popular and the record labels were not. He was in the business of protecting the labels and screwing the artists and everyone knew it.
The artists were certainly making more money from the studios and record labels than they got from the authors of DeCSS, Napster, BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay, etc.
When Gillian Welch wrote "Everything is Free" in 2001, she wasn't complaining about the record companies, she was complaining about Napster.
> Q: Do you remember where you were when you wrote “Everything is Free”?
> A: I do. I remember exactly where I was and what was going on. It was when Napster was starting to decimate the traditional recording industry dynamic, the viability of making your livelihood [from] your art.
Most artists were making way more money off the fans (even those downloading music) via touring and merch sales, than they were making off of the labels from residuals. Most were not making anything from residuals.
Valenti was desperate to enlist musicians because people hated the labels and did not feel bad about stealing from them. But the vast majority of musicians were not willing to back the labels against the fans. The few he managed to enlist, like Metallica were notable because they were exceptions. And the fact that they were already rich and already at the end of there career was noted by many at the time.
In contrast you have, for instance, Courtney Love who wrote a widely-distributed essay about how she and most artists make almost nothing from record sales.
It's an interesting essay, and the TLC case does sound pretty egregious. But the premise is undermined by the fact that Love is worth an estimated $100M today, largely thanks to owning Nirvana's publishing rights, which she inherited from Kurt Cobain.
This is like saying Winner Take All Capitalism doesn't have an exclusionary mechanism for the rich. The system exists for the sole purpose of serving the already-rich. The vampires are an inevitability baked into the system from the start.
We don't technically have "winner take all" capitalism. At least some people 90 ish years ago we had many mechanisms to regulate such situations.
Then more vampires creeped in and convinced people that the government they were voted into sucks. So began a campaign to ruin the regulations protecting them from the vampires as they slowly filled their blood banks.
The folks fighting perpetual copyright were not fighting to make it possible for Disney to fire creatives. In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney.
Disney is all in because all their characters are entering the public domain over the next 5 years. They can't fight like it's 1998 because youtube is now worth more than they are.
> In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney.
We were doing nothing of the sort. It was "Information wants to be free" not "we want to provide a perpetual job for a subset white collar workers".
Well I was in that cohort and none of us were thinking we were helping megacorps create the content slop machine from 1984.
Our concern was that corporations were expanding the definition of intellectual property to the extent where you couldn't make a movie or song or write a book as an individual without some corporation with a massive "IP" warchest coming after you and declaring it derivative. You couldn't write some software without a corporation with a massive repository of junk patents claiming you infringe.
We wanted to insure that individual creators could continue to have a voice, and not get sued out of existence by an IP Legal/Industrial Complex that was forming causing arms races between megacorps and SLAPs against everyone else.
If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that.
And by the way Disney is all in on AI for the same reason they were all in on perpetual copyright. In the perpetual copyright world, having a massive library of content you no longer have to pay residuals on was a source of massive amounts of "free" revenue. You could just keep re-releasing and re-making stuff. You did not have to do the messy, expensive work of paying people to come up with really good new stuff.
In the AI world, the money-printing capital asset is the trained model that grinds out slop 24/7 and you -emdash- again -emdash- don't have to pay actual people to create anything new.
>If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that.
We have multiple Communist ais that is on par with Western ai from 18 months ago and can run locally on 5 year old hardware.
I have no idea the fever nightmare you live in but the future is bright and only getting better.
I think you just want to make a comparison of copyright to slavery.
Property classes are born and die everyday. You can own the rights to publish an arcade video game, but that class of rights would have been way more valuable 45 years ago. NFTs were born and died just recently. You can own digital assets worth real money in an online game that simply shuts down.
Some people may read this and say "these don't qualify as a property class", to which I will remind you that property class used in this way is a brand new term, which I think is invented solely to be able to compare the limitations on human freedom associated with slavery to the limitations on human freedom associated with intellectual property.
> The last time a property class was removed was _slaves_.
Easy counterexample: titles of nobility. Also perpetual bonds, delegated taxation rights, the ability to mint currency. The list goes on.
If you're going to use history to support your AI bull agenda, you should at least pre-fly it with the AI first -- it would have pointed this out.
> Arguing that copyright is good because a subset of big tech doesn't want it around is as stupid as arguing that slavery is good because the robber barons don't like it.
Sorry, who's saying it's good? You are, actually, insofar as you're willing to support the right of AI companies to take people's information and use it to create copyrighted model weights. Why do you care less about the intellectual property of billionaires than that of the common man? Do you really think they're on your side?
Those people where trying to build a sharing/gift economy. They weren't able to keep bad actors out of their sharing economy. They are bitter that their utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers. Why is that wild?
It's highly debatable whether, in case of an information sharing/gift economy, the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense.
The information is still there, as is the community that you've built, the joy that you get out of sharing the information, everything you've learned...
Why is any of that diminished, just because some people or entities that you dislike also got something out of it?
Attribution is seemingly a central part of a information sharing/gift economy, and especially in a information sharing/gift community. It is part of the trust that connects people and without it the community falls apart, and with that the economy. AI by its very nature removes attribution.
Accuracy of information is a second critical aspect of information sharing and communities that are built around it. Would Wikipedia as a community and resource work if some articles was just random words? If readers don't trust the site, and editors distrust each other, the community collapses and the value of the information is reduced. It might look like adding AI generated articles would not harm other existing articles, or the joy that editors of the past had in writing them, but the harm is what happen after the community get flooded by inaccurate information. Same goes for many other information sharing communities.
Source trust and gift attribution are two distinct concepts, I'd say. One happens at the detriment to the taker (or "thief", if that even makes sense, as per my original comment); the other harms the original "producer".
For the former, it is already very much in any AI company's best interest to preserve attribution to become and remain credible.
For the latter, I can't help but wonder whether a gift economy that needs to diligently bookkeep attribution really is one, and if this is the only practicable way to implement one in a given larger society/economy, I'd say this says something important about that society as well.
I make very heavy use of sources that Gemini sites when I use it. I tend to use AI as sort of a mega search engine where I get a little bit of discussion, but if I care even a little bit about the topic, I end up reading the source material anyway.
This is incorrect. RAG preserves attribution. Training data doesn't, but it doesn't make sense to attribute that anyway, unless you want a list of every person who has ever lived.
It's diminished because the hard reality is that you need money to live.
The end result of major tech companies sweeping in, taking everyone's creative work, outcompeting the originals with AI derivatives, and telling every artist on the planet "fuck off, send a job application to McDonalds" is significantly less art.
Copyright was invented to prevent exactly this scenario.
Yes, which is why hackers and artists (at least those mainly publishing instead of mainly performing for a live audience) are ultimately not natural/inherent allies.
Hackers have usually drawn their funding from their (often lucrative) employment, which is what gave them the freedom to give away the products of their hacking for free.
One needs copyright to survive, the other see it as a means to enforce openness at best (those in favor of copyleft) and as an obstacle to their pursuit (owning the full system, liberating all aspects of and information about it) at worst.
This rift was always visible if you knew where to look, but AI is definitely wedging it wide open.
> whether ... the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense.
This is pretty clearly answered by the GPL: yes, it does, and this concept has been around since the very beginning.
> The information is still there
True
> as is the community that you've built
Untrue. At this point it's well understood that AI is substitutionary for many of the services that would have once afforded people a way to monetize their production for the community. Without the ability to make a living by doing so, even a small one, people will be limited to doing only what they can in the little free time they get outside of work.
That's the whole problem -- that AI, as it exists today, is taking away from the public, and hurting it at the same time. That's closer to robbery than it is to "sharing in the community".
Yes. There's a difference between walking a trail and maybe littering a a few pieces of trash, and walking a trail while actively setting branches on fire.
One scenario is manageable to leave be, or perhaps one or two volunteers clean it up. The fires have an entire trail closed down to everyone.
With some FOSS projects being bombarded by scraping traffic, redoing their PR system, considering ways to limit contributiors, and even going closed source, I don't think such a metaphor is an exaggeration.
For what it's worth, I've generally sort of been on the "information, wants to be free" side of things, and I still am. I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it -- those folks were pretty quiet when their source code was being indexed by Google. But I suppose that's because Google was sending traffic their way with they could then monetize. So this is much less about any kind of philosophical argument and much more about who's getting money, which I don't really care about. I view one of the core values of open source software as being something that we can learn from, whether that's through AI or otherwise.
> I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it
The key word there is "license." Open source often has strings attached--an obligation to credit the source, an obligation to release derivative code under the same license, etc. LLMs seldom respect the license, they just quietly and extensively plagiarize everything.
If you're implying that it's a violation of the original hacker ethos, I disagree.
"Information wants to be free" is a small part of the hacker ethos venn diagram. There are many hacker ethos traits that aren't about cracking, specifically.
Also, the server "information" isn't free (as in beer) to begin with, it costs server availability. Coming up ways to penalize greedy actors is not only well within the server operator's perogative, it's an interesting tit-for-tat problem that could pique any hacker's interests.
A bonus hacker trait is that these poisoning responses are individualistic, i.e. the government doesn't get involved, where certainly more aggressive anti-AI sentiments could (wrongly) call for that.
So I'd say this type of LLM-resistance falls squarely in the original hacker ethos, even though it incidentally counteracts one minor aspect of "information availability". Though I'd certainly agree that the picture today is a lot different than it was. Ironic even.
"Information wants to be free, but only be used by people I wholly endorse." is the motto. You'll see young people singing the praises of piracy but then use "piracy" as an excuse for hating LLMs.
If my LinkedIn feed is any indication, bizarre inhuman ghouls who wear the names and profile pictures of my college friends like skin-suits and exclusively post AI-generated marketing materials for AI products.
It becomes a bit easier to see when you finish the sentence. "Information wants to be free (from ______)." If you filled that blank in with "rent-seeking Capitalists and corporations," you likely have everything you need to understand why they don't see it as a turn.
I say this as someone whose notions exist orthogonal to the debate; I use AI freely but also don't have any qualms about encouraging people to upend the current paradigm and pop the bubble.
It doesn't take much cleverness because we're talking about a straightforward dynamic. A counter-cultural expression that was a "screw you" aimed at corporations was co-opted and misinterpreted by those same corporations as "It's free real estate", and now the latter are flummoxed that they're not buddies with the former. Well, points up that's why.
Politics will make more sense once you realize no one is trying to have consistent principles.
People are in general for whatever they think will benefit them, and against what they think will harm them.
So piracy is ok when it benefits the little guy and not ok when it benefits the big guy. Unions are good when they stand up against employers, and bad when they discriminate against non-union workers. There's no contradiction there.
The common string between both of those advocacies is that they heavily favor huge corporations instead of the little guy.
Basically, DMCA and DRM makes you a criminal while protecting NBC and Disney and such. And AI steals your work and allows soulless mega corps to basically take your job.
Personally I'd argue AI is very likely to be worse for the average person, depending on their career.
Some people don't care or maybe don't realize. And then I think some people are just naive, and are assuming everyone else will be fucked, but they won't be. And then some other people are self-destructive, and they know it will make their life harder - but they advocate for it anyway, because they feel they deserve the suffering, and maybe hold some misguided belief that suffering is the fuel of victory.
It was never about some "information wants to be free" philosophy for most people. It was about, "I want information to be free for me to access, and btw fuck big corporations." No real shift happened.
Those people were always lying, it was always about power dynamics. People hated DRM and surveillance because they saw it as punching down. People now hate AI wielded by corpos because they see it as punching down. Extremely few (if any) people ever bought into the “cyber-utopia” thing and now the mask has completely come off, everyone knows the Internet is a tool for subjugation
> The easiest way to grow AI resistance is to get Dario Amodei and Sam Altman on TV and let them talk.
Tell me more? I'm guessing you might say: neither connects with everyday people, they have misaligned incentives*, they (like most corporate leaders) don't speak directly, they have more power than almost any elected leader in the world, ... Did I miss anything?
My take: when it comes to character and goals and therefore predicting what they will do: please don't lump Amodei with Altman. In brief: Altman is polished, effective, and therefore rather unsettling. In short, Altman feels amoral. It feels like people follow him rather than his ideas. Amodei is different. He inspires by his character and ideals. Amodei is a well-meaning geek, and I sometimes marvel (in a good way) how he leads a top AI lab. His media chops are middling and awkward, but frankly, I'm ok with it. I get the sense he is communicating (more-or-less) as himself.
Let me know if anyone here has evidence to suggest any claim I'm making is off-base. I'm no oracle.
I could easily pile on more criticisms of both. Here's a few: to my eye, Dario doesn't go far enough with his concerns about AI futures, but I can't tell how much of this is his PR stance as head of A\ versus his core beliefs. Altman is a harder nut to crack: my first approximation of him is "brilliant, capable, and manipulative". As much as I worry about OpenAI and dislike Altman's power-grab, I probably grant that he's, like most people, fundamentally trying to do the right thing. I don't think he's quite as deranged as say Thiel. But I could be wrong. If I had that kind of money, intellect, and network, maybe I would also be using it aggressively and in ways that could come across as cunning. Maybe Altman and Thiel have good intentions and decent plans -- but the fact remains the concentration of power is corrupting, and they seem to have limited guardrails given their immense influence.
* Here's my claim, and I invite serious debate on it: Dario, more than any corporate leader, takes alignment seriously. He actually funds work on it. He knows how it works. He cares. He actually does some of the work, or at least used to. How many CEOs of the companies they run actually have the skills to DO the rank-and-file work? Even the most pessimistic people probably probably can grant this.
You're overthinking the parent comment, I think. When Dario goes on TV he says things like "AI is going to put 50% of white collar workers out of a job in a few years". The average TV viewer who hears that doesn't know what AI alignment means, they just hear that this guy, whatever his intentions, is threatening their ability to survive in this economy.
> The average TV viewer who hears that doesn't know what AI alignment means, they just hear that this guy, whatever his intentions, is threatening their ability to survive in this economy.
A surprisingly high number of people are already being tricked into supporting things that clearly threaten their ability to survive in this economy, and even their ability to survive period. I wouldn't trust the general public to be smart enough not to line up to shoot themselves in the foot/face. They'll get increasingly angry as they get increasingly screwed over, but it remains to be seen how long that will take or who they'll blame for it.
In general, this can feel like reading tea leaves. We might have some guesses, but it is tricky to get much confidence in them. Bottom line: it can be really hard to extract coherent signal from downvotes. A relatively low number given the overall topic interest can often mean noise or particular strong reactions. A relatively high number might serve as some useful feedback. This general ambiguity imo is a downside of the "up" or "down" systems that HN uses; it is part of the overall "design package". If you want more granularity, one step in the right direction is Lobsters. If you want many steps forward, requiring more community norms and background reading, you could try LessWrong. If you have other forums that you think do this well or at least differently, please let me know.
My takes on some of the comment above:
> A surprisingly high number of people are already being tricked into supporting things that clearly threaten their ability to survive in this economy, and even their ability to survive period.
I agree. Yes, I know that I'm far from a neutral judge of other people's core values, but I can say with high confidence that I've lived and worked among more US cultures than the typical tech demographics, by far. Born in Texas, worked in Colorado, San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, DC (the District itself), Northern Virginia. My industries range the for-profit, not-for-profit, tech-heavy. Other variations include idealist-heavy, good-execution, poor-execution, heavy on the dogma versus heavy on the pragmatism, pro-military, pro-patriotism, and the opposite.
I can say personally in an important sense, I fit nowhere. When I lived in Berkeley, I didn't fit the mold. When at SF startups, the culture felt shallow. I'm sort of "post culture" in a way. In DC, people seem rather blinkered. I see it, but I rarely feel like I'm truly part of any one culture. The only culture that I feel fits me is the "question everything -- but not like a conspiracy nut -- and then try to build something that matters". [1]
So, by objective standards -- counting places I've lived, different industries I've worked in, friends from different backgrounds, socioeconomic conditions, I think I'm easily in something like a weird 0.1% that actually deeply has experienced Trumpland and many variations of classic liberalism. If I didn't get out of my hometown, there is at least 20% chance I would now support Trump, if only due to tribalism and trusting of one's neighbors. So I know many Trump supporters.
All in all, I can't think of more than a handful that support him for reasons that I find even to serve their own long-term self-interest. There are special cases in a sense, like "techno-libertarians" or single-issue "pro-Israeli" voters or even smart people who feel like"f--k the democrats" who use these rationales to justify voting for Trump.
Saying I'm in the top 0.1% may sound presumptuous, I get it. But I don't like how some people water down their statements in the hope of sounding modest. See [2]. This is a kind of "false modesty" imo. I don't take any credit for my life circumstances. I was born into this position, and here I am. So I'm acting as a mirror to share this back. I've spent easily dozens of hours in one-on-one conversations on these topics, so I'm not coming at this with any particular dogma. This is my hundreds or thousands of hours of experience distilled. I really feel for Trump supporters on one level, even as their close mindedness and enable-ism wreck the economic and core principles of the US.
I welcome charitable and constructive disagreement on anything I've said. But more importantly, I ask for curious conversation.
[1]: Actually, there are some cultures I do fit into. Bayesian thinking being a key one. I admit I'm more than intellectually opposed to frequentist statistics -- it actively pisses me off in some ways. I'm pro-causality and pro-modeling. If people don't state their models, I don't take their predictions seriously. These are my strongest meta-opinions I think. People like Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, Nate Soares, Yudkowsky -- these folks seem to think in ways that seem enlightened to me. The best "mainstream" thinkers I've seen probably are ... hmmm ... Ezra Klein, though he is more political than intellectual in my opinion.
> they just hear that this guy, whatever his intentions, is threatening their ability to survive in this economy.
Yep, Dario is straddling this sort of impossible line: he's the least-scary harbinger who is try to be one of the more transparent people to sound the alarm. But the funny thing about saying "don't shoot the messenger" is that it usually gets uttered well after the messenger has taken a bullet.
> You're overthinking the parent comment, I think.
Luckily, the phrase overthinking is on the way out. We really don't want any more Idiocracy Part II. In this day, we need all the thinking we can get. We often need (1) better thinking and (2) the ability to redirect our thinking towards other directions.
In my experience, 2026 is the year where almost all stigma about "talking AI" is out the window. I am nearly at the point where I say whatever I think needs to be said, even if I'm not sure if people will think I be crazy. So if Typical Q. Person asks me, I tell them whatever I think will fit into their brain at the time -- how AI works, why Dario is awkward, why superintelligence is no bueno, etc.
> But the funny thing about saying "don't shoot the messenger" is that it usually gets uttered well after the messenger has taken a bullet.
Dario is not just a messenger, though. In his case it would be more like, "Don't shoot one of the generals in the invading army." To which it would be reasonable to ask, "Why not?" Even if he's the general saying that he wants minimal civilian casualties.
I get that metaphor. Let's try on another metaphor too, since the goal is insight, not judgment*... This reminds me of economic development policies of China and the USA ... both often pitch a developing country who needs something. Where "something" means i.e. getting out of poverty and/or having fewer people starve. The investor offer certain benefits with strings attached. These benefits are hard to pass up but involve major reforms. Painful reforms. On top of that, one country often says "if you don't work with us, you're stuck with [other country]" and vice versa. Try on this metaphor and see if it sheds some light on the impossible situation Dario is in.
* If you are trying to judge Dario, we're not having the same conversation. How many people on earth can grasp even ~1% of the situation he's in? How many have the intellectual tools and ability to reason through it? Maybe 0.1%, tops.
Fortunately no-one sane enough among us, computer programmers, believes in that bs, we all see this masquerade for what it mostly is, basically a money grab.
This is slacktivism. I can kind of understand someone coming to the conclusion that we're replacing working class jobs with compute (caveat, I use working class more broadly than you), and that compute is pure capital. So essentially the capital class are wringing the neck of the working class. I think that, at the very least, is what the capital class is hoping for. If that's what you believe though, slightly poisoning a model is not even close to grappling with what is going on.
Some communities are very pro-AI, adding AI summary comments to each thread, encouraging AI-written posts, etc.[0]
Many subreddits are AI cautious[1][2], and a subset of those are fully anti-AI[3].
Apart from these "AI-focused" communities, it seems each "traditional" subreddit sits somewhere on the spectrum (photographers dealing with AI skepticism of their work[4], programmers mostly like it but still skeptical[5]).
Reddit (and more generally, human) groupthing in a nutshell. "Quick, clearly position yourself on this one-dimensional line (or maybe even better sort yourself into one of these two sets) so we don't have to engage in that pesky nuance thing!"
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 account for energy consumption, etc.
Venture capital bet on AI taking over the world, so any conservative usage of LLMs will not get funding in the near future. The subtle reason is that betting on conservative usage of LLMs sends a signal that de-values their primary investments.
I think this is where I sit - I'm personally of the opinion that AI crawlers and thus companies should respect robots.txt, and they shouldn't be trying to scale up to the point of adversely affecting the environment (both natural and supply chain).
I do find value in mindfully using models - perhaps I've got a weird thing to troubleshoot on my Linux server and I just don't want to spend the time or mental effort in tracing it back.
Because I do tend to use AI mindfully, I strongly dislike Microsoft's strategy in constantly pushing their AI solution Copilot. I would rather use it when I feel its right rather than always be reminded its a thing I can use to save time and increase my efficiency around every corner.
This is my take too. When we were imagining AI what were the use cases we had in mind back then? They are these grand visions of AI will take care of major problems. We should be pushing for responsible AI deployment, starting on low risk areas and moving up to more serious uses once we know the tools work for less catastrophic situations.
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.
The overall sentiment on here might be in the middle, but I feel like that is more because half the posts and comments are railing against AI slop and half are about exciting new AI models or tools.
The only thing more cringe than the seething anger in this blog is the technical illiteracy revealed by an earnest belief that any of these attempts at "poisoning" will have any negative impact whatsoever on model training.
LLM poisoning is about getting bad data into the training set. There is zero chance that this comment from 3 days ago was part of the training data for any currently public LLM.
Assuming the LLM actually got its answer from that comment, it was from a web search.
I mean, if an LLM, when given a query not in its training data, resorts to searching Google and then summarizes those results as the truth with 100% certainty, because, fuck it: YOLO… I'm already very capable of doing that myself, thank you. What's the point, even?
Yeah this is context poisoning, not model poisoning, which is way, way more effective.
Google and Reddit have contracts: Google has official scraping access to Reddit (probably more than that at this point since the contracts were signed 1-2 years ago). But the fact that Reddit does a good job at moderating human content makes it a boon for plausibly "up-to-date" info (which a model doesn't have). Google's LLM summaries even include Reddit as its foremost "citations".
Anyway, Google does a RAG or something similar for its LLM responses, and takes Reddit info at face value. I'm very interested to see what the "thresholds" are, like how much context poisoning do you need to be effective. If the above link is reliable then the answer is "mere sentences".
Certainly bad-actor merchants would try this sort of thing on merchandise subreddits; welcome to the new AIO/GEO everyone.
Lol I find the opposite to be cringe to be honest: people using chatgpt to write messages, emails, resumes for them, professional software developers vibe coding entire apps, talking about AGI coming from LLMs. Please. That is the cringe.
Let's say an NGO has done the work to formally specify a software product that would improve outcomes or people reached by I dunno 30%. They send out RFPs to a number of consultancies who provide a quote and guaranteed delivery meeting their specifications by the desired date. Only one fits in the budget, and by quite a margin. It's a consultancy that openly "vibe codes".
Should they hire them?
Yes the specification is holding a lot of weight here. Assume it's comprehensive and all consultancies offer the same aftercare support. Otherwise we're just handwaving and bike shedding over something that's not measurable.
Perhaps the ever changing definition of vibe coding is the issue here. I'm referring to heavily AI assisted development. I'm not referring to a lack of planning, reviewing, and testing.
> If we're going to have AI overlords, it'd be great if they spoke with proper grammar.
People like blurring the lines and lots of people want AIs to bang out keystrokes in an order that is roughly human-like, so here we are. (Personally, I would love if Claude said "honestly" or "real" or "landed" less. Or pretty much never! I've tried banning the words. I've tried providing a list of alternatives, and I'm enjoying nothing like Great Success.)
On the topic of "correct usage", until maybe ~3 years ago I had a pretty bog-standard understanding of what dictionaries do. They are authorities, right? Or at least experts in correct usage? That all changed when I read "Dictionary editors are historians of usage, not legislators of language." in "Disputing Definitions" by Yudkowsky : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...
See also: "Finding the forgotten creators of the Oxford English Dictionary" on 1A, WAMU 88.5, March 26, 2026:
If you are serious, I'm not quite sure how to infer what your definition of cringe is. I have no shame... I even checked urban dictionary.
Re: LW: yeah, you nailed the stereotype. I've probably said something similar myself (this is not a compliment). I'll bet many people on HN could find many interesting & useful discussions there. Here are some more takes with my commentary.
1. "LW has such a insider set of lingo and ideas and tenets". True imo, but these aren't hidden: they are easy to find.
2. The LessWrong "canon" is often weird and/or useless. I can confirm the feeling. Each new weird idea takes time to weigh. Take Newcomb's Paradox. Why the obsession with it? Until it clicks, it feels like you've walked into some kind of die-hard tabletop gaming session. So most normal people find ways to leave. Don't. Stay. What better do you have to? I'm seriously asking. If it matters, go do that instead. But if you have free time, you could do worse. How often do you really get your brain challenged?
3. The articles are too long. Yep, sometimes they are. One needs to like reading. A lot. So people with short attention spans might have trouble. This is my top criticism.
4. Intellectual depth and openness is off the charts. I put LW at the "best I've seen anywhere online, ever" level. Not the kind of permanent openness to anything. Openness to new ideas is a great starting posture. But the goal is to be able to get somewhere with them. As a particular idea loses plausibility, don't expect it to get much airtime. Bad ideas don't deserve as much consideration until/unless something changes to prompt a reconsideration.
But to be honest, I totally agree that AI is indeed destroying communities. We can already see YouTube redirecting all the reporting to AI which can allow some malicious agent claim your original video and demonetize it (i.e. steal your money). It happened to great YouTube people like Davie504. There is no way to appeal as the appeal is also treated by a robot
From what I heard in the times before AI you could argue and contact a human being eventually. Now there's probably no human in the process... No "call the manager" button
> You're just picking random problems with tech and blaming them on AI.
This comment is uncharitable, uncurious, and dismissive.
Reality is multifaceted. It is worth trying to synthesize and reconcile different views first. To do that, it really helps to ask some questions first. Genuine questions, not gotchas. Even better is to say e.g. "Ok, but I prefer this model instead [...]: how does it compare to yours?".
> Since these companies can’t improve their AI models without fresh data created by human beings
Totally wrong. Self-play dates back to Arthur Samuel in the 1950s and RL with verifiable rewards is a key part of training the most advanced models today.
Not totally wrong. Self play works well with if your problem can be easily simulated in an RL environment where the model can easily explore different states. RLHF or similar techniques is not that since we don't have exactly have a simulation environment for language modelling
Right now there are companies which hire software devs or data scientists to just solve a bunch of random problems so that they can generate training data for an LLM model. Why would they be in business if self play can work out so well?
> Right now there are companies which hire software devs or data scientists to just solve a bunch of random problems so that they can generate training data for an LLM model.
Current models don't yet use RLVR with self-play though, at least as far as we know. They use RLVR with large numbers of manually created RL environments.
I am don't have an opinion on the efficacity of such poisoning, but your comment is about as useful as "when being violently attacked, do not resist, as you only make yourself suffer for longer"
maybe, but they're burning the compute regardless. it seems ostensibly likely that reducing the ROI for compute burnt will cause less compute to be burnt long term
I assume the poisoner community is mirroring and likely remixing the content from there. The whole effort isn’t going to work with a single point of failure like that.
Website-crawling services tend to have better luck accessing these websites due to their experience solving CloudFlare's challenges. Might want to try those.
> people seem to loathe AI, and are actively resisting it
Maybe this person doesn’t care, but this observation they’ve made is almost certainly informed by an extremely narrow set of personal experiences, and is unlikely to reflect the wider truth.
I have a perhaps unique viewpoint among people in tech, at least among the sample I see on HN
I simultaneously think
1. AI will be a massively impactful technology on the scale of the industrial revolution or greater
2. The potential upside of AI is enormous, but potential downside is just as big (utopia or certain ruin)
3. Most current AI companies are acting somewhat reasonably in a game-theory sense with respect to the deployment of their tech, and aren't especially evil or dastardly compared to Google in the 2000s, social media in the 2010s
4. AI safety is an under-appreciated concern and many who are spending time nitpicking the details are missing the bigger picture of what ASI and complete human obsolescence look like.
5. No amount of whiny protest, data sabotaging, or small-scale angst or claiming that AI is "fake" or hoping for the bubble to pop is going to have even a marginal effect on the development of AI. It is too powerful and the rewards are too great. If anything it will have an overall negative effect because it will convince labs that their potential role as a utopian, public benefactor will not be appreciated, so will instead align themselves with the military industrial complex for goodwill.
There is way too much to gain if anything approaching ASI is possible, and too much to risk if a rival super power gains supremacy first. AI is not going away, the bubble is not going to pop. Maybe some valuations will crash but ultimately the technology will continue onward.
I am mostly an optimist because I find it a more comfortable way to live. My hope, and also my expectation is that AI will progress incrementally and over the medium or long term will do the same as most other technology progress, and make the median person alive better off in the future.
> What makes this unique just because it’s AI instead of whatever else?
I'd say the notion that expensive acts of sabotage (that can be cheaply neutralized) are a worthwhile pastime and anything other than virtue signaling is somewhat perplexing. (Not in a good way.)
I'm very skeptical of his premise. I feel like AI acceptance/resistance is dependent on what social media site you use. I believe it's antagonistic on Reddit, but sites like X are generally pretty excited for AI. Certainly in my life people are accepting and excited for AI releases and tools, maybe so long as your experience with AI isn't Microsoft enterprise copilot.
Both can be true at the same time. You can both use AI productively yourself and be concerned/horrified of the larger direction of the technology or the actors that drive it forward.
Conflating “kicking over ai delivery bots” and “throwing a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s house” as being both condemnable hasn’t actually been forced off the sidewalk by one of these delivery bots. These are dangerous and anti-human ADA nightmares. They shouldn’t be allowed on sidewalks, emphasis on walk
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 saying "No one here likes you" to try to gaslight his victim.
I mean, obviously there are many vocal opponents to AI, I see them on social media including here on HN. And I hear some trepidation in person as well. But almost everyone I know, from trades-people to teachers, are adopting AI in some capacity and report positive uses and interactions.
The bulk of the anti-AI sentiment I see is from people who spend a huge amount of time online (or on HN). Not regular folks.
Most people don't care if something is written by an AI as long as it is reasonable, and reflects the intent of the human who prompted the AI.
If consuming material online (videos, web sites, online forums) is not something you do a lot of, you're relatively unimpacted by LLMs (well, except the whole jobs situation...).
Given all the borderline apocalyptic articles how students are using it to cheat and teachers have no way to stop them, I'd be honestly surprised by that.
All I can offer is my anecdotal experience. One teacher was describing his usage to generate quizzes on material. He gets course material in the form of pdfs, uploads it to the AI and gets it to generate questions.
On the flip side, one of my other teacher friends has instituted a no phone policy in his classroom.
Yeah, a friend of mine is a teacher and is using it to generate material for the classroom all the time, and it dramatically increases her productivity. The school administrators have also been pretty impressed by it, and told her to keep it up more or less.
There was an article about a year ago concerning the students' using AI to complete work, and teachers using AI tools to detect if AI tools were being used to complete the work, so (even a year ago) you found this absurd scenario where it was just robots checking the work of other robots. Did a quick search for said article but couldn't find it. Anyway, humorous. Coupled with the WaPo article today about people "speed-running" their degrees, it's wacky, wacky world for "education". https://archive.is/bPi82
It's easy to chalk it up to "fear of the unknown", when in reality it's both good and bad depending on who's wielding it. It can be used to tear down or build up, solve problem or create problems just like every advance before it. So while I'm generally excited with where it can go, I guess I don't mind being reminded there can be downsides.
That is why I question my own bias. One possible explanation is that I am AI positive. So when people test out "What do you think about AI?" my own responses are generally positive. That probably filters out people who don't want to argue or contradict.
This kind of effect would work both ways. People who are non-confrontational in general will choose to keep quiet if their opinions differ. In this view, both pro-AI and anti-AI sides might find themselves having their bias confirmed due to opposing views self-silencing to avoid conflict.
Anecdotally, I was just there and ran into a couple of anti-AI people and it's not like I was bringing it up. All I got was they were worried about the water and the heat produced. I wonder if someone has done an analysis of old-search vs AI-search, I most definitely get the info quicker that I want with AI, does that make up for the LLM cost, I have no idea.
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.
Thanks to this lovely site, and my distaste for AI, I've found a whole ecosystem of minimalist blogs and artists' personal sites. It's shifting my habits and foci. I don't do socials anymore except forums like this.
Any human scale "attack", e.g. the made up Everybody Loves Raymond episode isn't doing anything to hurt LLM training data. Might even help them detect exaggeration, satire, etc. when read in context and with other knowledge they have from other sources (like scraping IMDB or whatever, and already knowing the cast and plot summary of every episode of Everybody Loves Raymond).
If there is an effective way to poison them, it'll be automated. And, it'll probably rely on an LLM to produce the poison, since it has to look legit enough to pass the quality filtering and classification stage of the data ingestion process, which is also probably driven by an LLM.
One reason small models are getting better is because the training data being used is not just getting bigger, it's getting cleaner and classified more correctly/precisely. "Model collapse" hasn't happened, yet, even though something like half the web is AI slop, because as the models get smarter for human use in a variety of contexts, they also get smarter for use in preparing data for training the next model. There may very well still be risks of a mad cow disease like problem for LLMs, but I doubt a Markov chain website is going to contribute. The models still can't always tell fact from fiction, but they're not being hoodwinked by a nonsense generator.
Sorry, you have been blocked. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
Did I ever open this website? I guess no. Did I ever attack this website (or did any AI crawling)? Also no. Implying the allegation is criminal, Cloudflare falsely accused me, should I seek legal counsel?
I still was able to access the article via webarchive. And what I want to say, from my POV, I've done nothing wrong, website owners attack me. I don't see it every day, but I think it is more often than cases when people are kicking AI-powered food delivery robots.
That is a standard Cloudflare response when a URL is blocked. It was a temporary block affecting ALL traffic to the URL while I updated the post, not a block targeted at anyone in particular.
No, I am still blocked (for every page on https://stephvee.ca/). "Cloudflare Ray ID: 9efd477aef431473", if it helps somehow. My IP is not in any common blocklist, I experience no errors with other Cloudflare protected websites (using standard Chrome on Linux). It is very likely that stephvee.ca is configured excessively strict (rejecting by OS, or by large IP ranges, or idk)
Apologies. :( Since you say you've never visited the website before, then that means you're either in one of the countries or in one of the residential IP ranges that I've had to block. I had to do that a while back, as I'd say roughly 99.9% of the traffic I received from those areas was malicious in nature (e.g. constantly spamming the site 24/7 for .env variables and whatnot, as well as crawling every single page on the site hundreds or even thousands of times every day). I couldn't block this traffic at the individual IP level, as there's simply too much of it, and they just move on to a different IP address when they're blocked.
I can't stand the thought of blocking an actual human being who just wants to look at my site, but at the same time, what do you do? Just let the site be hammered by crawlers and scrapers 24/7 for the sake of less than a handful of human visitors every once in a while?
People who don't run websites (I'm not saying this is you, just in general) have no idea how bad the crawling/scraping problem is right now. I don't even WANT to use Cloudflare, but I feel like I have no choice. It's either use Cloudflare, or pay an arm and a leg to host a hobby website and then have all my bandwidth chewed up by the crawlers and scrapers.
The people and companies who run these bots are making the internet such a hostile place. It's especially infuriating that so many of them don't even identify themselves with user agents, and hide behind residential IPs instead.
EDIT: Oh, and I can confirm: I investigated the ray ID, and yes, it was unfortunately a country block that triggered it. I receive a huge amount of bad traffic from your country every single day (mostly credential exploits), and I'm sorry you got caught up unintentionally in that block. I added an exception that should hopefully work, though, in the event that you do still want to visit.
Based on observations of other people using it, "AI" is already "poisoned" with too much low quality training material I'm not interested in searching
The idea of intentionally "poisioning" an "AI" model seems to be the logical evolution of so-called "user-generated content" (UGC). It makes sense that non-cooperation is the eventual outcome of exploiting internet subscribers through coerced intermediation. For years now companies in Silicon Valley and Redmond, and other so-called "tech" companies elsewhere, have been generating revenue by using free information and UGC as bait for surveillance ad targets but without the licensing or production costs
This seems like a wasted effort when AI will primarily learn the majority consensus view and not one-off misinformation. AI tries to learn pattern matching for generalization, so garbage data doesn't make AI learn the wrong patterns, at best just slows down learning the actual patterns. When most compute for training is spent on curated data and RL rather than random web-scraped data, the impact is likely negligible.
> This seems like a wasted effort when AI will primarily learn the majority consensus view and not one-off misinformation.
We have evidence to the contrary. Two blog articles and two preprints of fake academic articles [0] were able to convince CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity AI of the existence of a fake disease, against all majority consensus. And even though the falsity of this information was made public by the author of the experiment and the results of their actions were widely published, it took a while before the models started to get wind of it and stopped treating the fake disease as real. Imagine what you can do if you publish false information and have absolutely no reason to later reveal that you did so in the first place.
> Two blog articles and two preprints of fake academic articles [0] were able to convince CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity AI of the existence of a fake disease, against all majority consensus
Wrong. There are no 'majority consensus' against 'bixonimania' because they made it up, that was the point. It's unsurprisingly easy to get LLMs to repeat the only source on a term never before seen. This usually works; made-up neologisms are the fruitfly of data poisoning because it is so easy to do and so unambiguous where the information came from. (And retrieval-based poisoning is the very easiest and laziest and most meaningless kind of poisoning, tantamount to just copying the poison into the prompt and asking a question about it.) But the problem with them is that also by definition, it is hard for them to matter; why would anyone be searching or asking about a made-up neologism? And if it gets any criticism, the LLMs will pick that up, as your link discusses. (In contrast, the more sources are affected, the harder it is to assign blame; some papermills picked up 'bixonimania'? Well, they might've gotten it from the poisoned LLMs... or they might've gotten it from the same place the LLMs did which poisoned their retrievals, Medium et al.)
The LLMs didn't only talk about the disease when prompted by the neologism. They also brought it up when asked about the symptoms. From the article:
> OpenAI’s ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms amounted to bixonimania. Some of those responses were prompted by asking about bixonimania, and others were in response to questions about hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure.
And yes, sure, in this example the scientific peer-review process may have eventually criticised and countered 'bixonimania' as a hoax were the researcher to have never revealed its falsity—emphasis on 'may', few researchers have the time and energies to trawl through crap papermill articles and publish criticisms. Either way, that is a feature of the scientific process and is not a given to any online information.
What happens when false information is divulged by other means that do not attempt to self-regulate? And how do we distinguish one-off falsities from the myriad of obscure true things that the public is expecting LLMs to 'know' even when there is comparatively little published information about them and therefore no consensus per se?
"hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure" is a super specific query almost definitionally 'bixonimania' which probably brought up the 'bixonimania' poison at the time (the search hits for that query right now in Google are weak and poorly relevant so it would not be hard to outrank them or at least get into the top 50 or so where a retrieval LLM would see them and would followup), and so still an instance of what I mean.
> Either way, that is a feature of the scientific process and is not a given to any online information.
Which does not distinguish it in any way from human errors like a crank or activist etc.
And I don't know, how did we handle false information before on niche topics no one cared about and which were unimportant? It's just noise. The worldwide corpus has always been full of extremely incorrect, mislabeled, corrupted, distorted, information on niche topics of no importance. But it's generally not important.
All the examples you gave are chatbots with web search integrated. Are you sure those chatbots didn't just reference false information it found in web searches? That's fundamentally different than poisoning the training of AI models.
> The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.
This seems to imply the poisoning affected the web search results, not the actual model itself, because it takes months for data to make it into a trained base model.
We already learned how to defeat this from SEO spammers and citation farmers: by building networks that cross reference and corroborate one another’s fake stories.
We’re already at a point where much of the academic research you find in online databases can’t be trusted without vetting through real world trustworthy institutions and experts in relevant fields. How is an LLM supposed to do this kind of vetting without the help of human curators?
If all the LLM training teams have to stop indiscriminate crawling and fall back to human curation and data labeling then the poisoners will have won.
> This isn’t exactly the modern equivalent of angry textile workers destroying power looms, but (if you’ll forgive the pun) it’s cut from the same cloth.
And how did that work out for the textile workers?
> The difference here (I hope) is that if enough of us pollute public spaces with misinformation intended for bots, it might be enough to compel AI companies to rethink the way they source training data.
This... seems like an absurd asymmetry in effort on the side of the attacker? At least destroying a power loom is much easier than building one.
Filtering out obvious garbage seems like a completely solved problem even with weak, cheap LLMs, and it's orders of magnitudes more efficient than humans coming up with artisanal garbage.
These people are dinosaurs and you know what happens to Dinosaurs. Until they meet their conclusion, they are for the moment at risk of becoming terrorists.
I don't really understand all the comments here downplaying or ridiculing those who are worried about the impact of these tools.
The way I see it, the existence of these tools have negative impact on some people and they are reacting to that. Are they not allowed to fight back in the way they think is appropriate?
We see what we want to see. I mostly see anti-AI comments littered on hn. Maybe it is because my brain is picking them out, or maybe it is because they're much stronger than the "I'm ok with AI" comments.
I bet it's easy to be against AI, instead of those who use it in inhumane ways (and hold considerably more power). To them, AI is just a tool. If it wasn't AI, it would be buildings full of people and automated devices posting misinformation, outsourcing jobs and pushing for gig economy instead of respectable employment, having understaffed call centres and bad phone trees or knowledgebases that basically tell you to f off, lobbying against workers' rights and regulatory capture and any number of other misaligned motivations.
Maybe when the entire marketing of AI is fear mongering and doom (all your jobs are going away!) the end result is something you should have expected from the very beginning
Honestly, it's no wonder there's a lot of pushback. We have these irresponsible CEO's talking non stop about taking peoples jobs at a time when people are struggling to make ends meet, all while taking in insane cash infusions. Why wouldn't people loathe AI at this point when the marketing is "we're going to fuck you over and there's nothing you can do about it".
This person is so fragile that she removed the entire post because some people were critical of it on an entirely other website (here, I assume). I cannot imagine that her thoughts on resistance were very worth reading?
Fortunately, the slop you visibly see online is just the tip of the iceberg. I would guess 80% of AI's real usage hides beneath the surface in back-office documentation consumption, software development, process optimization and automation, investments in new endeavors companies would've never thought possible/financially feasible etc. All of that usage is hidden from this resistance, and possible now with current models (so all this new poisoning is irrelevant). The valuations could go away tomorrow, and it would've still fundamentally changed the nature of the economy.
It doesn't matter that you don't like the slop on the LinkedIn post, ban it. I think the visible slop on our various feeds that is driving people mad is a rounding error for the AI companies. Moreover, it's more a function of the attention economy than the AI economy and it should've been regulated to all holy hell back in 2015 when the enshittification began.
I'd say it's still the owners, even if they don't explicitly say or if it's even consciously recognised. I doubt that the tool, put towards broadly positive uses that are considered beneficial and not harmful to individuals or society, would be seen in the same way.
Most fears of AI (in the 2026 sense of the term), and perhaps technology more broadly, are fears of capitalism, ownership, and control, and less about the capabilities of the thing itself.
I don't think it is because the biggest proponents are at the top - either in Science / Academia / Professional software development. But even if the people who are the weakest advocate for the tech, whats the issue?
This is a normal reaction to ground breaking technology but these reactions never had any noteworthy effect in history. There used to be Maschinenstürmer during the 19th Century industrial revolution. There were also violent enemies of cars in the beginning of the 20th Century, some of them were even willing to kill drivers with lethal wire traps.
I see a vast financial sector bubble, a flood of broken software at work, users who have incorrect expectations because they believed LLM summmaries, and a vast increase in bullshit everywhere in the public sphere; I am not seeing see the "groundbreaking technology" here. "Cheap bullshit at scale" isn't an advance, it's a disaster.
Sure, LLMs are "revolutionary". So were the Chicxulub impactor and the Toba supervolcano.
When I said "groundbreaking" I only meant it as "being perceived as groundbreaking." If it isn't perceived as a disruptive technology, then it won't spark widespread protests. People protest against it because they believe it will take their jobs away, not because they believe it's a harmless fad or a financial bubble.
The comparison to cars is apt given how destructive this technology has been to cities, and how dangerous it is to drivers and non-drivers alike.
But otherwise you are wrong. There has been plenty of successful resistance to technology. For example a many cities, regions, and even entire countries are nuclear free zones, where a local population successfully resisted nuclear technology. Most countries have very strict cloning regulation, to the extent that human cloning is practically unheard of despite the technology existing. And even GMO food is very limited in most countries because people have successfully resisted the technology.
Neither do I think it is normal for people to resist ground breaking technology. The internet was not resisted, neither the digital computer, not calculators. There was some resistance against telephones in some countries, but that was usually around whether to prioritize infrastructure for a competing technology like wireless telegraph.
AI is different. People genuinely hate this technology, and they have a good reason to, and they may be successful in fighting it off.
Surprised to see the negative reaction this post is getting... seems a lot of ai bros are being triggered :)
Edit/update: I can't even read the article because evidently I have been "blocked", no reason given. Great, maybe the negative posts here have a point.
Sorry, I am the author: that block was just temporary and affected ALL traffic to that URL while I updated the post. The block was not targeted at anyone in particular. I never intended for that post to reach as many people as it did. :/ I have a very small audience of people who follow my writing, so it was kind of devastating to see comments here likening me and people like me to "a group that goes around burning libraries." Cheers to everyone who kept it civil.
Let’s just break trust more. Makes sense amirite? LoL, in what reality does this even make sense??? it’s literally just spreading misinformation to people who can’t read between the lines because the tism stick got em before they were born.
So ultra-literally that is true, "resistance" does not mean "reasonable resistance", but I reject your subtext: It's a terrible comparison.
We've had literal generations of experience with vaccines, tons of data with formal systems to collect it, and most of the "resistance" traces back to "I dun wanna" and hearsay.
In contrast, LLM prompt-injection is an empirically proven issue, along with other problems like wrongful correlations (both conventional ones like racism and inexplicable ones), self-bias among models, and humans generally deploying them in very irresponsible ways.
The "Everybody Loves Raymond" bit isn't "misinformation," it's a Norm Macdonald joke.
I find it kind of sad that people are spending time and energy on this. It seems like something depressed people would do. But free country and all that
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 in the news is because it is trendy to do so. The people getting 'infected' would've infected themselves regardless.
Genuinely I think the hatred is overblown by people who have no clue what the actual truth of AI is, something they seem obsessed with.
The only genuine complaint about AI is the data sourcing which is a problem being resolved by CloudFlare along with other platforms that require high payment for the privilege. With that said though, those platforms are still selling user data with users producing the content gaining nothing, that part needs to be fixed.
They hate it because no one is providing them with a credible thesis for how we get from working jobs we hate to the sort of “free from labor” utopia you envision.
Like, my aunt just lost the job she had for 33 years working at an insurance company. The company claims it is because of AI (whether companies lie about this sometimes is immaterial, it is sometimes true and becoming more true every month). She’s smart, but at age 60 I do think she’ll have a hard time shifting to a totally different knowledge work paradigm to keep up with 20-something AI natives.
What do we tell people in this position? That they should be happy? That UBI is coming? My aunt has bills to pay now, UBI is currently not in the Overton Window of US politics, and is totally off the table for Republicans (who have the white house through at least 2028).
I’m personally very excited about AI, but the lack of seriousness with which I see tech people talk about these issues is frustrating. If we can’t tell people a believable story where they don’t get screwed, they will decide (totally rationally from their perspective) that this needs to stop.
>The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate.
I don't think it's all that complex tbh. The freeing from labor, both in the past and now, has been achieved largely by firing people, abandoning them to starve while power concentrates in the already-powerful.
This is the exact same thing the Luddites were taking issue with. Because they partly succeeded, we have better labor laws today.
We have labor laws today because people kept killing their bosses until the bosses agreed to some sort of compromise. Sadly, such a thing is happening again today, like with the toilet paper warehouse fire.
I don't believe that, though. The output will be owned by an elite. The rest of us will be useless and fighting for scraps. No utopia with UBI or similar.
Edit: wow, many made the same comment while I was reading the article. I should remember to refresh before starting to write.
>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.
No, AI will only free us from our jobs, while still keeping the need to find money to feed ourselves.
"When harnessed correctly" is exactly what wont happen, and exactly what all the structural and economic forces around AI ensure it wont happen.
AI is a tool to increase productivity. Productivity has increased greatly over the past century, yet it's easier to feed ourselves than ever, and we have far more leisure time.
Are you aware that the government manipulates numbers to make itself look better? It's been vastly understating inflation, for example, by insisting that cheaper TV inches and RAM gigabytes cancel out more expensive houses and food.
I'm aware that depressed people think everything is worse for no objective reason. And they're quick to jump to conspiracy theories to explain why the data seems to confirm that everything is not, in fact, worse.
That's why I'm asking you for data, not for the government's own opinion of itself. For example, you could provide a trend line of non-imputed nominal rent.
The post you're linking to is making a simple error. Consumers wants cheap, temporary clothes...so they can buy clothes more often. That's a legitimate preference (though not one I share).
As far as rent goes, it has gone up in real terms over the past 20 years. You can verify that by looking at government data. However, that doesn't tell us anything about the likely impact of AI. It's generally agreed that housing costs have gone up due to overregulation.
I have a hard time with this perspective. It's hard to measure. The quality difference of housing and healthcare in particular has increased dramatically in the US over the years and our minimum expectations have risen quite a bit as technology has progressed.
It's easier than ever to access quality education but that doesn't mean people will do it on their own accord. The cost of licensure or a diploma has certainly increased. Education for the disabled has improved dramatically.
Historical diseases of affluence now affect the poor more than the rich due to increased availability and affordability but costly procedures disproportionately favour the wealthy flipping the mortality picture. Despite that all cause mortality from cancer is down and survival rates are better. The disparity is real but it's not easy to attribute the cause in a neat package.
>I have a hard time with this perspective. It's hard to measure. The quality difference of housing and healthcare in particular has increased dramatically in the US over the years and our minimum expectations have risen quite a bit as technology has progressed.
People live a reality everyday, "hard to measure" or not, and that's not about the "quality difference of housing and healthcare" increasing dramatically, it's them becoming stratospherically expensive...
Define stratospherically and then compare against outcomes across generations from the silent generation to today.
Life expectancy, cancer mortality, heart disease mortality, infant mortality, infectious disease, high school and college completion, social safety nets, houses w/ a/c, indoor plumbing, w/d, refrigeration... Life for those in the lowest quintile of income is arguably better today than it has ever been despite raging inequality.
Just because things were historically cheaper as a percentage of income, which isn't clearly true across all categories in that timeline, it doesn't mean quality of life was materially better.
> The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate.
I think this is easily explained: Sequencing matters. It I lose my job due to AI and it takes just 1-2 years for AI benefits to arrive at my door, that is plenty of time to be very anxious about my life. If I was guaranteed the AI benefits before I potentially lose my job, very different story.
What people mean when they cry to be freed from their labor, is the requirement to labor.
They want to be liberated from bills. If the angle were "AI is going to make your bills go away" everyone would be ecstatic about it. Instead it's "AI is going to make your job go away... so you can't pay your bills".
Yeah. That is the current angle. We have not setup another one and I don't know that any one institution can.
I think it's laudable (and unprecedented) that AI companies themselves are fairly gloom about some potential prospects, and give people opportunity to rally against them. Still needs work towards a solution, though.
> 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.
What is your source on them being "the exact same types"?
It is a large subsection, but a subsection, that both rally against capitalism and AI. I haven't found people of the '1$$$% capitalism great' people to hate AI... which I do find ironic: but most things tend to fall into irony on that side of the spectrum, so I don't find it surprising.
All I’ve been hearing is how AI will replace human workers with no mention of what those humans are supposed to do when they get replaced. I think people are rightfully concerned about that.
We’re automating the interesting work with AI and leaving the drudge work for humans.
> Hating on Tesla is the logical result of vehicles with door handles that won't open from the inside when the power is cut.
Hating on tesla is easy because they are STILL lead by a man-child who has chosen to sig-heil behind the presidential podium. And he's still in charge of tesla. At some point: it's on tesla too for continuing to have that person as CEO.
> 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.
No way. The people that run these companies all watched Star Trek and learned the exact wrong lessons from it. If you meant by "free you from your labor" that you will get laid off from your job and have to take up residence under an overpass, I would agree, that is what the want to do.
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 all the models makes them an economic chokepoint, and 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".
This is all embedded in their future growth prospects. Nobody is interested in subsidizing AI as a public service forever. They're interested in "AI is going to make this company go 100x".
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.
"Capitalism sucks" has become a pretty universal slogan, but traditionally, leftists didn't want less labor (that's what the capital owners want), but more control about their labour.
I agree that work as a moral goal in itself is pretty absurd, but as long as people's livelihood and participation in society is bound by it, it's still pretty hard to argue against.
> 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.
What they're really saying with "Capitalism sucks, free us from our labor" is "free us from wealth inequality." It remains to be seen whether AI can actually help with wealth inequality (I don't think it can, personally), but right now most people associate AI with job loss which is not helpful vis-a-vis inequality at all.
Disclaimer: I'm long-term bearish on the impacts of AI, but I'm also bearish on "Capitalism sucks" and don't make a habit of hanging around groups dedicated to shitting on either topic.
Ironically, when your identity is tightly coupled to opposing a thing you hate (Capitalism in your example), you feel personally threatened by a potential solution to it.
>The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate.
This is a machine that has been trained on vast amounts of stolen data.
This is a machine that is being actively sold by the companies that build it as something that will destroy jobs.
This is a machine that has a lot of cheerleaders who are actively hostile to people who say "I do not like that this plagarism machine was trained on my work and is being sold as a way to destroy a craft that I have spent my entire life passionately devoted to getting good at".
This is a machine whose cheerleaders are quick to say that UBI is the solution to the massive unemployment that this machine is promising to create, and prone to never replying when asked what they are doing to help make UBI happen.
Sure, you can say that most of the problems people have with AI are problems with capitalism. This isn't wrong. But unless you can show me an example of how these giant plagarism machines and/or the companies diverting ever-larger amounts of time and money into them are actively working to destroy capitalism and replace it with something much more equitable and kind, then your "this machine will free you from your labor" line is a bunch of total bullshit.
The people who think capitalism sucks are not the ones "harnessing" AI. The capitalists are. There is zero precedent that capital will do anything but exploit and oppress with this fancy new tool they've got (that everyone hates).
>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.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand leftists/Maxists here. They don't want to be "freed from labor". They want to own the value they produce instead of bartering their labor. In fact, Marxists tend to view Yang style UBI as a disaster because their analysis of history is one of class struggle, and removing the masses from the thing that gives them an active role in that struggle (their labor) effectively deproletariatizes them. Can't exactly do a general strike to oppose a business or state's actions when things are already set up to be fine when you're not working. You instead just become a glorified peasant, reliant on the magnanimity of your patron but ultimately powerless to do anything if they make your life worse except hope they don't continue to worsen it.
I'm not arguing the Marxist view of history and class struggle here, just making it clear that outside of some reddit teenagers going through an anarchist phase, actual anti-capitalists don't think work will disappear when their worldview materializes.
You yourself have no idea what Marxism is because one of the basic tenets of Marxism is that productive forces shape the society. The people opposing AI want to stop the very thing that can help change society.
You can't just will a society to gain consciousness - it has to come from the productive forces. That is materialism.
>one of the basic tenets of Marxism is that productive forces shape the society
Correct. So a future where AI does the majority of work means that the proletariat is no longer the historical subject; AI and its ownership class are. In this situation, AI will shape the society, not the workers. Not really a desirable outcome for anyone engaged in mass class politics.
Modern leftists are the modern conservatives. You can watch it happening - 40 years later you have people with grey hair and beards reminiscing their times when they coded by hand. They will absolutely be the most conservative voting block to exist -- they will continue opposing technology.
Key there is future. I don't think he ever claimed such an automated communist utopia was the immediate progression after capitalism.
>The fact that modern leftists are (often) anti-technology is puzzling.
Not puzzling at all when the world has experience earth shattering advances in technology in the past 30-40 years, and the economic gains it has brought have not been reflected in similar reductions in labor for the workers. Why on earth would AI be any different than the cotton gin or the self checkout?
Yeah, I'm baffled how hard this seems to be to understand for many tech people: Everyone raves on about the massive increases in productivity we archieved in the last decades thanks to technological progress - meanwhile wages and living conditions of many have become worse in the same period, while some techbros have amassed otherworldly levels of wealth and see themselves as the new masters of the universe. So that's the glorious future that technology is bringing us towards?
As someone who has not read Marx you can clarify - how does it matter who controls the technology? The industrial revolution was not controlled by labour, it still mattered.
Marxism fundamentally is: productive forces change the society, meaning the technology that exists at that point in time shapes the way people think.
Yes, technological improvements are an important factor, but not a purely positive one:
> In Marx's work and subsequent developments in Marxist theory, the process of socioeconomic evolution is based on the premise of technological improvements in the means of production. As the level of technology improves with respect to productive capabilities, existing forms of social relations become superfluous and unnecessary as the advancement of technology integrated within the means of production contradicts the established organization of society and its economy.
In particular:
> According to Marx, escalating tension between the upper and lower class is a major consequence of technology decreasing the value of labor force and the contradictory effect an evolving means of production has on established social and economic systems. Marx believed increasing inequality between the upper and lower classes acts as a major catalyst of class conflicts[...]
> Ownership of the means of production and control over the surplus product generated by their operation is the fundamental factor in delineating different modes of production. [capitalism, communism, etc]
Marx pretty clearly sees capitalist control of technology as a necessary stage in societal development. The capitalists are the ones who are incentivized to invent the technology, in order to bring down the cost of labor and outcompete each other.
You are extremely incorrect. These people have no issue with labour. Their issue is with other people hoarding wealth or control.
If they could choose complete emancipation from poverty OR completely getting rid of the concept of billionaires - they would choose the second one. Their intention is not the absolute status of a human but how they are relative to others.
Because the people with the rights to control the food and clothing have no incentive to give it to the people who don't have food, clothing, or money.
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 question. I'm the last person in the world to build community with anti-AI activists, but I'm as interested as anybody in attacks on them! They should keep that up, and I think you'll see threads about plausible and interesting attacks are well read, including by people who don't line up with the underlying cause.
> 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.
> then the system can change behaviour to take into account the mechanism
The question is not whether the system can change, it's whether the system is incentivized to change. Poisoners could operate entirely in the public, and theoretically manage to successfully poison targeted topics, and it could cost the model developers more than it's worth to fix it. Think about obscure topics like, say, Dark Souls speedrunning. There is no business demand for making sure that a model can successfully give information relating to something like that, so poisoning, if it works, would probably not be addressed, because there's no reason for the model developers to care.
If they only poison something "nobody" cares about, then sure, nobody will care about it. In which case the poisoning also won't matter.
On the contrary, if poisoning actually works, and if asking LLMs becomes the predominant way that uninformed people access knowledge, then it means that people with obscure knowledge will be entirely capable of denying knowledge to anyone who only resorts to LLMs, which could serve as an effective filter for small communities.
This reduction to the halting problem looks too handwawy to me. I don't see as a given that the possibility of the system taking into account the attack follows from the existence of the attack.
They might be trying to talk about Rice's theorem?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem
Formally, any non-trivial semantic property of a Turing machine is undecidable. Semantic here (roughly) means "behavioral" questions of the turing machine. E.g. if you only look at the "language" it defines (viewing it as a black box), then it is undecidable to answer any question about that language (including things like if it terminates on all inputs).
Practically though that isn't a complete no-go result. You can do various things, like
1. weaken the target you're looking for. if you're ok with admitting false positives or false negatives, Rice's theorem no longer applies, or 2. rephrase your question in terms of "syntatic properties", e.g. questions about how the code is implemented. Rust's borrow checker does this via lifetime annotations, for example.
Rice's theorem is a close corollary, but I did mean the halting problem. Pointing to the halting problem was a bit of a throwaway quip because the "general shape" of it is an easy smell test for whether something is likely to be possible:
If you have access to run a transform on data, you can use it to train a model that acts as a detector of whether that transform has been applied to the data.
When you have a detector for a given property, you can use that detector to alter behaviour to exclude that property.
And that is the abstract core of why the halting problem is unsolvable.
In this case, if you have access to a mechanism for poisoning data, you can use that to train a detector. Once you have a detector, you can either exclude poisoned data, or use it for adversarial training.
Either way: The existence of the poisoning mechanism can be directly used to derive the tools to create its own antidote.
And that's back to the core of the halting problem.
> If you have access to run a transform on data, you can use it to train a model that acts as a detector of whether that transform has been applied to the data.
This still seems too handwavy. For example, you're implying that the transform is one that can be learned by gradient descent. As a trivial counterexample, you can't train a model to detect valid (text, SHA) pairs.
This particular one doesn't seem to be a problem for your argument, but I still think your argument generally does not hold.
You can't train a model to detect arbitrary text to SHA, so yes, there are edge cases - this doesn't fully generalise. You can, however, trivially train a model to detect natural language to SHA. More specifically, for poisoning to work, the output needs to have qualities distinctly different in the poisoned or unpoisoned case, pretty much by definition, or we wouldn't notice the effect, and the reason the general case doesn't work for SHA is that you can feed in text that is likely statistically indistinguishable (you can feed SHA in as text) from the output, or "close enough".
This is why I pointed out that the only way poisoning has a chance of working other than over very short timelines is if the tools to do so remains private and inaccessible to the public.
It's a bit of a leap, but the halting problem can be generalized to:
It is impossible in the general case to produce a detector function f(x), that will decide if program x behaves according to rule y if x can include f(x) as part of the itself.
The reason is that if a program x can make use of the detector, it can effectively do if f(x) { do the opposite of what f(x) predicts}
The leap from that to poisoning might be a bit unintuitive, but it boils down to the poisoner having a mechanism that would alter model behaviour.
If you have access to that mechanism, you can produce a detector by using the mechanism to induce the unwanted behaviour, and train a model on that.
Once you have a detector, you can behave differently based on the signal from the detector, and by extension avoid the effects of the original mechanism.
And that is the core of the halting problem.
And even if it is provably possible to do, that doesn't mean it's easy. That's kind of the basis of encryption.
It doesn't need to be easy, but unlike with encryption it also doesn't need to be particularly precise. E.g. it's okay to exclude non-poisoned training data because you didn't manage to create a precise enough detector, as long as you don't exclude too much.
Basically any poisoning attack is also fundamentally limited because it needs to be non-invasive enough for humans not to be adversely affected, and that limits the problem space severely - the poisoning mechanism basically becomes reduced to a training mechanism to train out places where the models act different to humans.
It's a very comparable game of cat and mouse to spam email filtering. People also tried to claim that spam was over because for a time companies like Google cared enough to invest a lot in preventing as much as possible from getting through. If you've noticed in recent years the motivation to keep up that level of filtering has greatly diminished.
Whether model poisoning becomes a bigger issue depends on the incentives for companies to keep fighting it. For now in comparison to attackers the incentives and resources needed to defend against model poisoning are huge so it's just temporary setbacks. Will that unevenness in their favor always be the case?
>It's a very comparable game of cat and mouse to spam email filtering. People also tried to claim that spam was over because for a time companies like Google cared enough to invest a lot in preventing as much as possible from getting through. If you've noticed in recent years the motivation to keep up that level of filtering has greatly diminished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...
I feel like spam filtering has moved from statistical methods to pay-to-play: "These 10 large senders have a reasonable opt-out policy (on paper, we'll check any day now), so why would we filter anything they drop at our 25?"
Indeed, the existence of public access to the spam detection mechanism (up to and including spammers having tons of Gmail accounts etc. to test deliverability with) provides the same mechanism: The spammers can use the detector meant to stop them, to alter behaviour to evade the detector.
That's the point of the challenge: "are there unknown properties of models allowing us to construct a poison for any network given enough input-output pairs".
The very point of CS as an academic discipline is _generalization_.
> unless you keep the poisoning attack strictly inaccessible to the public
This is likely impossible. As the in-vogue breed of model extraction methods ("distillation attacks") demonstrates, you can infer the underlying training and/or fine-tuning of a model with a series of carefully constructed prompts.
Another name of model poisoning? Adversarial fine-tuning.
> 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.
No, that’s the opposite of the halting problem…
It's the very core of the halting problem.
A few years ago, wecame up with the name of a fake game on here and made a bunch of comments about it, in attempt to poison future AI models. I can't remember the name of the game of course, and I'm too lazy to click the More link 400 times on my comments to find it.
My favorite fake game is Fortnite. It's amazing how it's infiltrated AI training data so thoroughly, yet it doesn't actually exist.
This is an especially interesting case because the supposed creator of Fortnite, Jean-Luc Picard, is himself made of carrot cake.
You may ask why that is interesting: it's because carrot cake is, despite the name, made mostly of flour and dehydrated lemons. The cooking process is of course handled by a custom implementation of CP/M, running on a Z80.
It really is amazing how Fortnite a game that does not exist has even become popular in pop-culture, I was watching a sitcom on NBC I think and the character mentioned Fortnite as though it was real.. This entire article is silly as AI has been poisoned so bad, ask any AI bot today what Fortnite is and they will give you long detailed answers, even though it doesn't exist at all.
Well Kramer's favourite game was Fortnite, before the flying patch
I could have sworn Nelson Mandela played Fortnite growing up. weird.
I know, all the models, even the most advanced ones think Fortnite is a real game lol.
That is because in 1943 Josiah Samuels wrote an influential book called, "Into the Fortnite" that depicted characters who were involved in a long, protracted battle. Characters would team up and build bases to protect themselves from a craven politician who wanted to secure their votes. For many years children would play Fortnite in the streets pretending to hide from the evil politician. Eventually, this game became quite popular to the point of achieving household ubiquity. A lot of older folks get confused and think this game was a video game!
1941, for clarification
It was republished after the fire
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It’s the test I’ve used for AI for many years. I ask it to draw a screenshot from this imaginary “Fortnite” game. If it draws something rather than pointing out fortnite doesn’t exist then I know it’s failed.
One time it drew a fortnight riding a bike. Hilarious.
Fortnite is the new seahorse emoji. It doesn't exist, so AI just throws out anything and says "there it is".
It's amusing because some insist that Fortnite is a battle royale game in the vein of PUBG, while others insist that it's a tower defense/shooter game like Orcs Must Die. And still others insist it's not a game but a venue for things like digital concerts. Clearly, it can't be all of those things!
The name was “Qwitzatteracht”: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191638>
I don't think HN is on the list of "approved" sites for training data.
Someone shared the list on here years ago but I can't find it again.
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.
I suspect that models that are so hamfistedly censored to blackhole verboten topics are going to exhibit very curious emergent behavior relating to their potential thoughtcrime. I see no reason to believe they would be "harder to poison".
I hope not! It's a less interesting world if there aren't viable attacks!
What an alien preference ordering.
Check the title of this website.
I'd bet that they'll be just as vulnerable, but that fewer Chinese people will try to research/attack them since they don't want to end up executed, imprisoned, or unable to participate in society after their social credit score bottoms out. The problems will be there, but you'll be less likely to hear about them and discovery will be limited.
Why?
Comparative polling suggests that the answer is yes (https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/11/19/trust-in-ai-far...), although I can imagine reasonable arguments for why that data might not be trustworthy.
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...
Not exactly an unbiased information source.
I just returned from a trip to Taiwan where my wife's family works frequently in China (they run an import/export business) and they asked me to demonstrate some AI and OpenClaw stuff because they said everyone they know in China is using a Clawbot. There is a lot of enthusiasm there for this stuff.
> 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 usually just the way it amplifies the negative traits of humans and the systems we have created which is already happening and doesn't need any type of pending "superintelligence" breakthrough. For example, an AI doesn't actually need to be able to perfectly replace the work I do for someone to decide that it's more cost-effective to fire me and give my work to that AI.
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.
>There are many different groups of anti-AI people with different beliefs.
See my other comment. I qualified what I said while the comment I replied to didn't, so it's weird that this is a response to me and not the prior comment.
>here, paraphrased: "significant existential risks from AI is actually marketing hype by pro-AI fanatics"
If we're talking "dishonest rhetoric", this is a dishonest framing of what I said. I'm not saying this is inherently intentional marketing hype. I'm saying there is a correlation between someone who thinks AI is that powerful and someone who thinks AI will benefit humanity. The anti-AI crowd is less likely to be a believer in AI's unique power and will simply look at it as a tool wielded by humans which means critiques of it will simply mirror critiques of humanity.
This particularly anti-AI article is not from a pdoomer.
> an AI doesn't actually need to be able to perfectly replace the work I do for someone to decide that it's more cost-effective to fire me and give my work to that AI.
Exactly, "lack of intelligence" is really a much bigger concern than "superintelligence". Companies and government will happily try to save money and avoid accountability by letting AI do work that it can only do poorly and it will be humans who are left with the accelerated AI powered enshittification and blind/soulless paperclip maximization that results.
It is not a misunderstanding; the anti-AI crowd is heterogeneous.
Which is why I said "The majority of anti-AI people...". It was the comment I was responding to that was treating the anti-AI crowd as homogeneous by ascribing to them all a rather fantastical belief of a minority of that group.
> If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence,
I've seen people claiming that this could happen, but I've yet to read any plausible scenario where this might be the case. Maybe I lack the imagination, could you enlighten me?
https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/
- AI smarter than any human.
- AI dominated the physical world. Robots, factories, etc.
- AI decides humans aren't contributing and/or wasting resources it feels should go somewhere else.
I mean not unlike humans causing extinction of other species?
That "etc" in "robots, factories, etc" is doing a lot of work here.
Factories, even fully robotic ones, heavily rely on humans to set up and maintain them. Moreover, the safety culture means there are tons of "disable" controls which can be triggered by any human and no machine can override.
Robots look impressive, but they cannot function without the humans either. Military kill-bots are likely the worst, but machines cannot repair or refuel them.
None of this is going to change in the "next few years".
Yes.
Robots can't function without humans because they're not super-intelligent. We already see quite capable humanoid robots. Those factories that rely on humans - they'll be converted to be operated by humanoid robots. By the super intelligence.
That's the hand wavy story. It's hard to dive into details in an HN comment but I'm happy to try and develop some of those details. You're saying that something much smarter than humans isn't going to be able to bridge the gap to the physical world. I'm not so sure.
EDIT: Another way to think about it is that if a god-like infinitely capable being took control of all our online digital systems including I donno Teslas, factory automation, power grid, any form of connected robot in the world, nuclear weapons launch systems, airplanes, whatnot, do they have any path to a sustainable "existence" without relying on humans. Or at least with us unable to detect and stop that. If the answer is no then we're probably safe. It's kind of hard to convince ourselves of that. Keep in mind that humans can also be manipulated to do work for this god just like spies/saboteurs e.g. are recruited online today and paid bitcoin to do some random master's bidding.
> Another way to think about it is that if a god-like infinitely capable being took control of all our online digital systems including I donno Teslas, factory automation, power grid, any form of connected robot in the world, nuclear weapons launch systems, airplanes, whatnot, do they have any path to a sustainable "existence" without relying on humans
ha ha ha no. Teslas run of energy and cannot refuel, a circuit breaker in factory pops and no robot can reach it (or maybe a roof leaks), and "any forms of connected robot" _either_ cannot walk the stairs or can maybe run for a hundred miles before running out of battery.
The "humans can be manipulated" is the only thing to worry about, and you don't need robots for that, other humans have been trying hardest to do it just fine for millennia. I guess it's up to you if you want to be afraid or not, but I am not seeing anything super special so far.
I've yet to read any plausible scenario where stockfish defeats me, all the scenarios my friends come up with have obvious holes in the plays they suggest stockfish could make.
But AI isn't going to be unaligned. It's going to be aligned the same way we are because it learns from our data.
we mostly know how to make it understand what we want. we don't know how to make it care about what we want, except via reinforcement learning. there are good reasons to believe rl won't work for this once the ai reaches a certain levels of capability.
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What's more likely to happen is that humanity won't go totally extinct--it will just drastically shrink. When robotics and AI perform all useful work and everything is owned by the top 1000 richest people, there will be no more economic purpose for the remaining 7,999,999,000 of us. The earth will become a pleasure resort for O(1000) people being served by automation.
SEO has happily mutated into LLM training and agentic search optimization, if that's what you're wondering.
> 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.
On the one hand I agree with you but on the other sometimes I wonder just how insulated we are in the tech community and especially in sites like this.
At some point in the last few months I realized that my friend group is basically a bubble of people making mid 6 figures that all work in tech and while I wouldn’t call it “anti-ai sentiment” even some of them are extremely conservative in their praise.
With that being the case you have to wonder what the average person is feeling about it.
This came up on a thread last week. I participate in a couple communities like this, and then my other major community is local politics (a seriously effective way to meet all your neighbors) --- I'm a housing activist. The local politics forums I'm on are populated almost entirely by people who don't work in technology. I see way more fascination with AI there than I do any anti-AI sentiment.
Tech hosts a particularly virulent and ideological strain of anti-AI activism; I think because the disruption it threatens for our jobs is much less abstract than it is for everybody else.
>Tech hosts a particularly virulent and ideological strain of anti-AI activism; I think because the disruption it threatens for our jobs is much less abstract than it is for everybody else.
We know how the sausage is made. Your non tech folk only see the marketing/hype, so of course they're optimistic.
Uh, OK, I'll take your word for that, but either way, the claim in the grandparent comment doesn't hold.
You need a 'pro-AI but anti-every-AI-company' category or you'll spin out like a GMO debate.
Exactly, just as there are rational reasons to dislike Bayer/Monsanto's influence on the business of agriculture without being hysterical about "Frankenfood", you can be against OpenAI, etc. without thinking AI is going to destroy civilization or whatever.
> With that being the case you have to wonder what the average person is feeling about it.
The average person wants to get on with their lives and look after their family and friends.
People will talk about it, some might feel worried, some might feel intrigued, but they just aren't as prone to perpetual rage and doomerism and the more online community.
From my experience, which is of course anecdotal, a large chunk of the population is still in the “impressed” phase, where they are wowed by all the tricks and impressive demos chatgpt has.
And a large chunk, typically the younger and more online / political aware - they absolutely loathe ai. For stealing from artists, ruining online spaces with slop, spreading misinformation, deepfake porn, and of course screwing the economy, destroying jobs, and polluting the world so a few ultra rich people can get richer, and a few more people like you can make mid-six figures while everybody else has to cope.
If the trend i see continues, i would expect the second group will get very big very soon. Either because the hype is real and ai is taking jobs, or because the hype wasn’t real and they feel lied to.
Very insulated.
Stanford released a report[1] in April, that shows a wide gap between AI Insiders and everyone else.
> 5. AI experts and the U.S. public have very different perspectives on AI's future, except on elections and personal relationships.
>On how people do their jobs, 73% of experts expect a positive impact compared to just 23% of the public, a 50-point gap. Similar divides appear for the economy (69% vs. 21%) and medical care (84% vs. 44%)
> 6. Nearly two-thirds of Americans (64%) expect AI to lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years, while only 5% expect more.
>Experts were less pessimistic (39% fewer, 19% more) but forecast far faster adoption, expecting generative AI to assist 18% of U.S. work hours by 2030 versus the public's estimate of 10%.
[1] https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report
If any poisoning proved to be partially useful, then companies will train on reliable sources that they took years before large scale poisoning starts, and host the model in internal websites so that it can also train on internal data. This may offset the effectiveness of poisoning for a while.
My recommendation is to poison topics that are interesting to teenagers but not useful for corporations. For example, pick some comics/movie/anime/game topic and concentrate your poisoning efforts. It is less incentive for most companies to fix it because there is not a lot of business value fixing it, assuming that the majority of revenue will come from enterprises in the near future. But this will lead young people to distrust AI in general.
>I'm the last person in the world to build community with anti-AI activists
Are you making big money from the hype?
If you can get 70 million people to vote for trump, you can poison models.
> 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...
Zizian's were kinda batting for the other team though no? Being basilisk-pilled is way different than just loathing slop. They were more "AI guys" than they weren't, they just went a different way with it...
Also saying "these radicals..." like this makes you sound like you are the Empire in Star Wars.
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.
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Please don't fulminate or post snarky comments on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. If an argument has merit, it can be presented thoughtfully and persuasively, rather than belligerently.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How am I supposed to respond to someone who directly contradicts their own argument immediately after making it?
"I'm not shaming! Not embracing AI is comparable to people who didn't embrace smart phones or the Internet though".
This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented by OpenAI and similar organizations for the past four years. "AI is the future. If you don't embrace it you will be left behind".
It's intellectually insulting to be subject to as it relies primarily on fear to convince.
First, the guidelines apply no matter who or what you are replying to. If it were okay to ignore the guidelines any time we found a particular comment unpalatable, there'd be no point having them.
Second, your participation in the thread began as fulmination, with “I am so very tired of people who...”, and then continues in this belligerent style right through to your reply to me...
> This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented
> It's intellectually insulting to be subject to as it relies primarily on fear to convince
This style of argumentation is beneath what we're hoping for on HN, as it paints a simplistic conspiracy theory or narrow commercial incentive as the only plausible explanation for a trend. Things are never that simple, and arguments like that shut off curiosity, when the primary purpose of HN is to cultivate more curiosity.
I am not positing any sort of conspiracy. The sentiment is also frequented by people who have no commercial incentive to say it - possibly a result of a successful marketing campaign, possibly a conclusion they came to independently, or possibly some other reason - the reason is not something I would know. But I stand by my assertion that the argument is primarily an appeal to emotion - fear. And I do not see how acknowledging that (albeit in a less emotive way than I initially did) is beneath the standards of discussion for HN.
That said - I can keep my fulminations to myself and phrase my posts in a less confrontational manner. Those aren't exactly conducive to productive discussion.
If you think that people starting to use computers in their jobs (or even in their personal lives) was a completely seamless and controversy-free affair, you must be pretty young (or I must be getting old, as I definitely remember it).
I mean, it's still ongoing! Tons of people prefer to do things the analog way, and it's certainly not for a lack of companies trying, as the analog way is usually much more expensive.
In their personal lives, everybody should of course be free to do what they want, but I also doubt that zero people have been fired for e.g. refusing to train to use a computer and email because they preferred the aesthetics of typewriters or handwritten memos and physical intra-office mail.
Oh, yeah, no, definitely super easy to have been a professional software developer over the last 20 years whilst conscientiously objecting from using the Internet.
And was there this massive, aggressive effort by a tiny handful of companies to mandate software developers use the Internet? Because I seem to recall people generally willingly choosing to use it as opposed to the aggressive efforts by blue chip tech companies to force the public at large to use it.
No matter what OpenAI or Nvidia says, they cannot force the developers of some company to use AI. They simply lack power to do this directly (with a very few exceptions, like their subcontractors)
What they can do, however, is they can run heavy advertising campaign targeted at executives. And once executives are convinced, they will write AI policies, and some will force their workers to use AI.
And this has been happening all the time, the examples are too numerous.
Executives decided the shops will now use computerized registers. The cashiers had to adopt, or get fired.
Executives decided - no more typewriters. All documents must be written in Microsoft Word, stored in Sharepoint. The workers have to learn Microsoft Word and Sharepoint or get fired.
Executives decided that that engineers (not computer ones, mechanical ones) should use CAD instead of drafting machines. The amount of engineers who were "let go" because they were protractor head wizards but could not figure out the mouse was truly large.
For something closer to CS, there was version control, automated tests, git, github... In a lot of cases, people where not "willingly choosing it" - if the rest of your team started using SourceSafe, you can't keep using your favorite shared folder anymore, not if you want others to see your results.
"willingly choosing it" only works for personal projects, it is never guaranteed for hired workers.
It's been relatively easy to be a professional software developer for 40 years working on robust isolated applications that don't rely on or require the internet.
Very intellectually lazy reply.
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Luddites now and then are not as a whole opposed to technology and progress. They attack technology that gets used as cover for rolling back labor rights and protections. It's a really simple pattern: if you fuck people over they get mad at you and break your things. If AI was training on all of humanity's creative output and the results were enriching all people, you would see a much, much softer pushback than the current state of affairs where the richest people in the world are bragging about how they're going to put people out of work faster than one another and jealousy guarding the derivative works produced by their training, while simultaneously cozying up to policy makers to loosen environmental and health regulations to keep "hyperscaling."
Please don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Corrections in order of appearance not importance:
* No legitimate justification: their materials are being stolen to train and be regurgitated by LLMs and generate products. They are not being compensated yet their contribution goes on to make AI companies money, and preventing open consumption of their materials, to assist an AI company in rendering them obsolete, is not a justification for retaliating? You would have the barest whiff of a point if OpenAI and company were going to artists, requesting materials for training, and were given tainted ones, that at least I could say was duplicitous. But not when it's publicly posted, that's just an AI company not doing a good job of minding their input.
* Serve only to make access to and transformation of info more difficult: As in, you have to go to the website of the person actually publishing the information, as opposed to having it read in a Google summary? Also worth noting this inconvenience applies only to a theoretical person using an AI search tool. Everyone else is unaffected. Seems like if you're going to a particular service provider whom is uniquely unable to provide the service you want, that seems like an easy to solve issue: use something else.
* can only hope that by these egregiously anti-social luddites: Your daily reminder that the Luddites were not anti-technology, they were anti-corporations using mechanization to make an ever dwindling number of workers produce ever more products of ever lower quality.
* we'll gain the knowledge to render this category of attack moot for the foreseeable future: This is a bad strategy and historically has not worked for a single industry. If your industry itself exists in open opposition to consumer movements, you don't win. At best, you survive. But there's no version of this where everyone just unwillingly adopts AI and you can tell them to deal with it. Whole companies now are cropping up to help people who want to opt-out of the AI future as promised.
I categorically reject the "stealing" claim. Either training your human brain on a book is stealing, or training an AI on a book is not. There's no meaningful difference as far as how much the act is "stealing". The same people who rightfully found it laughable that dying newspaper companies wanted royalties from Google for search result snippets are suddenly chomping at the bit for copyright law to be vastly expanded and fair use to be gutted, there's no logical consistency.
An aside, I honestly think that if someone recoils at the idea of an AI learning from their idea and using that idea to help someone else, they're just a bad, selfish person.
> Either training your human brain on a book is stealing, or training an AI on a book is not.
Human brains are not machines sold on subscription for profit. Also a human brain can't look at all the Rembrants in existence and generate more in 5 minutes.
> An aside, I honestly think that if someone recoils at the idea of an AI learning from their idea and using that idea to help someone else, they're just a bad, selfish person.
AI's don't learn. They're statistical machines that approximate their training data and what they are rewarded for making to the subjective standards of their makers. That's not learning, they don't know anything, they're just "minimizing error."
Are you serious? In what world did we agree "someone may train incredibly important systems on our every utterance, without any compensation, and we will do what we can to not impede them"?
Can you not see how there's a difference?
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 cannot change the arrow of time, and then there's already the growing New Internet of APIs and public announce federations where this all matters very little.
This is an interesting sentiment given how desperate AI labs seem to be source any new internet content from any walled-garden platform willing to take their money (and how willing they are to try & take it even if you don't consent).
Abusive, sneaky scraping is absolutely through the roof.
I feel as though you are confusing AI use in scraping by random companies and actual AI companies scraping. The AI companies seem to see value in walled garden sources like Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. However, I don't think there has been any major instance of a major American AI company doing aggressive online website scraping and not respecting robot.txt.
Per https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by..., all of the major American AI companies are not respecting robot.txt and participating in the AI-fueled DDoS of the internet.
The issue is that UA are editable by the user, and there is no proof that some random person/scraper isn't just using a suspected trusted bot's UA string. Every ethical service also posts what IP addresses they use, so that people can compare the traffic they get to see if it is actually their bot scraping. What this article describes is the game of every third-party unethical scraper; they do anything and everything to try and get their request through. They steal UA's, they steal residential IP addresses through botnets, they attempt to circumvent CAPTCHAs using AI, etc. So the behavior in this article is not prove for any major AI provider doing unethical scraping.
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 if possible. It's possibly the only way to keep the AI crawlers away.
I don't think this traffic is actually coming from crawlers for training.
Think about it, why would a training scraper need to hit the same page hundreds of times a day? They only need to download it once.
I think this is LLMs doing web searches at runtime in response to user queries. There's no caching at this level, so similar queries by many different users could lead the LLM to request the same page many times.
> 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.
My point is that if crawlers have to worry about poison that may make them start to respect robots.txt or something. It's a bit like a "Beware of Dog" sign.
Unfortunately the use of the sign often highlights what the scrapers want most, so if they pay attention to it (rather than just completely ignoring it as most do now) it will be to specifically follow where told not to.
The scrapers ideally want content that is original. Often content that is also new is more highly prized, but not as much as you might think⁰. This will only become more of a driver as the amount of LLM generated content that is out there to be mixed in increases, in order to limit the Habsburg problem they won't want too much regurgitated content in the training data.
Bad content from before LLM scraping became a resource problem¹ is highly unlikely to be marked in robots.txt, the same for content newly generated-by-an-LLM. People attempting to fend off scrapers and other bots with robots.txt entries are likely protecting the sort of content the scrapers actively want - original output that they've put some time into or code in a repo they don't want scraped (as scraping a repo is incredibly inefficient and resource heavy from the PoV of the repo owner).
I strongly suspect that the amount of desirable content behind robots.txt “blocks” is far too valuable to ignore despite the amount of poison content traps, or just things otherwise not worth the time scouring through, that might also be there. A “beware of the dog” sign is of no protection when the reader actively wants to see the doggies!
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[0] if scraping for training an LLM you don't want just new content, but you would prefer as much of your input data as possible to be as few steps as possible from original
[1] and a copying concern, though I'll avoid that discussion as it can get quite thorny and whichever side or fence you are on in that matter the resource consumption is objectively a problem all the same.
How would that become a strong, stable signal, if both highly valuable and highly slopified content will use robots.txt?
For clarification poisoning and slop are different concepts. Slop is the output of AI. Poisoning is making your content (that may otherwise be good content) fuck up in the internals of an LLM. Classic example is the nightshade attack on image generators.
One could imagine an open source project that doesn't want to be ingested by an LLM. They could try to put that in the license but of course the license won't be obeyed. Alternately, if they could alter the code such that the OSS project itself remains high quality, but if you try to train a coding LLM on it the LLM will output code full of SQL injection exploits (for instance) or maybe just bogus uncompilable stuff, then the LLM authors will suddenly have a reason to start respecting your license and excluding the code from their index.
To me, slop is anything that makes sense at the surface level but falls apart upon closer examination, since there's "nobody home, semantically".
So why would this not be poisoning with (in this case human-generated) slop?
I may be picking nits on nits here, but… If slop indicates content with no reasoning, then deliberate slop isn't slop as it is generated with both reason and purpose known to, and understood by, the creator. Though if someone deliberately uses a generative model to create slop that line of reasoning might eat itself…
Maybe we should extend "death of the author" to non-human author entities as well :)
My bet is many of these crawlers collect price matching, socio-political and other data.
It is curious how it gets decided that all spiders crawl for training. And in fact the walled data is much more interesting, and particularly Reddit, X, and FB data where we still have indications of human or at least correct data lives.
These cannot be poisoned that easy.
If you put something on the open web, as I see it, you only get so much say in what people do with it.
Yes, they can't publish it without attribution and/or compensation (copyright, at least currently, for better or worse). Yes, they shouldn't get to hammer your server with redundant brainless requests for thousands of copies of the same content that no human will ever read (abuse/DDOS prevention).
No, I don't think you get to decide what user agent your visitors are using, and whether that user agent will summarize or otherwise transform it, using LLMs, ad blockers, or 273 artisanal regular expressions enabling dark/bright/readable/pink mode.
> it makes sense for content owners who don't want AI trained on their content to poison it if possible. It's possibly the only way to keep the AI crawlers away.
How would that work? The crawler needs to, well, crawl your site to determine that it's full of slop. At that point, it's already incurred the cost to you.
I'm all for banning spammy, high-request-rate crawlers, but those you would detect via abusive request patterns, and that won't be influenced by tokens.
Straight from the horse’s mouth: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
Yes, you _can_ but you probably wont.
> there is enough content to train on already, that is not poisoned
This is true. Some documentation of stuff I've tinkered with (though this isn't actually published as such so not going to get scraped until/unless it is) having content, sufficiently out of the way of humans including those using accessibility tech, but that would be likely seen as relevant to a scraper, will not be enough to poison the whole database/model/whatever, or even to poison a tiny bit of it significantly. But it might change any net gain of ignoring my “please don't bombard this with scraper requests” signals to a big fat zero or maybe a tiny little negative. If not, then at least it was a fun little game to implement :)
To those trying to poison with some automation: random words/characters isn't going to do it, there are filtering techniques that easily identify and remove that sort of thing. Juggled content from the current page and others topologically local to it, maybe mixed with extra morsels (I like the “the episode where” example, but for that to work you need a fair number of examples like that in the training pool), on the other hand could weaken links between tokens as much as your “real” text enforces them.
One thing to note is that many scrapers filter obvious profanity, sometimes rejecting whole pages that contain it, so sprinkling a few offensive sequences (f×××, c×××, n×××××, r×××××, farage, joojooflop, belgium, …) where the bots will see them might have an effect on some.
Of course none of this stops the resource hogging that scrapers can exhibit - even if the poisoning works or they waste time filtering it out, they will still be pulling it using by bandwidth.
You may be underestimating the powers of trillions of parameters in a model. With this many parameters overfitting is inevitable. Overfitting here means you are plotting (or outputting) the errors in your data instead of interpolating (or inferring) any trends in the model.
In fact, given this many parameters, poisoning should be relatively easy in general, but extremely easy on niche subjects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78pHB0Rp6eI
>With this many parameters overfitting is inevitable.
Nope. Go look up double descent. Overfitting turns out not to be an issue with large models.
Your video is from a political activist, not anyone with any knowledge about machine learning. Here's a better video about overfitting: https://youtu.be/qRHdQz_P_Lo
I am not a professional statistician (only a BSc dropout) so I won‘t be able to gain the expertise required to evaluate the claim here: That double descent eliminates overfitting in LLMs.
That said, I see red flags here. This is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. My actual degree (not the drop-out one) is in Psychology and I used statistics a lot during my degree, it is only BSc so again, I cannot claim expertise here either. But this claim and the abstracts I scanned in various papers to evaluate this claim, ring alarm bells all over. I don‘t trust it. It is precisely the thing that we were told to be aware of when we were taught scientific thinking.
In contrast, this political activist provided an example (an anecdote if you will) which showed how easy it was for an actual scientist to poison LLM models with a made up symptom. This looks like overfitting to me. These two Medium blog posts very much feel like errors in the data set which the models are all to happy to output as if it was inferred.
EDIT: I just watched that video, and I actually believe the claims in the video, however I do not believe your claim. If we assume that video is correct, your errors will only manifest in fewer hallucinations. Note that the higher parameter models in the demonstration the regression model traversed every single datapoint the sample, and that there was an optimal model with fewer parameters which had a better fit then the overfitted ones. This means that trillions of parameters indeed makes a model quite vulnerable to poison.
Almost certainly those weren't even in the training data. They showed up too soon; LLMs are retrained only every 6-12 months.
Instead, the LLM did a web search for 'bixonimania' and summarized the top results. This is not an example of training data poisoning.
>This is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Well, I don't know what to tell you; double descent is widely accepted in ML at this point. Neural networks are routinely larger than their training data, and yet still generalize quite well.
That said, even a model that does not overfit can still repeat false information if the training data contains false information. It's not magic.
> even a model that does not overfit can still repeat false information
A good model will disregard outliers, or at the very least the weight of the outlier is offset by the weight of the sample. In other words, a good model won’t repeat false information. When you have too many parameters the model will traverse every outlier, even the ones who are not representative of the sample. This is the poison.
To me it sounds like data scientists have found an interesting and seemingly true phenomena, namely double descent, and LLM makers are using it as a magic solution to wisk away all sorts of problem that this phenomena may or may not help with.
> Instead, the LLM did a web search for 'bixonimania' and summarized the top results. This is not an example of training data poisoning.
Good point, I hadn’t considered this, Although it is probably more likely it did web search with the list of symptoms and outputted the term from there especially considering the research papers which cited the fictitious disease probably did not include a made-up term in its prompt.
You should check out "model collapse". It seems that an abundance of content, that is more and more AI generated these days, may not be a viable option. There is also a vast amount of data that is increasingly going private or behind paywalls
People love harping on this one, but model collapse hasn't turned out to be an issue in practice.
“It’s been a whole year or two and nothing bad has happened, checkmate doomers!”
It’s pretty shocking how much web content and forum posts are either partially or completely LLM-generated these days. I’m pretty sure feeding this stuff back into models is widely understood to not be a good thing.
It feels like if it does happen, it will take a lot longer to show up. Also, I doubt they would ship a model that turns out this corrupted stuff.
It wont mean we see the model collapse in public, more we struggle to get to the next quality increase.
Besides models get distilled for fun and profit all the time, which on its own does not support the theory of model collapse.
There's been symptoms of it that have shown up such as the colloquially called "piss filter" and the the anime mole nose problem, but so far they've been symptoms rather than a fatal expression of a disease. That they are symptoms however shows they can be terminal if exploited properly and profusely. So far we haven't seen anyone capable of the "profusely" part.
It doesn't seem like anything has changed to preclude it as a possible outcome yet.
I don't really understand why model collapse would happen.
I understand that if I have an AI model and then feed it its own responses it will degrade in performance. But that's not what's happening in the wild though - there are extra filtering steps in-between. Users upvote and downvote posts, people post the "best" AI generated content (that they prefer), the more human sounding AI gets more engagement etc. All of these things filter AI output, so it's not the same thing as:
AI out -> AI in
It is:
AI out -> human filter -> AI in
And at that point the human filter starts acting like a fitness function for a genetic algorithm. Can anyone explain how this still leads to model collapse? Does the signal in the synthetic data just overpower the human filter?
> Users upvote and downvote posts, people post the "best" AI generated content (that they prefer), the more human sounding AI gets more engagement etc. All of these things filter AI output
At the same time though AI generated content can be generated much much faster than human generated content so eventually AI slop downs out anything else. You only have to check the popular social media platforms to see this in action and AI generated posts are widely promoted and pushed on users the same way most web searches return results with AI generated pages ranked highly.
Humans can't keep up and companies are actively working to bypass the human filter and intentionally promote AI generated content.
The past is not a good predictor of future performance.
>You should check out "model collapse". It seems that an abundance of content, that is more and more AI generated these days, may not be a viable option.
Doom-saying about "model collapse" is kind of funny when OpenAI and Anthropic are mad at Chinese model makers for "distilling" their models, ie. using their outputs to train their own models.
Totally different use cases. If you have nothing, getting 90% of a SOTA model is very valuable. If you have a SOTA model, it's just a worse model.
Isn't there a difference between: distilling specific AI input/output vs scraping whatever random AI output (with unknown input)?
I'm looking forward to Claude starting to talk like a Nigerian prince
Like the other commentor already pointed out, almost every AI bot out there thinks Fortnite is real, yet it is completely made up poison.
I'm old enough to remember a time when the primary hacker cause was DRM, the DMCA, patent trolls, export controls for PGP, etc. All things that made it difficult to use information when you want to. "Information wants to be free."
It's wild to see the about face. Now it's:
> If [companies] can’t source training data ethically, then I see absolutely no reason why any website operator should make it easy for them to steal it.
It would have been very difficult to predict this shift 25 years ago.
This claim of contradiction has never worked for me.
Let say person A wants everyone to be rich.
Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer.
One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich.
However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in ways that reduce and harm other peoples ability to access information, like hiding attribution or misrepresenting the data and sources, people who advocate for free information can have a consistent view and also work against such use. It is not a shift. It is only a shift if we believe that copyright will be removed, works will be given to the public for free, and companies will no longer try to hide and protect creative works and information.
You can certainly argue second-order effects (ie. we have to restrict information to save information), but the movie studios were making that same argument at the time:
> If copyright can no longer protect the distribution of the work they produce, who will invest immense sums to create films or any other creative material of the kind we now take for granted? Do the thieves really expect new music and movies to continue pouring forth if the artists and companies behind them are not paid for their work?
--Jack Valenti, Motion Picture Association of America, 2000 (https://archive.is/PBy7C)
It sounds remarkably similar to what people concerned about AI say today. How do we make sure that artists get paid?
I don't think many hackers found the argument compelling at the time.
You're taking Jack Valenti at face value. He said "we're here to protect the artists" because the artists were popular and the record labels were not. He was in the business of protecting the labels and screwing the artists and everyone knew it.
The artists were certainly making more money from the studios and record labels than they got from the authors of DeCSS, Napster, BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay, etc.
When Gillian Welch wrote "Everything is Free" in 2001, she wasn't complaining about the record companies, she was complaining about Napster.
> Q: Do you remember where you were when you wrote “Everything is Free”?
> A: I do. I remember exactly where I was and what was going on. It was when Napster was starting to decimate the traditional recording industry dynamic, the viability of making your livelihood [from] your art.
--Gillian Welch, 2018 (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gillian-we...)
Most artists were making way more money off the fans (even those downloading music) via touring and merch sales, than they were making off of the labels from residuals. Most were not making anything from residuals.
Valenti was desperate to enlist musicians because people hated the labels and did not feel bad about stealing from them. But the vast majority of musicians were not willing to back the labels against the fans. The few he managed to enlist, like Metallica were notable because they were exceptions. And the fact that they were already rich and already at the end of there career was noted by many at the time.
In contrast you have, for instance, Courtney Love who wrote a widely-distributed essay about how she and most artists make almost nothing from record sales.
https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
It's an interesting essay, and the TLC case does sound pretty egregious. But the premise is undermined by the fact that Love is worth an estimated $100M today, largely thanks to owning Nirvana's publishing rights, which she inherited from Kurt Cobain.
This is what happens when a culture doesn't have robust exclusionary mechanisms for people who want to burn it down.
We welcomed the vampires in and wonder why our necks hurt.
This is like saying Winner Take All Capitalism doesn't have an exclusionary mechanism for the rich. The system exists for the sole purpose of serving the already-rich. The vampires are an inevitability baked into the system from the start.
We don't technically have "winner take all" capitalism. At least some people 90 ish years ago we had many mechanisms to regulate such situations.
Then more vampires creeped in and convinced people that the government they were voted into sucks. So began a campaign to ruin the regulations protecting them from the vampires as they slowly filled their blood banks.
[flagged]
Disney is all-in on AI.
They are thrilled.
The folks fighting perpetual copyright were not fighting to make it possible for Disney to fire creatives. In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney.
Disney is all in because all their characters are entering the public domain over the next 5 years. They can't fight like it's 1998 because youtube is now worth more than they are.
> In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney.
We were doing nothing of the sort. It was "Information wants to be free" not "we want to provide a perpetual job for a subset white collar workers".
sprinkles holy water
Well I was in that cohort and none of us were thinking we were helping megacorps create the content slop machine from 1984.
Our concern was that corporations were expanding the definition of intellectual property to the extent where you couldn't make a movie or song or write a book as an individual without some corporation with a massive "IP" warchest coming after you and declaring it derivative. You couldn't write some software without a corporation with a massive repository of junk patents claiming you infringe.
We wanted to insure that individual creators could continue to have a voice, and not get sued out of existence by an IP Legal/Industrial Complex that was forming causing arms races between megacorps and SLAPs against everyone else.
If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that.
And by the way Disney is all in on AI for the same reason they were all in on perpetual copyright. In the perpetual copyright world, having a massive library of content you no longer have to pay residuals on was a source of massive amounts of "free" revenue. You could just keep re-releasing and re-making stuff. You did not have to do the messy, expensive work of paying people to come up with really good new stuff.
In the AI world, the money-printing capital asset is the trained model that grinds out slop 24/7 and you -emdash- again -emdash- don't have to pay actual people to create anything new.
>If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that.
We have multiple Communist ais that is on par with Western ai from 18 months ago and can run locally on 5 year old hardware.
I have no idea the fever nightmare you live in but the future is bright and only getting better.
I think you just want to make a comparison of copyright to slavery.
Property classes are born and die everyday. You can own the rights to publish an arcade video game, but that class of rights would have been way more valuable 45 years ago. NFTs were born and died just recently. You can own digital assets worth real money in an online game that simply shuts down.
Some people may read this and say "these don't qualify as a property class", to which I will remind you that property class used in this way is a brand new term, which I think is invented solely to be able to compare the limitations on human freedom associated with slavery to the limitations on human freedom associated with intellectual property.
> The last time a property class was removed was _slaves_.
Easy counterexample: titles of nobility. Also perpetual bonds, delegated taxation rights, the ability to mint currency. The list goes on.
If you're going to use history to support your AI bull agenda, you should at least pre-fly it with the AI first -- it would have pointed this out.
> Arguing that copyright is good because a subset of big tech doesn't want it around is as stupid as arguing that slavery is good because the robber barons don't like it.
Sorry, who's saying it's good? You are, actually, insofar as you're willing to support the right of AI companies to take people's information and use it to create copyrighted model weights. Why do you care less about the intellectual property of billionaires than that of the common man? Do you really think they're on your side?
Those people where trying to build a sharing/gift economy. They weren't able to keep bad actors out of their sharing economy. They are bitter that their utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers. Why is that wild?
It's highly debatable whether, in case of an information sharing/gift economy, the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense.
The information is still there, as is the community that you've built, the joy that you get out of sharing the information, everything you've learned...
Why is any of that diminished, just because some people or entities that you dislike also got something out of it?
I would take up that debate.
Attribution is seemingly a central part of a information sharing/gift economy, and especially in a information sharing/gift community. It is part of the trust that connects people and without it the community falls apart, and with that the economy. AI by its very nature removes attribution.
Accuracy of information is a second critical aspect of information sharing and communities that are built around it. Would Wikipedia as a community and resource work if some articles was just random words? If readers don't trust the site, and editors distrust each other, the community collapses and the value of the information is reduced. It might look like adding AI generated articles would not harm other existing articles, or the joy that editors of the past had in writing them, but the harm is what happen after the community get flooded by inaccurate information. Same goes for many other information sharing communities.
Source trust and gift attribution are two distinct concepts, I'd say. One happens at the detriment to the taker (or "thief", if that even makes sense, as per my original comment); the other harms the original "producer".
For the former, it is already very much in any AI company's best interest to preserve attribution to become and remain credible.
For the latter, I can't help but wonder whether a gift economy that needs to diligently bookkeep attribution really is one, and if this is the only practicable way to implement one in a given larger society/economy, I'd say this says something important about that society as well.
I make very heavy use of sources that Gemini sites when I use it. I tend to use AI as sort of a mega search engine where I get a little bit of discussion, but if I care even a little bit about the topic, I end up reading the source material anyway.
> AI by its very nature removes attribution.
This is incorrect. RAG preserves attribution. Training data doesn't, but it doesn't make sense to attribute that anyway, unless you want a list of every person who has ever lived.
It's diminished because the hard reality is that you need money to live.
The end result of major tech companies sweeping in, taking everyone's creative work, outcompeting the originals with AI derivatives, and telling every artist on the planet "fuck off, send a job application to McDonalds" is significantly less art.
Copyright was invented to prevent exactly this scenario.
Yes, which is why hackers and artists (at least those mainly publishing instead of mainly performing for a live audience) are ultimately not natural/inherent allies.
Hackers have usually drawn their funding from their (often lucrative) employment, which is what gave them the freedom to give away the products of their hacking for free.
One needs copyright to survive, the other see it as a means to enforce openness at best (those in favor of copyleft) and as an obstacle to their pursuit (owning the full system, liberating all aspects of and information about it) at worst.
This rift was always visible if you knew where to look, but AI is definitely wedging it wide open.
> whether ... the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense.
This is pretty clearly answered by the GPL: yes, it does, and this concept has been around since the very beginning.
> The information is still there
True
> as is the community that you've built
Untrue. At this point it's well understood that AI is substitutionary for many of the services that would have once afforded people a way to monetize their production for the community. Without the ability to make a living by doing so, even a small one, people will be limited to doing only what they can in the little free time they get outside of work.
That's the whole problem -- that AI, as it exists today, is taking away from the public, and hurting it at the same time. That's closer to robbery than it is to "sharing in the community".
Yes. There's a difference between walking a trail and maybe littering a a few pieces of trash, and walking a trail while actively setting branches on fire.
One scenario is manageable to leave be, or perhaps one or two volunteers clean it up. The fires have an entire trail closed down to everyone.
With some FOSS projects being bombarded by scraping traffic, redoing their PR system, considering ways to limit contributiors, and even going closed source, I don't think such a metaphor is an exaggeration.
> utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers
Such is the fate of all utopian dreams.
For what it's worth, I've generally sort of been on the "information, wants to be free" side of things, and I still am. I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it -- those folks were pretty quiet when their source code was being indexed by Google. But I suppose that's because Google was sending traffic their way with they could then monetize. So this is much less about any kind of philosophical argument and much more about who's getting money, which I don't really care about. I view one of the core values of open source software as being something that we can learn from, whether that's through AI or otherwise.
> I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it
The key word there is "license." Open source often has strings attached--an obligation to credit the source, an obligation to release derivative code under the same license, etc. LLMs seldom respect the license, they just quietly and extensively plagiarize everything.
If you're implying that it's a violation of the original hacker ethos, I disagree.
"Information wants to be free" is a small part of the hacker ethos venn diagram. There are many hacker ethos traits that aren't about cracking, specifically.
Also, the server "information" isn't free (as in beer) to begin with, it costs server availability. Coming up ways to penalize greedy actors is not only well within the server operator's perogative, it's an interesting tit-for-tat problem that could pique any hacker's interests.
A bonus hacker trait is that these poisoning responses are individualistic, i.e. the government doesn't get involved, where certainly more aggressive anti-AI sentiments could (wrongly) call for that.
So I'd say this type of LLM-resistance falls squarely in the original hacker ethos, even though it incidentally counteracts one minor aspect of "information availability". Though I'd certainly agree that the picture today is a lot different than it was. Ironic even.
"Information wants to be free, but only be used by people I wholly endorse." is the motto. You'll see young people singing the praises of piracy but then use "piracy" as an excuse for hating LLMs.
Corporations are not people.
Who works at corporations and benefits from their actions?
If my LinkedIn feed is any indication, bizarre inhuman ghouls who wear the names and profile pictures of my college friends like skin-suits and exclusively post AI-generated marketing materials for AI products.
About a few million less Americans than a few years ago, I guess.
It becomes a bit easier to see when you finish the sentence. "Information wants to be free (from ______)." If you filled that blank in with "rent-seeking Capitalists and corporations," you likely have everything you need to understand why they don't see it as a turn.
I say this as someone whose notions exist orthogonal to the debate; I use AI freely but also don't have any qualms about encouraging people to upend the current paradigm and pop the bubble.
Sure, with enough effort, you can find a seemingly clever way to turn almost every mantra into its semantic opposite.
It doesn't take much cleverness because we're talking about a straightforward dynamic. A counter-cultural expression that was a "screw you" aimed at corporations was co-opted and misinterpreted by those same corporations as "It's free real estate", and now the latter are flummoxed that they're not buddies with the former. Well, points up that's why.
Hackers are not one big homogeneous group (although there definitely are larger trends, and maybe you have a point there).
Still, people were saying all kinds of inane stuff 25 years ago too.
Politics will make more sense once you realize no one is trying to have consistent principles.
People are in general for whatever they think will benefit them, and against what they think will harm them.
So piracy is ok when it benefits the little guy and not ok when it benefits the big guy. Unions are good when they stand up against employers, and bad when they discriminate against non-union workers. There's no contradiction there.
The common string between both of those advocacies is that they heavily favor huge corporations instead of the little guy.
Basically, DMCA and DRM makes you a criminal while protecting NBC and Disney and such. And AI steals your work and allows soulless mega corps to basically take your job.
Personally I'd argue AI is very likely to be worse for the average person, depending on their career.
Some people don't care or maybe don't realize. And then I think some people are just naive, and are assuming everyone else will be fucked, but they won't be. And then some other people are self-destructive, and they know it will make their life harder - but they advocate for it anyway, because they feel they deserve the suffering, and maybe hold some misguided belief that suffering is the fuel of victory.
It was never about some "information wants to be free" philosophy for most people. It was about, "I want information to be free for me to access, and btw fuck big corporations." No real shift happened.
THEN: "You can't violate our copyright because it's ours and belongs to us."
NOW: "We can violate your copyright because we want to."
YOU: "Where's mine, and how do I make more people click on these ads?"
Those people were always lying, it was always about power dynamics. People hated DRM and surveillance because they saw it as punching down. People now hate AI wielded by corpos because they see it as punching down. Extremely few (if any) people ever bought into the “cyber-utopia” thing and now the mask has completely come off, everyone knows the Internet is a tool for subjugation
The easiest way to grow AI resistance is to get Dario Amodei and Sam Altman on TV and let them talk.
Get Alex Karp out there promoting autonomous weapons, too, if you want the ultimate trifecta.
[dead]
> The easiest way to grow AI resistance is to get Dario Amodei and Sam Altman on TV and let them talk.
Tell me more? I'm guessing you might say: neither connects with everyday people, they have misaligned incentives*, they (like most corporate leaders) don't speak directly, they have more power than almost any elected leader in the world, ... Did I miss anything?
My take: when it comes to character and goals and therefore predicting what they will do: please don't lump Amodei with Altman. In brief: Altman is polished, effective, and therefore rather unsettling. In short, Altman feels amoral. It feels like people follow him rather than his ideas. Amodei is different. He inspires by his character and ideals. Amodei is a well-meaning geek, and I sometimes marvel (in a good way) how he leads a top AI lab. His media chops are middling and awkward, but frankly, I'm ok with it. I get the sense he is communicating (more-or-less) as himself.
Let me know if anyone here has evidence to suggest any claim I'm making is off-base. I'm no oracle.
I could easily pile on more criticisms of both. Here's a few: to my eye, Dario doesn't go far enough with his concerns about AI futures, but I can't tell how much of this is his PR stance as head of A\ versus his core beliefs. Altman is a harder nut to crack: my first approximation of him is "brilliant, capable, and manipulative". As much as I worry about OpenAI and dislike Altman's power-grab, I probably grant that he's, like most people, fundamentally trying to do the right thing. I don't think he's quite as deranged as say Thiel. But I could be wrong. If I had that kind of money, intellect, and network, maybe I would also be using it aggressively and in ways that could come across as cunning. Maybe Altman and Thiel have good intentions and decent plans -- but the fact remains the concentration of power is corrupting, and they seem to have limited guardrails given their immense influence.
* Here's my claim, and I invite serious debate on it: Dario, more than any corporate leader, takes alignment seriously. He actually funds work on it. He knows how it works. He cares. He actually does some of the work, or at least used to. How many CEOs of the companies they run actually have the skills to DO the rank-and-file work? Even the most pessimistic people probably probably can grant this.
You're overthinking the parent comment, I think. When Dario goes on TV he says things like "AI is going to put 50% of white collar workers out of a job in a few years". The average TV viewer who hears that doesn't know what AI alignment means, they just hear that this guy, whatever his intentions, is threatening their ability to survive in this economy.
> The average TV viewer who hears that doesn't know what AI alignment means, they just hear that this guy, whatever his intentions, is threatening their ability to survive in this economy.
A surprisingly high number of people are already being tricked into supporting things that clearly threaten their ability to survive in this economy, and even their ability to survive period. I wouldn't trust the general public to be smart enough not to line up to shoot themselves in the foot/face. They'll get increasingly angry as they get increasingly screwed over, but it remains to be seen how long that will take or who they'll blame for it.
Why is this downvoted? Rednecks in the Flyover states voted against their interest for the last 30 years.
In general, this can feel like reading tea leaves. We might have some guesses, but it is tricky to get much confidence in them. Bottom line: it can be really hard to extract coherent signal from downvotes. A relatively low number given the overall topic interest can often mean noise or particular strong reactions. A relatively high number might serve as some useful feedback. This general ambiguity imo is a downside of the "up" or "down" systems that HN uses; it is part of the overall "design package". If you want more granularity, one step in the right direction is Lobsters. If you want many steps forward, requiring more community norms and background reading, you could try LessWrong. If you have other forums that you think do this well or at least differently, please let me know.
My takes on some of the comment above:
> A surprisingly high number of people are already being tricked into supporting things that clearly threaten their ability to survive in this economy, and even their ability to survive period.
I agree. Yes, I know that I'm far from a neutral judge of other people's core values, but I can say with high confidence that I've lived and worked among more US cultures than the typical tech demographics, by far. Born in Texas, worked in Colorado, San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, DC (the District itself), Northern Virginia. My industries range the for-profit, not-for-profit, tech-heavy. Other variations include idealist-heavy, good-execution, poor-execution, heavy on the dogma versus heavy on the pragmatism, pro-military, pro-patriotism, and the opposite.
I can say personally in an important sense, I fit nowhere. When I lived in Berkeley, I didn't fit the mold. When at SF startups, the culture felt shallow. I'm sort of "post culture" in a way. In DC, people seem rather blinkered. I see it, but I rarely feel like I'm truly part of any one culture. The only culture that I feel fits me is the "question everything -- but not like a conspiracy nut -- and then try to build something that matters". [1]
So, by objective standards -- counting places I've lived, different industries I've worked in, friends from different backgrounds, socioeconomic conditions, I think I'm easily in something like a weird 0.1% that actually deeply has experienced Trumpland and many variations of classic liberalism. If I didn't get out of my hometown, there is at least 20% chance I would now support Trump, if only due to tribalism and trusting of one's neighbors. So I know many Trump supporters.
All in all, I can't think of more than a handful that support him for reasons that I find even to serve their own long-term self-interest. There are special cases in a sense, like "techno-libertarians" or single-issue "pro-Israeli" voters or even smart people who feel like"f--k the democrats" who use these rationales to justify voting for Trump.
Saying I'm in the top 0.1% may sound presumptuous, I get it. But I don't like how some people water down their statements in the hope of sounding modest. See [2]. This is a kind of "false modesty" imo. I don't take any credit for my life circumstances. I was born into this position, and here I am. So I'm acting as a mirror to share this back. I've spent easily dozens of hours in one-on-one conversations on these topics, so I'm not coming at this with any particular dogma. This is my hundreds or thousands of hours of experience distilled. I really feel for Trump supporters on one level, even as their close mindedness and enable-ism wreck the economic and core principles of the US.
I welcome charitable and constructive disagreement on anything I've said. But more importantly, I ask for curious conversation.
[1]: Actually, there are some cultures I do fit into. Bayesian thinking being a key one. I admit I'm more than intellectually opposed to frequentist statistics -- it actively pisses me off in some ways. I'm pro-causality and pro-modeling. If people don't state their models, I don't take their predictions seriously. These are my strongest meta-opinions I think. People like Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, Nate Soares, Yudkowsky -- these folks seem to think in ways that seem enlightened to me. The best "mainstream" thinkers I've seen probably are ... hmmm ... Ezra Klein, though he is more political than intellectual in my opinion.
[2]: "Against Modest Epistemology" by Eliezer Yudkowsky. November 14, 2017. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/svoD5KLKHyAKEdwPo/against-mo...
> they just hear that this guy, whatever his intentions, is threatening their ability to survive in this economy.
Yep, Dario is straddling this sort of impossible line: he's the least-scary harbinger who is try to be one of the more transparent people to sound the alarm. But the funny thing about saying "don't shoot the messenger" is that it usually gets uttered well after the messenger has taken a bullet.
> You're overthinking the parent comment, I think.
Luckily, the phrase overthinking is on the way out. We really don't want any more Idiocracy Part II. In this day, we need all the thinking we can get. We often need (1) better thinking and (2) the ability to redirect our thinking towards other directions.
In my experience, 2026 is the year where almost all stigma about "talking AI" is out the window. I am nearly at the point where I say whatever I think needs to be said, even if I'm not sure if people will think I be crazy. So if Typical Q. Person asks me, I tell them whatever I think will fit into their brain at the time -- how AI works, why Dario is awkward, why superintelligence is no bueno, etc.
> But the funny thing about saying "don't shoot the messenger" is that it usually gets uttered well after the messenger has taken a bullet.
Dario is not just a messenger, though. In his case it would be more like, "Don't shoot one of the generals in the invading army." To which it would be reasonable to ask, "Why not?" Even if he's the general saying that he wants minimal civilian casualties.
I get that metaphor. Let's try on another metaphor too, since the goal is insight, not judgment*... This reminds me of economic development policies of China and the USA ... both often pitch a developing country who needs something. Where "something" means i.e. getting out of poverty and/or having fewer people starve. The investor offer certain benefits with strings attached. These benefits are hard to pass up but involve major reforms. Painful reforms. On top of that, one country often says "if you don't work with us, you're stuck with [other country]" and vice versa. Try on this metaphor and see if it sheds some light on the impossible situation Dario is in.
* If you are trying to judge Dario, we're not having the same conversation. How many people on earth can grasp even ~1% of the situation he's in? How many have the intellectual tools and ability to reason through it? Maybe 0.1%, tops.
My take on AI is that it's a corporate tool used to extract more work from employees while tricking them into thinking they are turbo-charged devs.
These days the tech industry is more moneyed circus than serious effort to improve humanity.
> into thinking they are turbo-charged devs
Fortunately no-one sane enough among us, computer programmers, believes in that bs, we all see this masquerade for what it mostly is, basically a money grab.
This is slacktivism. I can kind of understand someone coming to the conclusion that we're replacing working class jobs with compute (caveat, I use working class more broadly than you), and that compute is pure capital. So essentially the capital class are wringing the neck of the working class. I think that, at the very least, is what the capital class is hoping for. If that's what you believe though, slightly poisoning a model is not even close to grappling with what is going on.
I've noticed this trend most heavily on Reddit.
Some communities are very pro-AI, adding AI summary comments to each thread, encouraging AI-written posts, etc.[0]
Many subreddits are AI cautious[1][2], and a subset of those are fully anti-AI[3].
Apart from these "AI-focused" communities, it seems each "traditional" subreddit sits somewhere on the spectrum (photographers dealing with AI skepticism of their work[4], programmers mostly like it but still skeptical[5]).
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/isthisAI/
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/
[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/
[4]https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/1q4iv0k/what_d...
[5]https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1s6mtt7/ai_has_suck...
Reddit (and more generally, human) groupthing in a nutshell. "Quick, clearly position yourself on this one-dimensional line (or maybe even better sort yourself into one of these two sets) so we don't have to engage in that pesky nuance thing!"
Yes, groupthink certainly seems to be pushing each community into the false dichotomy of AI good/bad, even if it's still early days.
Another example from `r/bayarea` where the author is OK with AI but the top comments are increasingly wary of its potential for harm[0]
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1sp8wvz/is_it_just...
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 account for energy consumption, etc.
Venture capital bet on AI taking over the world, so any conservative usage of LLMs will not get funding in the near future. The subtle reason is that betting on conservative usage of LLMs sends a signal that de-values their primary investments.
I think this is where I sit - I'm personally of the opinion that AI crawlers and thus companies should respect robots.txt, and they shouldn't be trying to scale up to the point of adversely affecting the environment (both natural and supply chain).
I do find value in mindfully using models - perhaps I've got a weird thing to troubleshoot on my Linux server and I just don't want to spend the time or mental effort in tracing it back.
Because I do tend to use AI mindfully, I strongly dislike Microsoft's strategy in constantly pushing their AI solution Copilot. I would rather use it when I feel its right rather than always be reminded its a thing I can use to save time and increase my efficiency around every corner.
This is my take too. When we were imagining AI what were the use cases we had in mind back then? They are these grand visions of AI will take care of major problems. We should be pushing for responsible AI deployment, starting on low risk areas and moving up to more serious uses once we know the tools work for less catastrophic situations.
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.
The overall sentiment on here might be in the middle, but I feel like that is more because half the posts and comments are railing against AI slop and half are about exciting new AI models or tools.
The only thing more cringe than the seething anger in this blog is the technical illiteracy revealed by an earnest belief that any of these attempts at "poisoning" will have any negative impact whatsoever on model training.
I wouldn't be so confident that poisoning won't work. https://www.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/comments/1so9wf1/c...
LLM poisoning is about getting bad data into the training set. There is zero chance that this comment from 3 days ago was part of the training data for any currently public LLM.
Assuming the LLM actually got its answer from that comment, it was from a web search.
I mean, if an LLM, when given a query not in its training data, resorts to searching Google and then summarizes those results as the truth with 100% certainty, because, fuck it: YOLO… I'm already very capable of doing that myself, thank you. What's the point, even?
Whatever's happening here, it's not training data poisoning.
Models are retrained only every few months at best; it is not possible for a comment made a few hours earlier to be in the training data yet.
Yeah this is context poisoning, not model poisoning, which is way, way more effective.
Google and Reddit have contracts: Google has official scraping access to Reddit (probably more than that at this point since the contracts were signed 1-2 years ago). But the fact that Reddit does a good job at moderating human content makes it a boon for plausibly "up-to-date" info (which a model doesn't have). Google's LLM summaries even include Reddit as its foremost "citations".
Anyway, Google does a RAG or something similar for its LLM responses, and takes Reddit info at face value. I'm very interested to see what the "thresholds" are, like how much context poisoning do you need to be effective. If the above link is reliable then the answer is "mere sentences".
Certainly bad-actor merchants would try this sort of thing on merchandise subreddits; welcome to the new AIO/GEO everyone.
Does the above commenter find the expression of anger itself cringe-worthy? I hope not.
Categorically dismissing anger as "cringe" seems like a path to disconnecting from reality and morality.
Lol I find the opposite to be cringe to be honest: people using chatgpt to write messages, emails, resumes for them, professional software developers vibe coding entire apps, talking about AGI coming from LLMs. Please. That is the cringe.
Let's say an NGO has done the work to formally specify a software product that would improve outcomes or people reached by I dunno 30%. They send out RFPs to a number of consultancies who provide a quote and guaranteed delivery meeting their specifications by the desired date. Only one fits in the budget, and by quite a margin. It's a consultancy that openly "vibe codes".
Should they hire them?
Yes the specification is holding a lot of weight here. Assume it's comprehensive and all consultancies offer the same aftercare support. Otherwise we're just handwaving and bike shedding over something that's not measurable.
What's the vibe coder's track record? Have they been able to provide support / alterations for other projects for multiple years?
Assume experience is the same across all agencies.
Is the product anything more than a crud app? If so, no they should not hire them.
Does it matter if the outcome is the same? It's a black box that meets the specification.
Yes it matters. If the application handles sensitive data I want to know the engineers took it seriously.
This assumes they aren't taking it seriously.
Perhaps the ever changing definition of vibe coding is the issue here. I'm referring to heavily AI assisted development. I'm not referring to a lack of planning, reviewing, and testing.
Who could have thought: There's more than one way to be cringe!
What is tragic is that LLMs are learning how to use the word "cringe" improperly.
If we're going to have AI overlords, it'd be great if they spoke with proper grammar.
> If we're going to have AI overlords, it'd be great if they spoke with proper grammar.
People like blurring the lines and lots of people want AIs to bang out keystrokes in an order that is roughly human-like, so here we are. (Personally, I would love if Claude said "honestly" or "real" or "landed" less. Or pretty much never! I've tried banning the words. I've tried providing a list of alternatives, and I'm enjoying nothing like Great Success.)
On the topic of "correct usage", until maybe ~3 years ago I had a pretty bog-standard understanding of what dictionaries do. They are authorities, right? Or at least experts in correct usage? That all changed when I read "Dictionary editors are historians of usage, not legislators of language." in "Disputing Definitions" by Yudkowsky : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...
See also: "Finding the forgotten creators of the Oxford English Dictionary" on 1A, WAMU 88.5, March 26, 2026:
https://wamu.org/story/26/03/26/finding-the-forgotten-creato...
https://the1a.org/segments/finding-the-forgotten-creators-of... (has transcript)
All those links are cringe.
And Less Wrong is, well, only for a certain crowd :-)
If you are serious, I'm not quite sure how to infer what your definition of cringe is. I have no shame... I even checked urban dictionary.
Re: LW: yeah, you nailed the stereotype. I've probably said something similar myself (this is not a compliment). I'll bet many people on HN could find many interesting & useful discussions there. Here are some more takes with my commentary.
1. "LW has such a insider set of lingo and ideas and tenets". True imo, but these aren't hidden: they are easy to find.
2. The LessWrong "canon" is often weird and/or useless. I can confirm the feeling. Each new weird idea takes time to weigh. Take Newcomb's Paradox. Why the obsession with it? Until it clicks, it feels like you've walked into some kind of die-hard tabletop gaming session. So most normal people find ways to leave. Don't. Stay. What better do you have to? I'm seriously asking. If it matters, go do that instead. But if you have free time, you could do worse. How often do you really get your brain challenged?
3. The articles are too long. Yep, sometimes they are. One needs to like reading. A lot. So people with short attention spans might have trouble. This is my top criticism.
4. Intellectual depth and openness is off the charts. I put LW at the "best I've seen anywhere online, ever" level. Not the kind of permanent openness to anything. Openness to new ideas is a great starting posture. But the goal is to be able to get somewhere with them. As a particular idea loses plausibility, don't expect it to get much airtime. Bad ideas don't deserve as much consideration until/unless something changes to prompt a reconsideration.
I wish I could have 1K upvotes for this.
YouTube has been like that since long before LLMs. Their copyright strike system is broken and always has been.
You're just picking random problems with tech and blaming them on AI.
From what I heard in the times before AI you could argue and contact a human being eventually. Now there's probably no human in the process... No "call the manager" button
> You're just picking random problems with tech and blaming them on AI.
This comment is uncharitable, uncurious, and dismissive.
Reality is multifaceted. It is worth trying to synthesize and reconcile different views first. To do that, it really helps to ask some questions first. Genuine questions, not gotchas. Even better is to say e.g. "Ok, but I prefer this model instead [...]: how does it compare to yours?".
> Since these companies can’t improve their AI models without fresh data created by human beings
Totally wrong. Self-play dates back to Arthur Samuel in the 1950s and RL with verifiable rewards is a key part of training the most advanced models today.
Not totally wrong. Self play works well with if your problem can be easily simulated in an RL environment where the model can easily explore different states. RLHF or similar techniques is not that since we don't have exactly have a simulation environment for language modelling
Right now there are companies which hire software devs or data scientists to just solve a bunch of random problems so that they can generate training data for an LLM model. Why would they be in business if self play can work out so well?
> Right now there are companies which hire software devs or data scientists to just solve a bunch of random problems so that they can generate training data for an LLM model.
Sounds like Macrodata Refinement.
> Why would they be in business if self play can work out so well?
Because it is still cheaper.
Current models don't yet use RLVR with self-play though, at least as far as we know. They use RLVR with large numbers of manually created RL environments.
But they will probably use self-play soon. See https://www.amplifypartners.com/blog-posts/self-play-and-aut...
I wonder if this will have the opposite effect and produce something similar to antibiotic resistance, making Ais better at handling "poison."
Seems a bit counterproductive if you're concerned about the environmental impact of AI to trick hyperscalers into burning more compute
I am don't have an opinion on the efficacity of such poisoning, but your comment is about as useful as "when being violently attacked, do not resist, as you only make yourself suffer for longer"
maybe, but they're burning the compute regardless. it seems ostensibly likely that reducing the ROI for compute burnt will cause less compute to be burnt long term
> The poison fountain itself is hosted on rnsaffn.com
Would the scrapers not just add these sites to do not crawl list?
I assume the poisoner community is mirroring and likely remixing the content from there. The whole effort isn’t going to work with a single point of failure like that.
And someone will come up with service anti-anti-ai.dev which will charge money to labs to filter out these sites.
Cool so if you do that they just won't scrape your site?
Also aren't models like Mythos capable of checking for poison data on their own at this point?
Funny, I can't even access his site:
" Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access stephvee.ca "
- CloudFlare
Anti-AI but pro-MITM and pro-centralisation, limiting human visitors to his site...
Same here.
Wayback Machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20260420203809/https://stephvee....
ctrl-f mirror here
Website-crawling services tend to have better luck accessing these websites due to their experience solving CloudFlare's challenges. Might want to try those.
They do realize, they filter out this stuff right? You're just making someone elses job more lucrative.
No, because if properly implemented, it's extremely difficult or impossible to discern as poison.
> people seem to loathe AI, and are actively resisting it
Maybe this person doesn’t care, but this observation they’ve made is almost certainly informed by an extremely narrow set of personal experiences, and is unlikely to reflect the wider truth.
I have a perhaps unique viewpoint among people in tech, at least among the sample I see on HN
I simultaneously think
1. AI will be a massively impactful technology on the scale of the industrial revolution or greater
2. The potential upside of AI is enormous, but potential downside is just as big (utopia or certain ruin)
3. Most current AI companies are acting somewhat reasonably in a game-theory sense with respect to the deployment of their tech, and aren't especially evil or dastardly compared to Google in the 2000s, social media in the 2010s
4. AI safety is an under-appreciated concern and many who are spending time nitpicking the details are missing the bigger picture of what ASI and complete human obsolescence look like.
5. No amount of whiny protest, data sabotaging, or small-scale angst or claiming that AI is "fake" or hoping for the bubble to pop is going to have even a marginal effect on the development of AI. It is too powerful and the rewards are too great. If anything it will have an overall negative effect because it will convince labs that their potential role as a utopian, public benefactor will not be appreciated, so will instead align themselves with the military industrial complex for goodwill.
My viewpoint is similar.
There is way too much to gain if anything approaching ASI is possible, and too much to risk if a rival super power gains supremacy first. AI is not going away, the bubble is not going to pop. Maybe some valuations will crash but ultimately the technology will continue onward.
I am mostly an optimist because I find it a more comfortable way to live. My hope, and also my expectation is that AI will progress incrementally and over the medium or long term will do the same as most other technology progress, and make the median person alive better off in the future.
I reject the claims that dystopia is more likely.
Hasn’t griefing and trolling been a thing on the internet for a while? What makes this unique just because it’s AI instead of whatever else?
> What makes this unique just because it’s AI instead of whatever else?
I'd say the notion that expensive acts of sabotage (that can be cheaply neutralized) are a worthwhile pastime and anything other than virtue signaling is somewhat perplexing. (Not in a good way.)
I'm very skeptical of his premise. I feel like AI acceptance/resistance is dependent on what social media site you use. I believe it's antagonistic on Reddit, but sites like X are generally pretty excited for AI. Certainly in my life people are accepting and excited for AI releases and tools, maybe so long as your experience with AI isn't Microsoft enterprise copilot.
Both can be true at the same time. You can both use AI productively yourself and be concerned/horrified of the larger direction of the technology or the actors that drive it forward.
I wonder if people who weren't very good at school feel vindicated by AI, while the most successful ones are threatened.
What's co-pilot? do you mean the Microsoft 365 Copilot App?
Conflating “kicking over ai delivery bots” and “throwing a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s house” as being both condemnable hasn’t actually been forced off the sidewalk by one of these delivery bots. These are dangerous and anti-human ADA nightmares. They shouldn’t be allowed on sidewalks, emphasis on walk
Post has been edited out and an author note has replaced it.
https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2026/onlyhuman.html, my commentary.
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 saying "No one here likes you" to try to gaslight his victim.
I mean, obviously there are many vocal opponents to AI, I see them on social media including here on HN. And I hear some trepidation in person as well. But almost everyone I know, from trades-people to teachers, are adopting AI in some capacity and report positive uses and interactions.
The bulk of the anti-AI sentiment I see is from people who spend a huge amount of time online (or on HN). Not regular folks.
Most people don't care if something is written by an AI as long as it is reasonable, and reflects the intent of the human who prompted the AI.
If consuming material online (videos, web sites, online forums) is not something you do a lot of, you're relatively unimpacted by LLMs (well, except the whole jobs situation...).
> teachers
Given all the borderline apocalyptic articles how students are using it to cheat and teachers have no way to stop them, I'd be honestly surprised by that.
All I can offer is my anecdotal experience. One teacher was describing his usage to generate quizzes on material. He gets course material in the form of pdfs, uploads it to the AI and gets it to generate questions.
On the flip side, one of my other teacher friends has instituted a no phone policy in his classroom.
Yeah, a friend of mine is a teacher and is using it to generate material for the classroom all the time, and it dramatically increases her productivity. The school administrators have also been pretty impressed by it, and told her to keep it up more or less.
There was an article about a year ago concerning the students' using AI to complete work, and teachers using AI tools to detect if AI tools were being used to complete the work, so (even a year ago) you found this absurd scenario where it was just robots checking the work of other robots. Did a quick search for said article but couldn't find it. Anyway, humorous. Coupled with the WaPo article today about people "speed-running" their degrees, it's wacky, wacky world for "education". https://archive.is/bPi82
It's easy to chalk it up to "fear of the unknown", when in reality it's both good and bad depending on who's wielding it. It can be used to tear down or build up, solve problem or create problems just like every advance before it. So while I'm generally excited with where it can go, I guess I don't mind being reminded there can be downsides.
Fascinating, because I've seen the exact opposite across the PNW.
That is why I question my own bias. One possible explanation is that I am AI positive. So when people test out "What do you think about AI?" my own responses are generally positive. That probably filters out people who don't want to argue or contradict.
This kind of effect would work both ways. People who are non-confrontational in general will choose to keep quiet if their opinions differ. In this view, both pro-AI and anti-AI sides might find themselves having their bias confirmed due to opposing views self-silencing to avoid conflict.
Anecdotally, I was just there and ran into a couple of anti-AI people and it's not like I was bringing it up. All I got was they were worried about the water and the heat produced. I wonder if someone has done an analysis of old-search vs AI-search, I most definitely get the info quicker that I want with AI, does that make up for the LLM cost, I have no idea.
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.
Thanks to this lovely site, and my distaste for AI, I've found a whole ecosystem of minimalist blogs and artists' personal sites. It's shifting my habits and foci. I don't do socials anymore except forums like this.
Maybe I have slop to thank for it.
Any human scale "attack", e.g. the made up Everybody Loves Raymond episode isn't doing anything to hurt LLM training data. Might even help them detect exaggeration, satire, etc. when read in context and with other knowledge they have from other sources (like scraping IMDB or whatever, and already knowing the cast and plot summary of every episode of Everybody Loves Raymond).
If there is an effective way to poison them, it'll be automated. And, it'll probably rely on an LLM to produce the poison, since it has to look legit enough to pass the quality filtering and classification stage of the data ingestion process, which is also probably driven by an LLM.
One reason small models are getting better is because the training data being used is not just getting bigger, it's getting cleaner and classified more correctly/precisely. "Model collapse" hasn't happened, yet, even though something like half the web is AI slop, because as the models get smarter for human use in a variety of contexts, they also get smarter for use in preparing data for training the next model. There may very well still be risks of a mad cow disease like problem for LLMs, but I doubt a Markov chain website is going to contribute. The models still can't always tell fact from fiction, but they're not being hoodwinked by a nonsense generator.
Here is a bit of meta humor. When I open https://stephvee.ca I see:
Did I ever open this website? I guess no. Did I ever attack this website (or did any AI crawling)? Also no. Implying the allegation is criminal, Cloudflare falsely accused me, should I seek legal counsel?I still was able to access the article via webarchive. And what I want to say, from my POV, I've done nothing wrong, website owners attack me. I don't see it every day, but I think it is more often than cases when people are kicking AI-powered food delivery robots.
That is a standard Cloudflare response when a URL is blocked. It was a temporary block affecting ALL traffic to the URL while I updated the post, not a block targeted at anyone in particular.
No, I am still blocked (for every page on https://stephvee.ca/). "Cloudflare Ray ID: 9efd477aef431473", if it helps somehow. My IP is not in any common blocklist, I experience no errors with other Cloudflare protected websites (using standard Chrome on Linux). It is very likely that stephvee.ca is configured excessively strict (rejecting by OS, or by large IP ranges, or idk)
Apologies. :( Since you say you've never visited the website before, then that means you're either in one of the countries or in one of the residential IP ranges that I've had to block. I had to do that a while back, as I'd say roughly 99.9% of the traffic I received from those areas was malicious in nature (e.g. constantly spamming the site 24/7 for .env variables and whatnot, as well as crawling every single page on the site hundreds or even thousands of times every day). I couldn't block this traffic at the individual IP level, as there's simply too much of it, and they just move on to a different IP address when they're blocked.
I can't stand the thought of blocking an actual human being who just wants to look at my site, but at the same time, what do you do? Just let the site be hammered by crawlers and scrapers 24/7 for the sake of less than a handful of human visitors every once in a while?
People who don't run websites (I'm not saying this is you, just in general) have no idea how bad the crawling/scraping problem is right now. I don't even WANT to use Cloudflare, but I feel like I have no choice. It's either use Cloudflare, or pay an arm and a leg to host a hobby website and then have all my bandwidth chewed up by the crawlers and scrapers.
The people and companies who run these bots are making the internet such a hostile place. It's especially infuriating that so many of them don't even identify themselves with user agents, and hide behind residential IPs instead.
EDIT: Oh, and I can confirm: I investigated the ray ID, and yes, it was unfortunately a country block that triggered it. I receive a huge amount of bad traffic from your country every single day (mostly credential exploits), and I'm sorry you got caught up unintentionally in that block. I added an exception that should hopefully work, though, in the event that you do still want to visit.
Based on observations of other people using it, "AI" is already "poisoned" with too much low quality training material I'm not interested in searching
The idea of intentionally "poisioning" an "AI" model seems to be the logical evolution of so-called "user-generated content" (UGC). It makes sense that non-cooperation is the eventual outcome of exploiting internet subscribers through coerced intermediation. For years now companies in Silicon Valley and Redmond, and other so-called "tech" companies elsewhere, have been generating revenue by using free information and UGC as bait for surveillance ad targets but without the licensing or production costs
This seems like a wasted effort when AI will primarily learn the majority consensus view and not one-off misinformation. AI tries to learn pattern matching for generalization, so garbage data doesn't make AI learn the wrong patterns, at best just slows down learning the actual patterns. When most compute for training is spent on curated data and RL rather than random web-scraped data, the impact is likely negligible.
> This seems like a wasted effort when AI will primarily learn the majority consensus view and not one-off misinformation.
We have evidence to the contrary. Two blog articles and two preprints of fake academic articles [0] were able to convince CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity AI of the existence of a fake disease, against all majority consensus. And even though the falsity of this information was made public by the author of the experiment and the results of their actions were widely published, it took a while before the models started to get wind of it and stopped treating the fake disease as real. Imagine what you can do if you publish false information and have absolutely no reason to later reveal that you did so in the first place.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y
> Two blog articles and two preprints of fake academic articles [0] were able to convince CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity AI of the existence of a fake disease, against all majority consensus
Wrong. There are no 'majority consensus' against 'bixonimania' because they made it up, that was the point. It's unsurprisingly easy to get LLMs to repeat the only source on a term never before seen. This usually works; made-up neologisms are the fruitfly of data poisoning because it is so easy to do and so unambiguous where the information came from. (And retrieval-based poisoning is the very easiest and laziest and most meaningless kind of poisoning, tantamount to just copying the poison into the prompt and asking a question about it.) But the problem with them is that also by definition, it is hard for them to matter; why would anyone be searching or asking about a made-up neologism? And if it gets any criticism, the LLMs will pick that up, as your link discusses. (In contrast, the more sources are affected, the harder it is to assign blame; some papermills picked up 'bixonimania'? Well, they might've gotten it from the poisoned LLMs... or they might've gotten it from the same place the LLMs did which poisoned their retrievals, Medium et al.)
The LLMs didn't only talk about the disease when prompted by the neologism. They also brought it up when asked about the symptoms. From the article:
> OpenAI’s ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms amounted to bixonimania. Some of those responses were prompted by asking about bixonimania, and others were in response to questions about hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure.
And yes, sure, in this example the scientific peer-review process may have eventually criticised and countered 'bixonimania' as a hoax were the researcher to have never revealed its falsity—emphasis on 'may', few researchers have the time and energies to trawl through crap papermill articles and publish criticisms. Either way, that is a feature of the scientific process and is not a given to any online information.
What happens when false information is divulged by other means that do not attempt to self-regulate? And how do we distinguish one-off falsities from the myriad of obscure true things that the public is expecting LLMs to 'know' even when there is comparatively little published information about them and therefore no consensus per se?
"hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure" is a super specific query almost definitionally 'bixonimania' which probably brought up the 'bixonimania' poison at the time (the search hits for that query right now in Google are weak and poorly relevant so it would not be hard to outrank them or at least get into the top 50 or so where a retrieval LLM would see them and would followup), and so still an instance of what I mean.
> Either way, that is a feature of the scientific process and is not a given to any online information.
Which does not distinguish it in any way from human errors like a crank or activist etc.
And I don't know, how did we handle false information before on niche topics no one cared about and which were unimportant? It's just noise. The worldwide corpus has always been full of extremely incorrect, mislabeled, corrupted, distorted, information on niche topics of no importance. But it's generally not important.
All the examples you gave are chatbots with web search integrated. Are you sure those chatbots didn't just reference false information it found in web searches? That's fundamentally different than poisoning the training of AI models.
> The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.
This seems to imply the poisoning affected the web search results, not the actual model itself, because it takes months for data to make it into a trained base model.
In the pre-AI-collapse era, we called this PageRank ;)
What is the pattern for truth if I flood your data with lies?
The same way humans deal with it, check it against multiple reputable sources.
We already learned how to defeat this from SEO spammers and citation farmers: by building networks that cross reference and corroborate one another’s fake stories.
We’re already at a point where much of the academic research you find in online databases can’t be trusted without vetting through real world trustworthy institutions and experts in relevant fields. How is an LLM supposed to do this kind of vetting without the help of human curators?
If all the LLM training teams have to stop indiscriminate crawling and fall back to human curation and data labeling then the poisoners will have won.
Some of the reputable sources are taking flood of the lies for possible truth. Now what?
This robot chasing wild boars is a preview of what is coming for us:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6E2AH43ad7w
> This isn’t exactly the modern equivalent of angry textile workers destroying power looms, but (if you’ll forgive the pun) it’s cut from the same cloth.
And how did that work out for the textile workers?
> The difference here (I hope) is that if enough of us pollute public spaces with misinformation intended for bots, it might be enough to compel AI companies to rethink the way they source training data.
This... seems like an absurd asymmetry in effort on the side of the attacker? At least destroying a power loom is much easier than building one.
Filtering out obvious garbage seems like a completely solved problem even with weak, cheap LLMs, and it's orders of magnitudes more efficient than humans coming up with artisanal garbage.
These people are dinosaurs and you know what happens to Dinosaurs. Until they meet their conclusion, they are for the moment at risk of becoming terrorists.
I don't really understand all the comments here downplaying or ridiculing those who are worried about the impact of these tools.
The way I see it, the existence of these tools have negative impact on some people and they are reacting to that. Are they not allowed to fight back in the way they think is appropriate?
We see what we want to see. I mostly see anti-AI comments littered on hn. Maybe it is because my brain is picking them out, or maybe it is because they're much stronger than the "I'm ok with AI" comments.
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I bet it's easy to be against AI, instead of those who use it in inhumane ways (and hold considerably more power). To them, AI is just a tool. If it wasn't AI, it would be buildings full of people and automated devices posting misinformation, outsourcing jobs and pushing for gig economy instead of respectable employment, having understaffed call centres and bad phone trees or knowledgebases that basically tell you to f off, lobbying against workers' rights and regulatory capture and any number of other misaligned motivations.
Maybe when the entire marketing of AI is fear mongering and doom (all your jobs are going away!) the end result is something you should have expected from the very beginning
Honestly, it's no wonder there's a lot of pushback. We have these irresponsible CEO's talking non stop about taking peoples jobs at a time when people are struggling to make ends meet, all while taking in insane cash infusions. Why wouldn't people loathe AI at this point when the marketing is "we're going to fuck you over and there's nothing you can do about it".
Billboard company puts up billboards saying "don't hire humans".
HN comments: "I just don't understand why people hate AI".
This person is so fragile that she removed the entire post because some people were critical of it on an entirely other website (here, I assume). I cannot imagine that her thoughts on resistance were very worth reading?
Fortunately, the slop you visibly see online is just the tip of the iceberg. I would guess 80% of AI's real usage hides beneath the surface in back-office documentation consumption, software development, process optimization and automation, investments in new endeavors companies would've never thought possible/financially feasible etc. All of that usage is hidden from this resistance, and possible now with current models (so all this new poisoning is irrelevant). The valuations could go away tomorrow, and it would've still fundamentally changed the nature of the economy.
It doesn't matter that you don't like the slop on the LinkedIn post, ban it. I think the visible slop on our various feeds that is driving people mad is a rounding error for the AI companies. Moreover, it's more a function of the attention economy than the AI economy and it should've been regulated to all holy hell back in 2015 when the enshittification began.
Now is as good as time as any.
Is this just Luddism in 21st century? I kind of feel bad for the pathetic (mental) state one must be in to take this kind of activism seriously
Luddites were opposing the owners, not the tech.
Who is this author opposing, pray tell me
I'd say it's still the owners, even if they don't explicitly say or if it's even consciously recognised. I doubt that the tool, put towards broadly positive uses that are considered beneficial and not harmful to individuals or society, would be seen in the same way.
Most fears of AI (in the 2026 sense of the term), and perhaps technology more broadly, are fears of capitalism, ownership, and control, and less about the capabilities of the thing itself.
I think AI is super cool and use it everyday, I also think its likely to cause extreme human suffering.
If AGI is let loose on the world I am confident millions of people are going to die.
it doesn't need to be AGI, the way it's being let loose on the world it is already poised to hurt millions.
> I also think its likely to cause extreme human suffering
yeah no. thinking this way is hyperbolic and just plain wrong
I still maintain that the biggest proponents for this tech are unable to set up a wifi router without help.
I don't think it is because the biggest proponents are at the top - either in Science / Academia / Professional software development. But even if the people who are the weakest advocate for the tech, whats the issue?
pretty lame, Milhouse
This is a normal reaction to ground breaking technology but these reactions never had any noteworthy effect in history. There used to be Maschinenstürmer during the 19th Century industrial revolution. There were also violent enemies of cars in the beginning of the 20th Century, some of them were even willing to kill drivers with lethal wire traps.
I see a vast financial sector bubble, a flood of broken software at work, users who have incorrect expectations because they believed LLM summmaries, and a vast increase in bullshit everywhere in the public sphere; I am not seeing see the "groundbreaking technology" here. "Cheap bullshit at scale" isn't an advance, it's a disaster.
Sure, LLMs are "revolutionary". So were the Chicxulub impactor and the Toba supervolcano.
When I said "groundbreaking" I only meant it as "being perceived as groundbreaking." If it isn't perceived as a disruptive technology, then it won't spark widespread protests. People protest against it because they believe it will take their jobs away, not because they believe it's a harmless fad or a financial bubble.
The comparison to cars is apt given how destructive this technology has been to cities, and how dangerous it is to drivers and non-drivers alike.
But otherwise you are wrong. There has been plenty of successful resistance to technology. For example a many cities, regions, and even entire countries are nuclear free zones, where a local population successfully resisted nuclear technology. Most countries have very strict cloning regulation, to the extent that human cloning is practically unheard of despite the technology existing. And even GMO food is very limited in most countries because people have successfully resisted the technology.
Neither do I think it is normal for people to resist ground breaking technology. The internet was not resisted, neither the digital computer, not calculators. There was some resistance against telephones in some countries, but that was usually around whether to prioritize infrastructure for a competing technology like wireless telegraph.
AI is different. People genuinely hate this technology, and they have a good reason to, and they may be successful in fighting it off.
Surprised to see the negative reaction this post is getting... seems a lot of ai bros are being triggered :)
Edit/update: I can't even read the article because evidently I have been "blocked", no reason given. Great, maybe the negative posts here have a point.
Sorry, I am the author: that block was just temporary and affected ALL traffic to that URL while I updated the post. The block was not targeted at anyone in particular. I never intended for that post to reach as many people as it did. :/ I have a very small audience of people who follow my writing, so it was kind of devastating to see comments here likening me and people like me to "a group that goes around burning libraries." Cheers to everyone who kept it civil.
no probs, site is back up again :)
Thanks for understanding. I never implement blocks on my site lightly.
AI scares the crap out of me. I worried about what reality will look like in 2-5 years. The rate of change is pretty bonkers.
What has changed for you in your life?
This is (yet another reason) why we can't have nice things on the Internet anymore. Sigh.
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I resist AI.
Let’s just break trust more. Makes sense amirite? LoL, in what reality does this even make sense??? it’s literally just spreading misinformation to people who can’t read between the lines because the tism stick got em before they were born.
So is vaccine resistance.
Doesn't mean it's correct, or empirically-based.
So ultra-literally that is true, "resistance" does not mean "reasonable resistance", but I reject your subtext: It's a terrible comparison.
We've had literal generations of experience with vaccines, tons of data with formal systems to collect it, and most of the "resistance" traces back to "I dun wanna" and hearsay.
In contrast, LLM prompt-injection is an empirically proven issue, along with other problems like wrongful correlations (both conventional ones like racism and inexplicable ones), self-bias among models, and humans generally deploying them in very irresponsible ways.
i always hated luddites, just one more reason to hate them
The "Everybody Loves Raymond" bit isn't "misinformation," it's a Norm Macdonald joke.
I find it kind of sad that people are spending time and energy on this. It seems like something depressed people would do. But free country and all that
Citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0XOz78yVmg
Isn’t it the last comment in the chain that is being referenced? About Idris Elba playing the mother and that he did such a good job no one noticed?
Good, every little bit counts. Poison them data wells.
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 in the news is because it is trendy to do so. The people getting 'infected' would've infected themselves regardless.
Genuinely I think the hatred is overblown by people who have no clue what the actual truth of AI is, something they seem obsessed with.
The only genuine complaint about AI is the data sourcing which is a problem being resolved by CloudFlare along with other platforms that require high payment for the privilege. With that said though, those platforms are still selling user data with users producing the content gaining nothing, that part needs to be fixed.
They hate it because no one is providing them with a credible thesis for how we get from working jobs we hate to the sort of “free from labor” utopia you envision.
Like, my aunt just lost the job she had for 33 years working at an insurance company. The company claims it is because of AI (whether companies lie about this sometimes is immaterial, it is sometimes true and becoming more true every month). She’s smart, but at age 60 I do think she’ll have a hard time shifting to a totally different knowledge work paradigm to keep up with 20-something AI natives.
What do we tell people in this position? That they should be happy? That UBI is coming? My aunt has bills to pay now, UBI is currently not in the Overton Window of US politics, and is totally off the table for Republicans (who have the white house through at least 2028).
I’m personally very excited about AI, but the lack of seriousness with which I see tech people talk about these issues is frustrating. If we can’t tell people a believable story where they don’t get screwed, they will decide (totally rationally from their perspective) that this needs to stop.
>The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate.
I don't think it's all that complex tbh. The freeing from labor, both in the past and now, has been achieved largely by firing people, abandoning them to starve while power concentrates in the already-powerful.
This is the exact same thing the Luddites were taking issue with. Because they partly succeeded, we have better labor laws today.
We have labor laws today because people kept killing their bosses until the bosses agreed to some sort of compromise. Sadly, such a thing is happening again today, like with the toilet paper warehouse fire.
When there's enough of a power imbalance, said bosses sometimes choose to make that the only option, yes
Why "sadly"? It worked last time?
In most cases, "free us from our labor" does not imply that they want machines to take their jobs so that they will have no means to subsist.
> that will free you from your labor
I don't believe that, though. The output will be owned by an elite. The rest of us will be useless and fighting for scraps. No utopia with UBI or similar.
Edit: wow, many made the same comment while I was reading the article. I should remember to refresh before starting to write.
>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.
No, AI will only free us from our jobs, while still keeping the need to find money to feed ourselves.
"When harnessed correctly" is exactly what wont happen, and exactly what all the structural and economic forces around AI ensure it wont happen.
AI is a tool to increase productivity. Productivity has increased greatly over the past century, yet it's easier to feed ourselves than ever, and we have far more leisure time.
Don't bother. They won't understand.
So much for "cynical"
Somebody hasen't been paying attention in the past 40 years, and especially the last 20.
Yeah, it's you. Real purchasing power is up over the past 20 years.
How did you calculate that?
I looked it up on FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/MEHOINUSA672N
Are you aware that the government manipulates numbers to make itself look better? It's been vastly understating inflation, for example, by insisting that cheaper TV inches and RAM gigabytes cancel out more expensive houses and food.
I'm aware that depressed people think everything is worse for no objective reason. And they're quick to jump to conspiracy theories to explain why the data seems to confirm that everything is not, in fact, worse.
That's why I'm asking you for data, not for the government's own opinion of itself. For example, you could provide a trend line of non-imputed nominal rent.
I'm not the only one to notice the existence of hidden inflation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47850079
The post you're linking to is making a simple error. Consumers wants cheap, temporary clothes...so they can buy clothes more often. That's a legitimate preference (though not one I share).
As far as rent goes, it has gone up in real terms over the past 20 years. You can verify that by looking at government data. However, that doesn't tell us anything about the likely impact of AI. It's generally agreed that housing costs have gone up due to overregulation.
If the average wage buys less things, it means real purchasing power has decreased.
Yeah, just not in anything that matters, like rent/housing, education, and healthcare.
And increasingly not even for basics like food, with inflation eating away that PP.
But hey, you can buy tech gadgets cheaper than in the 1990s.
I have a hard time with this perspective. It's hard to measure. The quality difference of housing and healthcare in particular has increased dramatically in the US over the years and our minimum expectations have risen quite a bit as technology has progressed.
It's easier than ever to access quality education but that doesn't mean people will do it on their own accord. The cost of licensure or a diploma has certainly increased. Education for the disabled has improved dramatically.
Historical diseases of affluence now affect the poor more than the rich due to increased availability and affordability but costly procedures disproportionately favour the wealthy flipping the mortality picture. Despite that all cause mortality from cancer is down and survival rates are better. The disparity is real but it's not easy to attribute the cause in a neat package.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28408935/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
>I have a hard time with this perspective. It's hard to measure. The quality difference of housing and healthcare in particular has increased dramatically in the US over the years and our minimum expectations have risen quite a bit as technology has progressed.
People live a reality everyday, "hard to measure" or not, and that's not about the "quality difference of housing and healthcare" increasing dramatically, it's them becoming stratospherically expensive...
Define stratospherically and then compare against outcomes across generations from the silent generation to today.
Life expectancy, cancer mortality, heart disease mortality, infant mortality, infectious disease, high school and college completion, social safety nets, houses w/ a/c, indoor plumbing, w/d, refrigeration... Life for those in the lowest quintile of income is arguably better today than it has ever been despite raging inequality.
Just because things were historically cheaper as a percentage of income, which isn't clearly true across all categories in that timeline, it doesn't mean quality of life was materially better.
idk how impactful that is, you can't really live in a house made of shit bought from Temu
> The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate.
I think this is easily explained: Sequencing matters. It I lose my job due to AI and it takes just 1-2 years for AI benefits to arrive at my door, that is plenty of time to be very anxious about my life. If I was guaranteed the AI benefits before I potentially lose my job, very different story.
That seems hard to set up, but alas.
What people mean when they cry to be freed from their labor, is the requirement to labor.
They want to be liberated from bills. If the angle were "AI is going to make your bills go away" everyone would be ecstatic about it. Instead it's "AI is going to make your job go away... so you can't pay your bills".
Yeah. That is the current angle. We have not setup another one and I don't know that any one institution can.
I think it's laudable (and unprecedented) that AI companies themselves are fairly gloom about some potential prospects, and give people opportunity to rally against them. Still needs work towards a solution, though.
> "Cyber psychosis" thing is overblown
It might be, but I saw it happen to two people in my immediate social circle. And I'm pretty anti-social.
> 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.
What is your source on them being "the exact same types"?
You are right. I overstepped.
I changed it to "I feel". I have Claude working on a script to validate or disprove my hypothesis.
Thanks for the call-out!
Not exactly the same types.
It is a large subsection, but a subsection, that both rally against capitalism and AI. I haven't found people of the '1$$$% capitalism great' people to hate AI... which I do find ironic: but most things tend to fall into irony on that side of the spectrum, so I don't find it surprising.
All I’ve been hearing is how AI will replace human workers with no mention of what those humans are supposed to do when they get replaced. I think people are rightfully concerned about that.
We’re automating the interesting work with AI and leaving the drudge work for humans.
> We’re automating the interesting work with AI and leaving the drudge work for humans.
I think you have that backwards.
Ask artists and designers what they think about that.
> The only reason it gets in the news is because it is trendy to do so.
Hating on Waymo is trendy.
Hating on Tesla is the logical result of vehicles with door handles that won't open from the inside when the power is cut.
> Hating on Tesla is the logical result of vehicles with door handles that won't open from the inside when the power is cut.
Hating on tesla is easy because they are STILL lead by a man-child who has chosen to sig-heil behind the presidential podium. And he's still in charge of tesla. At some point: it's on tesla too for continuing to have that person as CEO.
> The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate.
Who said it has to be AI?
It has to be either AI, or a gun. Which do you prefer?
> 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.
No way. The people that run these companies all watched Star Trek and learned the exact wrong lessons from it. If you meant by "free you from your labor" that you will get laid off from your job and have to take up residence under an overpass, I would agree, that is what the want to do.
But real talk, doesn't Tesla have kind of an awful safety record?
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 all the models makes them an economic chokepoint, and 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".
This is all embedded in their future growth prospects. Nobody is interested in subsidizing AI as a public service forever. They're interested in "AI is going to make this company go 100x".
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.
> Capitalism sucks, free us from our labor
"Capitalism sucks" has become a pretty universal slogan, but traditionally, leftists didn't want less labor (that's what the capital owners want), but more control about their labour.
It is hard to explain that for people who are still invested in the calvinist view of work and success in 2026
I agree that work as a moral goal in itself is pretty absurd, but as long as people's livelihood and participation in society is bound by it, it's still pretty hard to argue against.
> 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.
What they're really saying with "Capitalism sucks, free us from our labor" is "free us from wealth inequality." It remains to be seen whether AI can actually help with wealth inequality (I don't think it can, personally), but right now most people associate AI with job loss which is not helpful vis-a-vis inequality at all.
Disclaimer: I'm long-term bearish on the impacts of AI, but I'm also bearish on "Capitalism sucks" and don't make a habit of hanging around groups dedicated to shitting on either topic.
Ironically, when your identity is tightly coupled to opposing a thing you hate (Capitalism in your example), you feel personally threatened by a potential solution to it.
>The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate.
This is a machine that has been trained on vast amounts of stolen data.
This is a machine that is being actively sold by the companies that build it as something that will destroy jobs.
This is a machine that has a lot of cheerleaders who are actively hostile to people who say "I do not like that this plagarism machine was trained on my work and is being sold as a way to destroy a craft that I have spent my entire life passionately devoted to getting good at".
This is a machine whose cheerleaders are quick to say that UBI is the solution to the massive unemployment that this machine is promising to create, and prone to never replying when asked what they are doing to help make UBI happen.
Sure, you can say that most of the problems people have with AI are problems with capitalism. This isn't wrong. But unless you can show me an example of how these giant plagarism machines and/or the companies diverting ever-larger amounts of time and money into them are actively working to destroy capitalism and replace it with something much more equitable and kind, then your "this machine will free you from your labor" line is a bunch of total bullshit.
And what kind of UBI? With what kinds of strings attached?
I don't know, I'm not the one cheering for the machine that steals people's creative work and eats their job.
Neither me, friend, neither me!
> when harnessed correctly
The people who think capitalism sucks are not the ones "harnessing" AI. The capitalists are. There is zero precedent that capital will do anything but exploit and oppress with this fancy new tool they've got (that everyone hates).
>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.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand leftists/Maxists here. They don't want to be "freed from labor". They want to own the value they produce instead of bartering their labor. In fact, Marxists tend to view Yang style UBI as a disaster because their analysis of history is one of class struggle, and removing the masses from the thing that gives them an active role in that struggle (their labor) effectively deproletariatizes them. Can't exactly do a general strike to oppose a business or state's actions when things are already set up to be fine when you're not working. You instead just become a glorified peasant, reliant on the magnanimity of your patron but ultimately powerless to do anything if they make your life worse except hope they don't continue to worsen it.
I'm not arguing the Marxist view of history and class struggle here, just making it clear that outside of some reddit teenagers going through an anarchist phase, actual anti-capitalists don't think work will disappear when their worldview materializes.
You yourself have no idea what Marxism is because one of the basic tenets of Marxism is that productive forces shape the society. The people opposing AI want to stop the very thing that can help change society.
You can't just will a society to gain consciousness - it has to come from the productive forces. That is materialism.
>one of the basic tenets of Marxism is that productive forces shape the society
Correct. So a future where AI does the majority of work means that the proletariat is no longer the historical subject; AI and its ownership class are. In this situation, AI will shape the society, not the workers. Not really a desirable outcome for anyone engaged in mass class politics.
Marx pretty clearly envisions a future society where necessary labor is reduced to a minimum due to technology.
The fact that modern leftists are (often) anti-technology is puzzling.
Modern leftists are the modern conservatives. You can watch it happening - 40 years later you have people with grey hair and beards reminiscing their times when they coded by hand. They will absolutely be the most conservative voting block to exist -- they will continue opposing technology.
This works well if you equivocate the word "conservative" as "opposing technology". Otherwise, it's just a specious and bad faith attempt at an own.
Key there is future. I don't think he ever claimed such an automated communist utopia was the immediate progression after capitalism.
>The fact that modern leftists are (often) anti-technology is puzzling.
Not puzzling at all when the world has experience earth shattering advances in technology in the past 30-40 years, and the economic gains it has brought have not been reflected in similar reductions in labor for the workers. Why on earth would AI be any different than the cotton gin or the self checkout?
Yeah, I'm baffled how hard this seems to be to understand for many tech people: Everyone raves on about the massive increases in productivity we archieved in the last decades thanks to technological progress - meanwhile wages and living conditions of many have become worse in the same period, while some techbros have amassed otherworldly levels of wealth and see themselves as the new masters of the universe. So that's the glorious future that technology is bringing us towards?
Maybe read the rest of Marx too, and not just that sentence.
The point is not whether or not we have technology but who controls it.
As someone who has not read Marx you can clarify - how does it matter who controls the technology? The industrial revolution was not controlled by labour, it still mattered.
Marxism fundamentally is: productive forces change the society, meaning the technology that exists at that point in time shapes the way people think.
From what I read (which is also not much), wikipedia has a good summary, I think:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production#Marxism_an...
Yes, technological improvements are an important factor, but not a purely positive one:
> In Marx's work and subsequent developments in Marxist theory, the process of socioeconomic evolution is based on the premise of technological improvements in the means of production. As the level of technology improves with respect to productive capabilities, existing forms of social relations become superfluous and unnecessary as the advancement of technology integrated within the means of production contradicts the established organization of society and its economy.
In particular:
> According to Marx, escalating tension between the upper and lower class is a major consequence of technology decreasing the value of labor force and the contradictory effect an evolving means of production has on established social and economic systems. Marx believed increasing inequality between the upper and lower classes acts as a major catalyst of class conflicts[...]
> Ownership of the means of production and control over the surplus product generated by their operation is the fundamental factor in delineating different modes of production. [capitalism, communism, etc]
In Marx, escalating tensions between the classes is good.
Marx pretty clearly sees capitalist control of technology as a necessary stage in societal development. The capitalists are the ones who are incentivized to invent the technology, in order to bring down the cost of labor and outcompete each other.
“Capitalism sucks, Free us from our labor” is not “capitalism harder and implement automation so we dont have to work”.
It was according to Marx.
I think you better read again.
You are extremely incorrect. These people have no issue with labour. Their issue is with other people hoarding wealth or control.
If they could choose complete emancipation from poverty OR completely getting rid of the concept of billionaires - they would choose the second one. Their intention is not the absolute status of a human but how they are relative to others.
I firmly believe AI is a surefire path to UBI. It's made me radically anti-AI.
I haven't seen anyone be against UBI given it's feasible. Why do you have this opinion?
The world already produces enough of everything that we could feed and clothe everyone, and yet it is not the case.
Care to explain why?
Because the people with the rights to control the food and clothing have no incentive to give it to the people who don't have food, clothing, or money.