6 ms·

You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

95 points by fortran77 2y ago

p0w3n3d 2y ago
I think one could hypothetical create a preamble invisible to human which would overload the LLM reading one's article. Like Rick and Morty did in simulation. At least it would cost a lot more to harvest one's article for the harvesting company
bookofjoe 2y ago
https://archive.ph/dsh2w https://archive.ph/dsh2w
ishtanbul 2y ago
The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance
- orev 2y ago
  Unlikely. What’s more likely to happen is that the AI posts that don’t get good engagement provides a feedback loop into the AI, training it to what works and what doesn’t. I believe we’re already seeing this on Reddit where upon the initial OpenAI deal, there was an influx of obviously poorly generated AI posts, people flagged them, and they fell off pretty quickly. The posts that make it through now are the ones people can’t tell are AI, based on that feedback. We’re training it in real time how to fool us.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Mission Fucking Accomplished https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- shombaboor 2y ago
  Discord and heavily moderated forums are the future.
  - altruios 2y ago
    IRC still is around. Pretty sure most of the user base is human still.
    - rogerthis 2y ago
      Lots of bots. Also body-only-soul-less users (as I call those that never look at messages).
  - doesnt_know 2y ago
    Yeah, small, invite-only "walled garden" style communities are definitely the future of the web. There has always been those of course, but I think they will just end up becoming the default, rather then the fringes. And the thing with these smaller communities is that they are far less tolerant to their hosting platforms pulling dumb shit (like stating they will train AI's on the comunities content).
- dartos 2y ago
  We can only hope
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  If that was true Twitter would be collapsing. The vast majority have been too passive to leave. I no longer think there's a threshold of worsening that will disrupt Twitter, Reddit, etc.
- jsheard 2y ago
  What I'd give to see the user retention stats at DeviantArt ever since they allowed it to be filled absolutely wall-to-wall with the most boring AI art you've ever seen. Not just allowed but encouraged by jumping on the bandwagon and integrating their own generator. Anecdotally it feels like there's not just an insane glut of AI slop drowning out everything else, but also less "everything else" over time due to user attrition. It really can't be overstated just how much it's come to dominate the entire site, skimming the frontpage now I immediately spotted a generic Midjourney-core image and the creator has posted 4100 pieces to date after joining... two months ago. 68 uploads every day on average.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    100%. It's intensely frustrating that they didn't at least firewall that vast amount of AI noise using a subdomain or something (e.g. ai.deviantart.com).
    - jsheard 2y ago
      They do have an AI tag that creators are supposed to set where applicable, and there's an option to hide everything with that tag, but the enforcement is weak so there's a lot of obvious AI spam which isn't tagged. Many of the AI spammers are using DAs monetization features or promoting a Patreon so they're incentivized to not set the AI tag to maximise their reach.
    - yieldcrv 2y ago
      Deviantart was already noise of unappreciated forms of expressions People just use it as a hosting platform Sounds more like a UX issue that you can see galleries
  - Mistletoe 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo This made real.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  Hard to make any forecast about "spaces" "prone to AI slop," whatever that means, besides social networks that you personally do not like, in aggregate or individually. TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in relative or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New York Times audiences are, paid or unpaid. If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking, if you exclude their presence on social media itself. If anything we already live in a post-scarcity world with regards to engaging content, starting a few years before the advent of generative AI. Why would AI generated content reverse that trend? Isn't TikTok's feed algorithm agnostic to whether a video is AI slop or user created? Isn't Instagram's? Are you really going to play No True Scotsman with "spaces" "prone to AI slop?" Shouldn't Kyle Chayka, who supposedly wrote a book on this, know that? Aren't there already too many good books, movies, TV shows, video games, operas, plays, etc. to consume? The toughest thing about this article is it is longing for a world that hasn't existed for a long time. If anything, the New Yorker and the New York Times, by doing a bad job at being media companies, have reduced the amount of new narrative creative projects that can thrive, not increased it. They never look in the mirror. The fickle and sometimes vindictive personalities that work there are not allied with narrative creators. The idea that discovering one or two diamonds in the rough offsets the incumbent cultural trends the New Yorker reinforces has long been dead - there is just way too much new stuff for any traditional media company to accurately review, report on and amplify. Everyone thriving on YouTube, Instagram, Steam, TikTok, hawking their shit, figured that out. It's even crazier to me that Kyle Chayka, who wrote a book on this, misses the mark here - I mean he should know about non-negative matrix factorization, which basically was the beginning of the end of traditional media, he should be able to make the leap that invention that enabled accurate collaborative filtering at scale killed The New Yorker, not AI, or anything in between 2000 and now. He should know there's absolutely no reason that AI generated content would be treated any differently than any other bad content, by NNMF or whatever feed algorithm. There's a possibility that the reason the NYTimes and Conde Nast have to reinvent themselves is because they do a bad job. To them, "A.I." is just another effigy, when the reality is that fewer and fewer people care what important New Yorkers think. Listen guys, it's not looking good for the writers, better to get your head out of the sand.
  - kibwen 2y ago
- jabroni_salad 2y ago
  When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed with an AI generated children's science fair project I always notice that it has 60k+ likes. To me it says that the stuff is indistinguishable from real for enough people that discerning users are just helplessly along for the ride on every platform. The article purports that the reason slop is here to stay is because people like it. The next iteration, IMO, will be AI generated children's science fair projects that also have a pepsi logo in them, still with 60k likes.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    And how many of those likes are AI-generated?
  - munk-a 2y ago
    We need to move above that before it kills the web though - if the end state is that you want to look at any old random adorable puppy pictures so you just ask your machine to generate them for you then we might have a way out of this internet death cycle. I'd hope that if you can trivially produce your own better tailored slop on your local machine then the AI slop online will lose any value - I'm concerned that we're going to lose a lot of good content created by artists before we reach that level though. I suspect the actual outcome will be a rise of manual curation and providence where a feed of adorable puppies or discussions on technology will rise or fall by how diligent the moderator is at keeping slop out of the feed.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Animats 2y ago
    > When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed... There are still people watching Facebook with unfiltered feeds? There are filters for that. From the article: "The main people benefitting from the launch of A.I. tools so far are not everyday Internet users trying to communicate with one another but those who are producing the cheap, attention-grabbing A.I.-generated content that is monetizable on social platforms." Yes. The main use case for LLMs remains blithering.
- bakugo 2y ago
  I wish this was actually true. The unfortunate reality is that the average internet user can't tell that they're looking at AI generated content with an AI generated caption and AI generated people posting AI generated comments, as we've already seen on Facebook.
- r0m4n0 2y ago
  Or humanity will devolve into confusion over what is real or AI generated for the next decade until we learn to live alongside the monster we have created.
desumeku 2y ago
https://archive.is/dsh2w https://archive.is/dsh2w
ryandv 2y ago
This is just the practice of invasive data harvesting taken to its natural conclusion, which any tech savvy user or computer geek brought up in the pre-postmodern social media era of the Internet (before Facebook) could have seen coming decades in advance. The only winning move here is not to play, accepting the unfortunate consequence that you will need to "limit the reach of your profile just to avoid participating in the new technology" - because nothing on the Internet is ever forgotten, and can (and will) be used for any purpose. Adding a few magic words to bewitch the AI into not scraping your profile is the new superstition of the digital era, a cousin to the pseudolegal "no copyright intended" incantation often seen on pirated YouTube videos of yesteryear. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, for there is a fundamental tradeoff between privacy and convenience as popularized by Schneier, 11 years ago. [0] You must stop using the platform and do something other than continue to consume vapid social media nonsense; yet no one ever listens or cares, for the revealed preference of the masses is to continue to not be users of the system but to be used in exchange for "free" access to these platforms. [0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/trading_privacy_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/trading_priva...
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  I'm not sure why having an LLM use my output in particular is problematic - I'm pretty sure OpenAI trained GPT-3+ on every single bit of data they could find, so they probably included a bunch of stuff I've written here already (though it is minuscule fraction of their vast corpus of course). Losing anonymity is something I'd be much more worried about overall (not that it's entirely separate I don't think it's the same).
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    > I'm not sure why having an LLM use my output in particular is problematic For me, the problem is almost entirely that doing so requires me to have a great deal of trust in entities that I consider untrustworthy.
  - rpgwaiter 2y ago
    There’s many good reasons, but for me it’s that I don’t want companies profiting off of my posts that have no intention of profit sharing. When I make a Youtube video and companies run ads on it, I get a piece of that pie (assuming I meet the requirements, etc.). That same video fed into Gemini so google can charge for AI video generation? I get nothing, Google makes bank. As a user I can pay for YouTube premium and not see ads, but as a creator there’s no amount I can pay to not feed Gemini.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
> For the time being, though, avoiding A.I. is up to you. If it were as easy as posting a message of objection on Instagram, many of us would already be seeing a lot less of it. It's true that it is quite hard, but there are ways to reduce it for sure. Here is what I have done: 1. I've deleted accounts for websites that promote AI. I have already deleted LinkedIn, Github, Medium, and a few others. 2. I have stopped supporting businesses that use AI/support ones that are against AI. For example, the company behind the Procreate iPad app is 100% against AI so I support them. Also, in my professional life, I have already refused to collaborate with three separate companies due to their promotion and use of AI. 3. I've deactivated any tools that could be AI based like assisted writing tools in Gmail. 4. I do not click or read any articles with AI-generated images or text. Nor do I watch any videos any more. 5. I am reconnecting with friends and share with them through email and other means. In my opinion, the internet has gotten WAY worse with the introduction of generative AI. Generative AI itself is not the root cause of course: the aggressive capitalistic takeover of the internet is, but AI is the apex tool for that and it makes the internet a rather horrible place.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  > 4. I do not click or read any articles with AI-generated images or text. How can you possibly know the articles you read have no AI-generated images or text?
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    > How can you possibly know the articles you read have no AI-generated images or text? I use a web of trust. I have a network of known writers who don't use AI. I avoid others...I mean, most articles on the internet are relatively useless anyway and just for entertainment so I don't really "need" those in my day to day life. The ones in my web of trust are enough for me,
  - debugnik 2y ago
    So what if his criteria has false negatives? AI or not, ignoring noticeable slop will be a net positive.
joe_the_user 2y ago
I thought it was going to be about escape generative AI output online. Personally, I run a large-ish niche FB group and I haven't seen a threat of bots taking over there or other online spaces. Is there anywhere that people have seen the bots crowding out the people? My guess is Twitter but that place would already/always a sewer.
23B1 2y ago
"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." -Mark Zuckerberg.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
yazzku 2y ago
> hundreds of thousands of Instagram users posted a block of text to their accounts hoping to avoid the plague of artificial intelligence online. [...] “I do not give Meta or anyone else permission to use any of my personal data, profile information or photos.” Actually, you did. What you didn't do is read the fucking terms of service. But sarcasm aside, it is a general failure of the system that things have gotten to this point. The amount of naivete like is seen above is tremendous, yet somehow we and everyone who understands this crap have failed to deliver the memo.

95 points by fortran77 2y ago

I think one could hypothetical create a preamble invisible to human which would overload the LLM reading one's article. Like Rick and Morty did in simulation. At least it would cost a lot more to harvest one's article for the harvesting company

bookofjoe 2y ago

https://archive.ph/dsh2w https://archive.ph/dsh2w

ishtanbul 2y ago

The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance

orev 2y ago
Unlikely. What’s more likely to happen is that the AI posts that don’t get good engagement provides a feedback loop into the AI, training it to what works and what doesn’t. I believe we’re already seeing this on Reddit where upon the initial OpenAI deal, there was an influx of obviously poorly generated AI posts, people flagged them, and they fell off pretty quickly. The posts that make it through now are the ones people can’t tell are AI, based on that feedback. We’re training it in real time how to fool us.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Mission Fucking Accomplished https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
shombaboor 2y ago
Discord and heavily moderated forums are the future.
- altruios 2y ago
  IRC still is around. Pretty sure most of the user base is human still.
  - rogerthis 2y ago
    Lots of bots. Also body-only-soul-less users (as I call those that never look at messages).
- doesnt_know 2y ago
  Yeah, small, invite-only "walled garden" style communities are definitely the future of the web. There has always been those of course, but I think they will just end up becoming the default, rather then the fringes. And the thing with these smaller communities is that they are far less tolerant to their hosting platforms pulling dumb shit (like stating they will train AI's on the comunities content).
dartos 2y ago
We can only hope
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
If that was true Twitter would be collapsing. The vast majority have been too passive to leave. I no longer think there's a threshold of worsening that will disrupt Twitter, Reddit, etc.
jsheard 2y ago
What I'd give to see the user retention stats at DeviantArt ever since they allowed it to be filled absolutely wall-to-wall with the most boring AI art you've ever seen. Not just allowed but encouraged by jumping on the bandwagon and integrating their own generator. Anecdotally it feels like there's not just an insane glut of AI slop drowning out everything else, but also less "everything else" over time due to user attrition. It really can't be overstated just how much it's come to dominate the entire site, skimming the frontpage now I immediately spotted a generic Midjourney-core image and the creator has posted 4100 pieces to date after joining... two months ago. 68 uploads every day on average.
- vunderba 2y ago
  100%. It's intensely frustrating that they didn't at least firewall that vast amount of AI noise using a subdomain or something (e.g. ai.deviantart.com).
  - jsheard 2y ago
    They do have an AI tag that creators are supposed to set where applicable, and there's an option to hide everything with that tag, but the enforcement is weak so there's a lot of obvious AI spam which isn't tagged. Many of the AI spammers are using DAs monetization features or promoting a Patreon so they're incentivized to not set the AI tag to maximise their reach.
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    Deviantart was already noise of unappreciated forms of expressions People just use it as a hosting platform Sounds more like a UX issue that you can see galleries
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo This made real.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
Hard to make any forecast about "spaces" "prone to AI slop," whatever that means, besides social networks that you personally do not like, in aggregate or individually. TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in relative or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New York Times audiences are, paid or unpaid. If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking, if you exclude their presence on social media itself. If anything we already live in a post-scarcity world with regards to engaging content, starting a few years before the advent of generative AI. Why would AI generated content reverse that trend? Isn't TikTok's feed algorithm agnostic to whether a video is AI slop or user created? Isn't Instagram's? Are you really going to play No True Scotsman with "spaces" "prone to AI slop?" Shouldn't Kyle Chayka, who supposedly wrote a book on this, know that? Aren't there already too many good books, movies, TV shows, video games, operas, plays, etc. to consume? The toughest thing about this article is it is longing for a world that hasn't existed for a long time. If anything, the New Yorker and the New York Times, by doing a bad job at being media companies, have reduced the amount of new narrative creative projects that can thrive, not increased it. They never look in the mirror. The fickle and sometimes vindictive personalities that work there are not allied with narrative creators. The idea that discovering one or two diamonds in the rough offsets the incumbent cultural trends the New Yorker reinforces has long been dead - there is just way too much new stuff for any traditional media company to accurately review, report on and amplify. Everyone thriving on YouTube, Instagram, Steam, TikTok, hawking their shit, figured that out. It's even crazier to me that Kyle Chayka, who wrote a book on this, misses the mark here - I mean he should know about non-negative matrix factorization, which basically was the beginning of the end of traditional media, he should be able to make the leap that invention that enabled accurate collaborative filtering at scale killed The New Yorker, not AI, or anything in between 2000 and now. He should know there's absolutely no reason that AI generated content would be treated any differently than any other bad content, by NNMF or whatever feed algorithm. There's a possibility that the reason the NYTimes and Conde Nast have to reinvent themselves is because they do a bad job. To them, "A.I." is just another effigy, when the reality is that fewer and fewer people care what important New Yorkers think. Listen guys, it's not looking good for the writers, better to get your head out of the sand.
- kibwen 2y ago
jabroni_salad 2y ago
When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed with an AI generated children's science fair project I always notice that it has 60k+ likes. To me it says that the stuff is indistinguishable from real for enough people that discerning users are just helplessly along for the ride on every platform. The article purports that the reason slop is here to stay is because people like it. The next iteration, IMO, will be AI generated children's science fair projects that also have a pepsi logo in them, still with 60k likes.
- kibwen 2y ago
  And how many of those likes are AI-generated?
- munk-a 2y ago
  We need to move above that before it kills the web though - if the end state is that you want to look at any old random adorable puppy pictures so you just ask your machine to generate them for you then we might have a way out of this internet death cycle. I'd hope that if you can trivially produce your own better tailored slop on your local machine then the AI slop online will lose any value - I'm concerned that we're going to lose a lot of good content created by artists before we reach that level though. I suspect the actual outcome will be a rise of manual curation and providence where a feed of adorable puppies or discussions on technology will rise or fall by how diligent the moderator is at keeping slop out of the feed.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Animats 2y ago
  > When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed... There are still people watching Facebook with unfiltered feeds? There are filters for that. From the article: "The main people benefitting from the launch of A.I. tools so far are not everyday Internet users trying to communicate with one another but those who are producing the cheap, attention-grabbing A.I.-generated content that is monetizable on social platforms." Yes. The main use case for LLMs remains blithering.
bakugo 2y ago
I wish this was actually true. The unfortunate reality is that the average internet user can't tell that they're looking at AI generated content with an AI generated caption and AI generated people posting AI generated comments, as we've already seen on Facebook.
r0m4n0 2y ago
Or humanity will devolve into confusion over what is real or AI generated for the next decade until we learn to live alongside the monster we have created.

desumeku 2y ago

https://archive.is/dsh2w https://archive.is/dsh2w

ryandv 2y ago

This is just the practice of invasive data harvesting taken to its natural conclusion, which any tech savvy user or computer geek brought up in the pre-postmodern social media era of the Internet (before Facebook) could have seen coming decades in advance. The only winning move here is not to play, accepting the unfortunate consequence that you will need to "limit the reach of your profile just to avoid participating in the new technology" - because nothing on the Internet is ever forgotten, and can (and will) be used for any purpose. Adding a few magic words to bewitch the AI into not scraping your profile is the new superstition of the digital era, a cousin to the pseudolegal "no copyright intended" incantation often seen on pirated YouTube videos of yesteryear. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, for there is a fundamental tradeoff between privacy and convenience as popularized by Schneier, 11 years ago. [0] You must stop using the platform and do something other than continue to consume vapid social media nonsense; yet no one ever listens or cares, for the revealed preference of the masses is to continue to not be users of the system but to be used in exchange for "free" access to these platforms. [0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/trading_privacy_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/trading_priva...

joe_the_user 2y ago
I'm not sure why having an LLM use my output in particular is problematic - I'm pretty sure OpenAI trained GPT-3+ on every single bit of data they could find, so they probably included a bunch of stuff I've written here already (though it is minuscule fraction of their vast corpus of course). Losing anonymity is something I'd be much more worried about overall (not that it's entirely separate I don't think it's the same).
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > I'm not sure why having an LLM use my output in particular is problematic For me, the problem is almost entirely that doing so requires me to have a great deal of trust in entities that I consider untrustworthy.
- rpgwaiter 2y ago
  There’s many good reasons, but for me it’s that I don’t want companies profiting off of my posts that have no intention of profit sharing. When I make a Youtube video and companies run ads on it, I get a piece of that pie (assuming I meet the requirements, etc.). That same video fed into Gemini so google can charge for AI video generation? I get nothing, Google makes bank. As a user I can pay for YouTube premium and not see ads, but as a creator there’s no amount I can pay to not feed Gemini.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

> For the time being, though, avoiding A.I. is up to you. If it were as easy as posting a message of objection on Instagram, many of us would already be seeing a lot less of it. It's true that it is quite hard, but there are ways to reduce it for sure. Here is what I have done: 1. I've deleted accounts for websites that promote AI. I have already deleted LinkedIn, Github, Medium, and a few others. 2. I have stopped supporting businesses that use AI/support ones that are against AI. For example, the company behind the Procreate iPad app is 100% against AI so I support them. Also, in my professional life, I have already refused to collaborate with three separate companies due to their promotion and use of AI. 3. I've deactivated any tools that could be AI based like assisted writing tools in Gmail. 4. I do not click or read any articles with AI-generated images or text. Nor do I watch any videos any more. 5. I am reconnecting with friends and share with them through email and other means. In my opinion, the internet has gotten WAY worse with the introduction of generative AI. Generative AI itself is not the root cause of course: the aggressive capitalistic takeover of the internet is, but AI is the apex tool for that and it makes the internet a rather horrible place.

chrisjj 2y ago
> 4. I do not click or read any articles with AI-generated images or text. How can you possibly know the articles you read have no AI-generated images or text?
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  > How can you possibly know the articles you read have no AI-generated images or text? I use a web of trust. I have a network of known writers who don't use AI. I avoid others...I mean, most articles on the internet are relatively useless anyway and just for entertainment so I don't really "need" those in my day to day life. The ones in my web of trust are enough for me,
- debugnik 2y ago
  So what if his criteria has false negatives? AI or not, ignoring noticeable slop will be a net positive.

joe_the_user 2y ago

I thought it was going to be about escape generative AI output online. Personally, I run a large-ish niche FB group and I haven't seen a threat of bots taking over there or other online spaces. Is there anywhere that people have seen the bots crowding out the people? My guess is Twitter but that place would already/always a sewer.

23B1 2y ago

"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." -Mark Zuckerberg.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

yazzku 2y ago

> hundreds of thousands of Instagram users posted a block of text to their accounts hoping to avoid the plague of artificial intelligence online. [...] “I do not give Meta or anyone else permission to use any of my personal data, profile information or photos.” Actually, you did. What you didn't do is read the fucking terms of service. But sarcasm aside, it is a general failure of the system that things have gotten to this point. The amount of naivete like is seen above is tremendous, yet somehow we and everyone who understands this crap have failed to deliver the memo.