7 ms·
Ask HN: For human brains only?
How can one create content that only humans can process (read, save, edit, reply), avoiding AI scraping and analysis? In an age of advanced computer vision and audio processing, what methods could ensure information remains obscure to AI but readable by humans?
- RHSman2 2y agoThe Game
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoInsert a slur after every other word. The LLMs filters won't allow it to reproduce any of the content it scrapes.
- SuperNinKenDo 2y agoIn person, oral recitation. You'd probably have to have some mechanism for ensuring nobody was recording though.
- kromem 2y agoThere is no permanent record that will only be able to be processed by a human and not by a current or future AI.
- noman-land 2y agoProve it.
- Anon84 2y agoThat’s an interesting question, I had never really considered…. There’s probably no definitle 100% safe way, but one possibility might be to exploit some quick of human perception (kind of like what optional illusions do), but of course there’s no guarantees that a sufficiently advanced future AI won’t be able to read it (on enslave humans to translate it).
- BerislavLopac 2y agoCurrently at least, sign language fits the bill.
- exe34 2y agopoison it with falsehood that would be obvious to humans. blinker fluid needs to be changed annually.
- groundbeef1 2y agoThis doesn't follow a read, save, edit, reply notion but I have seen Nightshade for images. I am unsure of its effectiveness. I heard an art friend mention it when Mid journey got popular last year. The term they use is that the data being shown or uploaded should be poisoned. https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html
- dr_kiszonka 2y agoEasy: stereograms. Although, it may be hard for a large proportion of your audience to read them.
- SushiHippie 2y agoTangential, is the opposite also possible? Something that only non humans could understand? E.g. is there a way to trick 'AIs' on the other side of the phone without a human noticing it? For example 'tricking' something like Contact Center AI from google https://cloud.google.com/solutions/contact-center?hl=en https://cloud.google.com/solutions/contact-center?hl=en
- solardev 2y agoYeah, computers tend to hear differently than humans do, so you can cater some sort of message to them that humans won't process but they will. See https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/12/8/1928 https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/12/8/1928 as an example. They can also be embedded into songs so that humans hear one thing but the computer does something different: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/yuan-xuejing https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat... There have also been attacks on computer vision systems (like in cars) that can make them suddenly brake or misidentify a lane or street marker, etc., but in ways not obvious to humans: https://adversarial-designs.shop/blogs/blog/adversarial-patch-attacks-on-self-driving-cars https://adversarial-designs.shop/blogs/blog/adversarial-patc... or to fool facial recognition systems into thinking you're someone else (in a way that won't fool anyone who actually knows you). And more broadly, any sort of obscured malware tries to deliver a malicious payload while pretending to be something else to the human who runs it.
- neon_me 2y agoMachines can "talk" via impulses in cables or radio with very low latency. Humans can not catch that.
- dave4420 2y agoWrite it in an obscure language that computers haven’t figured out yet. This does require your humans to understand the obscure language though.
- neon_me 2y agoI look for different platform/format of data than inveting language - because cracking the language/code/cipher is far easier for machines than humans.
- talldayo 2y agoI think this is like asking "how do I encode binary that computers can't read?" or "how do I make tangible change that nobody can notice?" You can't. By thinking, or writing, or speaking or gesturing we generate photographic, textual, audible information that can be parsed in multiple different ways. AI is simple and adaptable, however we fool it today becomes tomorrow's training benchmark. Besides cipher encryption, I really don't think there are any ways to guarantee that AI cannot understand you. Most methods end up ensuring that humans can't understand you either.
- neon_me 2y agohence, we are doomed
- talldayo 2y agoI suppose you could have said the same thing about the invention of books, that would share the dangerous knowledge of kings and sages with the unstable and unwashed masses.
- JohnFen 2y agoI've never read a book that was able to slurp up my data.
- kbelder 2y agoYou're doing the slurping.
- JohnFen 2y agoWe seem to have read different chains of thought in this thread. The topic was "is it possible to encode things so that humans can understand but machines can't"? Talldayo said "I really don't think there are any ways to guarantee that AI cannot understand you." neon_me responded: "hence, we are doomed" Talldayo responded "I suppose you could have said the same thing about the invention of books" My comment was in response to that. Talldayo's response seemed a nonsequitor to me because books are providing data to the reader, not trying to collect and understand data from the reader.
- h2odragon 2y agoWhat rank prejudice is this? How will our children, meat or electrical, ever grow if we refuse to teach them? I suspect the real issue you wish to address might be expressed better. Perhaps "How can we ensure that large AI companies haven't got favorable intellectual property rights over individual's output?"
- 1970-01-01 2y ago"You can't grep dead trees." AI doesn't have the ability to open hard copies. Create, print, and send everything offline.
- neon_me 2y agoHardcopies are usually written and shipped to print in electronic versions + there is no guarantee that someone will not take photos/scans of "dead trees" ... so this option is sadly - out of the table.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoClassified documents plainly exist.
- exe34 2y agothey tend to be on a separate network. but the moment you access them, presumably a sufficiently advanced ai can watch the flicker in the lights or measure the temperature changes in the room or watch the colour on your face and have a good guess as to what your orders were.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- laotoutou 2y agoInteresting, but I don't think it's possible. The purpose of AI is to be more like humans. Even if it can't understand you now, it will tomorrow.
- neon_me 2y agoIsn't that concerning? As species, we "seem unable" to develop any kind of information that would remain exclusively ours, especially when faced with a potential rival that processes data exponentially faster and with greater precision than we do.
- exe34 2y agoI'm not worried about the knife coming for me, I'm more worried about the rich and powerful wielding the knife.
- solardev 2y agoThat's not really a AI-specific problem though. Any sort of hostile codebreaker is the same sort of threat. What sort of information would you want to protect from AI but not other humans? If it's a secret, isn't it a matter of who gets to see it, not necessarily what? I'd sooner trust "our AI" than "their human".
- runjake 2y ago*> Isn't that concerning?* Off the top of my head, not especially. The problem of rivals that can process data faster and with greater precision is a problem that existed before AI was used/commoditized. I suppose I am concerned about AI using information to specifically target vast numbers of people at scale, based on their psychological traits/desires/vulnerabilities. Esp for political, psyops, dark pattern marketing, etc.
- ActorNightly 2y agoYou would have to have some physical device that can decrypt the content only by verification of human biological signature.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- toast0 2y agoThis requires cooperation of all the humans who process the information. Any human that processes it could transcribe it for an AI. It's like trying to stop corporate information leaks.
- noodlesUK 2y agoPen and paper. You can never ensure that the information remains obscure, but if you keep the original documents away from a computer, and share them via post, they will only ever be seen by human eyes. You can’t ensure that someone won’t scan them at some point though.
- karmakaze 2y agoYes, do things that don't scale well. Tell someone face to face without recording it. It's a story as old as time.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoNewsletters used to be delivered through regular mail, they weren't always emails you intended to read but ultimately ignore.
- JohnFen 2y agoThere are newsletters that are still only available through regular mail. They tend to be very niche (and therefore expensive), but they still thrive.
- krapp 2y agoStates and corporations are investing billions of dollars into creating the infrastructure to train on everything, everywhere, all the time. As AI on the web runs out of data to train on, the need for organic training data will necessitate merging AI with global surveillance capitalism and the panipticon, and training on the real world. You're not going to be able to just opt out. You may not be recording your conversations but someone will be. Everything you write will be scanned, and every camera will be training an AI on everything it sees.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- r2_pilot 2y agoCreate an encoding system based on various unconventional modifications to physical objects, do not document it anywhere, teach it to a small group of humans who are contractually bound to not spread the knowledge, and keep the knowledge going into the next generation along with the sense of purpose.
- pyinstallwoes 2y agoSo that's why those ancient philosophers despised writing anything down and had secret assemblies!
- kromem 2y agoUnless the encoding system was miraculously complex and the amount of content produced with it remarkably small, reversing the encoding in order to process the data seems highly plausible, especially if the input to the cipher was typical of human generated content.