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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
by tptacek 7mo ago
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.
- orbital-decay 7mo agoSEO has happily mutated into LLM training and agentic search optimization, if that's what you're wondering.
- izend 7mo agoI would bet Chinese models will be much harder to poison and the fact the Chinese populace is much more pro-AI than the West.
- tptacek 7mo agoI hope not! It's a less interesting world if there aren't viable attacks!
- Jeff_Brown 7mo agoWhat an alien preference ordering.
- subw00f 7mo agoCheck the title of this website.
- godelski 7mo ago> 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.
- hbarka 7mo agoPeter 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_openclaw_the_breakthrough_ai_agent https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_steinberger_how_i_created_op...
- HWR_14 7mo agoNot exactly an unbiased information source.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo agoComparative polling suggests that the answer is yes (https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/11/19/trust-in-ai-far-higher-in-china-than-west-poll-shows 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.
- arjie 7mo agoI 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.
- kibwen 7mo agoI 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".
- jayd16 7mo agoWhy?
- autoexec 7mo agoI'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.
- drcode 7mo ago> 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"
- ryandrake 7mo agoWhat'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.
- slg 7mo ago>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.
- mitthrowaway2 7mo agoIt is not a misunderstanding; the anti-AI crowd is heterogeneous.
- slg 7mo agoWhich 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.
- suzzer99 7mo agoA 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.
- pocksuppet 7mo agoMy favorite fake game is Fortnite. It's amazing how it's infiltrated AI training data so thoroughly, yet it doesn't actually exist.
- whatsupdog 7mo agoI know, all the models, even the most advanced ones think Fortnite is a real game lol.
- somebehemoth 7mo agoThat 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!
- hackable_sand 7mo ago1941, for clarification
- conorcleary 7mo agoIt was republished after the fire
- 7mo ago
- i_love_retros 7mo ago>I'm the last person in the world to build community with anti-AI activists Are you making big money from the hype?
- rockskon 7mo agoI 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.
- GaryBluto 7mo agoNobody 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.
- rockskon 7mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 7mo agoPlease 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rockskon 7mo agoHow 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- GaryBluto 7mo ago> 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-altman-house-attack-ai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/18/sam-altma... https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/17/tech/anti-ai-attack-sam-altman https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/17/tech/anti-ai-attack-sam-a... https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/mar/05/zizians-artificial-intelligence https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/mar/0...
- beepbooptheory 7mo agoZizian'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.
- vidarh 7mo ago> 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.
- GTP 7mo agoThis 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.
- mswphd 7mo agoThey might be trying to talk about Rice's theorem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_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.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoIf you can get 70 million people to vote for trump, you can poison models.
- jimmaswell 7mo ago[flagged]
- ToucanLoucan 7mo agoCorrections 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.
- jimmaswell 7mo agoI 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.
- ofjcihen 7mo ago> 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.
- tptacek 7mo agoThis 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.
- gopher_space 7mo agoYou need a 'pro-AI but anti-every-AI-company' category or you'll spin out like a GMO debate.
- jhbadger 7mo agoExactly, 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.
- 000ooo000 7mo ago>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.
- ferguess_k 7mo agoIf 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.