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

pmarreck

So is vaccine resistance. Doesn't mean it's correct, or empirically-based.

jrflo

Seems a bit counterproductive if you're concerned about the environmental impact of AI to trick hyperscalers into burning more compute

fuddle

> The poison fountain itself is hosted on rnsaffn.com Would the scrapers not just add these sites to do not crawl list?

guywithahat

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.

slibhb

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

damnesian

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.

tptacek

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.

jonathanstrange

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.

madamelic

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.

Aboutplants

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

mjtk

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.

larodi

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.

MisterTea

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.

alyxya

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.

zoogeny

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.

simianwords

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

roschdal

I resist AI.

pj_mukh

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.

lpcvoid

Good, every little bit counts. Poison them data wells.

jmmcd

> 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.