AI Surveillance Should Be Banned While There Is Still Time

I believe that LLM’s will have the capability to fill in for human workers in many important ways. It’s like getting an economic infusion without the associated population growth required.

But we aren’t there yet, so innovation looks like continuing to build out how to efficiently use AI tools. Not necessarily better models, but longer memory, more critical reasoning, etc.

At the same time…there are winner-take-all dynamics and possibility to weaponize that are not good for society in the long-term.

So we need to both encourage innovation while making sure we don’t kill each other in the process.

Like nuclear fission, AI should never have been developed.

The groups that didn't train on public domain content would have an advantage if it's implemented as a rule moving forward at least for some time.

New models following this could create a gap.

I'm sure competition as has been seen from open-source models will be able to

To their credit, their privacy policy says they have agreements on how the upstream services can use that info[1]:

> As noted above, we call model providers on your behalf so your personal information (for example, IP address) is not exposed to them. In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests, including not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models, as well as deleting all information received once it is no longer necessary to provide Outputs (at most within 30 days, with limited exceptions for safety and legal compliance).

But even assuming the upstream services actually respect the agreement, their own privacy policy implies that your prompts and the responses could still be leaked because they could technically be stored for up to 30 days, or for an unspecified amount of time in the case of the exceptions mentioned.

I mean, it's reasonable and a good start to move in the direction of better privacy, way better than nothing. Just have to keep those details in mind.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/duckai/privacy-terms

...hm. maybe I am worried about the Basilisk, then.

Getting customers to pay for the weights would be entirely dependent on copyright law, which OpenAI already has a complicated relationship with. Quite the needle to thread: it's okay for us to ingest and regurgitate data with total disregard for how it's licensed, but under no circumstances can anyone share these weights.

I understand that people assume LLMs are private but there isn’t any guarantee that is the case, specially when law enforcement comes knocking.

You do realize he became King maker by position himself in YC, who is the owner/operator of Hackernews. What makes you think you are not being traced here, and your messages are not being used to train his LLM?

As far as him being a conman, if you haven't realized that most of the SV elite, that this place worships, are all conmen (See Trump Dinner this week) with clear ties to the intelligence agency (see newly appointed generals who are C-suite in several Mag 7 corps) who will placate a fascist in order to push their agenda(s) then you simply aren't paying attention.

His scam coin is the most insipid of his rap sheet at this point, and I say this as a person who has seen all kind of grifting in that space.

Ads are there to change your behavior to make you more likely to buy products, e.g., put downward pressure on your self esteem to make you feel "less than" unless you live a lifestyle that happens to involve buying X product

They are not made in your best interest, they are adverserial psycho-tech that have a side effect of building a economic and political profile on you for whoever needs to know what messaging might resonate with you

I'd rather see totally irrelevant ads because they're easy to ignore or dismiss. Targeted ads distract your thought processes explicitly because they know what will distract you; make you want something where there was previously no wanting. Targeted advertising is productised ADHD; it is anti-productive.

Like the start of Madness' One Step Beyond: "Hey you! Don't watch that, watch this!"

> Each Shiftkey nurse is offered a different pay-scale for each shift. Apps use commercially available financial data – purchased on the cheap from the chaotic, unregulated data broker sector – to predict how desperate each nurse is. The less money you have in your bank accounts and the more you owe on your credit cards, the lower the wage the app will offer you.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luig...

Most of my close friends are non-technical and expect me to be a cheerleader fir USA AI efforts. They were surprised when I started mentioning the recent Stanford study that 80% of US startups are using Chinese models. I would like us to win but we seem too hype focused and not engineering and practical applications focused.

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

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

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc

I suspect sites like Reddit don't care about a few% false positive rate, without considering in context that bot farmers literally do not care, they'll make another free account, but genuine users will have their attitude towards the site turn significantly negative when they're falsely actioned.

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

You have malevolent third-party bots taking advantage of poor moderation to conflate similar/same word different context pairs to silence communication.

For example, the reddit AI bots considers "ricing" to be the same as "rice boy". The latter definitely is pejorative, but the former is not.

Just wild and absolutely crazy-making that this is even allowed, since communication is the primary means to inflict compulsion and torture these days.

Intolerable acts without due process or a rule of law lead to only one possible outcome. Coercion isn't new, but the stupid people are trying their hand for another bite at the apple.

The major platforms will not remain usable because eventually you get this hollowing out of meaning, and this behavior will either drive away all your rational intelligent contributors, or lead to accelerated failures such as evaporative cooling in the social networks. People use things because they provide some amount of value. When that stops being the case, the value disappears not overnight, but within a few months.

Just take a look at the linuxquestions subreddit since the mod exodus. They have a automated trickle of the same questions that don't really get sufficiently answered. Its all slop.

All the experienced people who previously shared their knowledge as charity have moved on because they were driven out by caustic harassment and lack of proper moderation to prevent that. The mod list even hides who the mods are now so people who have had moderated action can't appeal to the Reddit Administrators with the specific moderator who did something as a fascist dictator incapable of basic reading level comprehension common to grade schoolers (AI).

But I don't have any alt accounts...??? Appeal process is a joke. I just opted to delete my 12 year old account instead and have stopped going there.

Oh well, probably time for them to go under and be reborn anyways. The default subs and front page has been garbage for some time.