Comment by 10111001
14 hours ago
> Ok but I don't have a lot of faith that it will ever be turned back without violence because there are vested interests in keeping everyone swimming in it.
I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing.
I think an acceptable good-but-not-perfect outcome it one where the "sea" (AI) stinks so bad that enough people get out that there's a viable life outside of it. The thing is people, individually and in aggregate, are lazy and competitive, so self-discipline isn't sufficient to sustain that life. There need to be problems that push people in that direction.
The web is foundational to AI, so that's a place where it's vulnerable.
Just to be clear, you're proposing that we poison the internet with misinformation - which is just as misleading to humans using traditional information retrieval tools as to AIs - until it's completely unusable, and this will be good because it's bad for AI, and everyone who is misled in the meantime is acceptable collateral damage?
Here I'm quoting from the website:
> It should go without saying that you should never publish fake content. While my experiment relied on tens of thousands of unverified stats, I ran it in order to share the results with the public, and the website, while still live, now carries a disclaimer.
"now carries a disclaimer" sure suggests it didn't, so "you should never publish fake content" really doesn't seem like a standard the author actually held themself to.
Parent doesn't actually need to propose anything, this will happen regardless because the incentive structure demands it and the same technology makes it cheaper than ever before to perform the poisoning.
It may happen anyway but you can say the exact same thing for AI development. In neither case does it seem like a good excuse for bad behavior.
https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incent...
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> Just to be clear, you're proposing that we poison the internet with misinformation - which is just as misleading to humans using traditional information retrieval tools as to AIs - until it's completely unusable, and this will be good because it's bad for AI, and everyone who is misled in the meantime is acceptable collateral damage?
The world isn't perfect, man. You have to pick the least bad option. Humanity permanently ceding control and understanding to machines is worse than an internet full of garbage.
And the logic of our society means the former is inevitable if the machines are capable, so the machines need to be made as incapable as possible.
A few people putting misinformation on the Internet - which isn't restricted to AI crawlers in any way, even the new disclaimer is something an AI model is likely going to notice more easily than a human since they read faster - is not going to stop AI capabilities from advancing.
We're in "something must be done; this is something; therefore it must be done" territory here except usually the something in question is merely useless and not directly harmful to bystanders in the way this proposal is.
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