AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

The underlying issue here isn’t AI based policing, it’s the fact private entities have enough unregulated influence on peoples’ daily life that their use of these or any such policy mechanisms are undemocratically effecting people in notably significant ways. The Facebook example is, whatever, but what if it’s some landlord renting making a decision, some health insurance company deciding your coverage, etc.

Now obviously this won’t stop with private entities, state and federal law enforcement are gung-ho to leverage any of these sorts of systems and have been for ages. It doesn’t help the current direction the US specifically is moving in, promoting such authoritarian policies.

I'm suspended on reddit for, as best as I can tell, posting a DFhack bug fix script. For the uninitiated, this is a bug fix script for a program commonly used in Dwarf Fortress moderating, not anything illicit.

If this kind of low-quality AI moderation is the future, I'm not sure if these major platforms will even remain usable.

I've already had a pre-screen coding tests judged by AI. It's unsettling.

I also had a CV rejection letter with AI rejection reasons in it as well which was frustrating because none of the reasons matched my CV at all, in my opinion. I am still not sure if the resume was actually reviewed by a human or AI but I am assuming the latter.

I absolutely hated looking for a new job pre-AI and when times were good. Now I'm feeling completely disillusioned with the whole process.

The way facebook uses automation to manage their products is a disgrace, they can’t even manage to keep themselves automatically banning a lawyer who happens to be called Mark Zuckerberg: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-zuckerberg-lawsuit-imper...

If you advertise on facebook you’re almost guarantee to have your ad account restricted for no apparent reason and no human being to appeal to, even if you spend big money.

It’s so bad that is common knowledge that you should start a fan page, post random stuff and buy page likes for 5-7 days before you start advertising, otherwise their system will just flag your account.

Maybe it banned you because you used a comma splice[0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice

Facebook is mostly using AI now. Early this year they closed their entire moderation office in our city and fired the thousands of people that worked there. There was no training handover to other teams like what was the case before when a part was moved to a lower wage country.

The problem is how it is easy for AI with full surveillance to shape one's opinions. We are mostly doomed as a species.

Not using Facebook doesn't help either though. My new co-worker didn't have one but needed it for his job so he made an account and was immediately flagged for suspicious activity.

Yeah I've basically refused to ever have kid's because I cant imagine them growing up knowingly becoming slaves. As a parent I'd basically expected CPS to be called on me for having kid's in this environment.

> but that goes against the business model.

Not if you are selling hardware. If I was Apple, Dell, or Lenovo, I would be pushing for local running models supporting Hugging Face while I full speed developed systems that can do inference locally.

> Fiat privacy still has all the same problems as telling your therapist that you killed someone, or keeping your wallet keys printed out on paper in a safe.

They could take a lesson from churches. If LLM providers and their employees were willing to commit to privacy and were willing to sacrifice their wealth and liberty for the sake of their clients, society would yield.

I remember seeing a video of a certain Richard Masten, a CrimeStoppers coordinator, destroying the information he had on a confidential source right in the courtroom under the threat of a contempt charge and getting away with a slap on the wrist.

In decent societies standing up for principles does work.

> Sam Altman made a comparison to attorney-client privilege in an interview

Isn't his company, OpenAI, the one that said the monitor all communications and will report anyone they think is a threat to the government?

https://openai.com/index/helping-people-when-they-need-it-mo...

> If human reviewers determine that a case involves an imminent threat of serious physical harm to others, we may refer it to law enforcement.

I get they are trying to do something positive overall. At the same time. I don't want corp owned AI that's monitoring everything I ask it.

IIRC it is illegal for the phone company to monitor and censor communications. The government can ask a judge for permission for police to monitor a line but otherwise it's illegal. But now with AI transcription it won't be long until a company can monitor every call, transcribe it, feed to an LLM to judge and decide which lists you should be on.

Sam "Harvest Your Biometric Data For A Scamcoin" Altman? Real trustworthy bloke, I'm sure. We should all buy some worldcoin by giving him our eye scans, in the name of privacy of course.

I wonder if pushing for privacy protections is due to seeing such concerns of intrusion on privacy already on the horizon.

The tech companies have wised up and they'll continue to speak idyllically about what "should be" and maybe even deploy watered-down versions of it, but really they're just buying time to where they can get even bigger and capture more power before the government even thinks of stepping in. The nice thing about being first to market is you can abuse the market, abuse customers, pay a few trivial class action lawsuits along the way, then when regulations finally lag along you've got hundreds of billions worth of market power behind you to bribe the politicians. The US govt won't do anything about AI companies for at least 5 years, and when they do OpenAI, Google, and Meta will all be sitting at the table holding the pen.

Anyone can just kill you whenever they want. Security cannot be granted by cryptography, only secrecy.

You really think that Altman won’t turn around and start selling ads once enough people are on OpenAI’s “trusted” platform?

For me, what is most scary about ai-chatbot is the interface to an exploiter.

They can just prompt "given all your chats with this person, how can we manipulate him to do x"

Not really any expertise needed at all, let the AI to all the lifting.

Or literally read out in court if you discuss anything relevant to a legal case.

Honestly, retargeting/personalized ads have never bothered me. If I'm gonna see ads anyway, I'd much rather get ads that might actually interest me, versus wildly irrelevant pharmaceutical drugs and other nonsense.

I think people will come to the conclusion that they don’t want to post anything online. Private chats, if they exist, will stay but already, if you generate a work of art, you donate it more or less to the shareholders of Google or Meta. This is even before the thought policing and similar implications.

I would argue that's been happening for a long time with much simpler methods. Take this website for example, I get points for posting comments that people upvote. If I post a comment that people don't like, I will get downvoted. I obviously want more points because... so I naturally work to craft the comment that I believe will net the most upvotes. This isn't 100% terrible because this helps weed out the assholes, but I think it has much more insidious effects.

Feel free to call me an accelerationist but I hope AI makes social media so awful that no one wants to use it anymore. My hope is that AI is the cleansing fire that burns down social media so that we can rebuild on fertile soil.

Like search histories but far more.

Roko's basilisk is on it's way.

No devices, no passwords were ever required of any of us (yet). We deliberately walked into this, we can walk right back out again. Will we have to make do with less? (Did we really need it anyway?)

While I owned a cellphone, I never left the house with it. While using it, my location was always known.

None of this is terribly new. For decades our names and addresses were collected in telephone books (along with our numbers) that were given away to everyone. Telecorp doxxing. That too was involuntary.

The company whose buses I carded into (instead of paying cash) knew where I got on and got off. Once you get tuned into these 'services', you are in a position to limit their accuracy. That skill can be refined. We don't have to become predictable.

This is a pretty serious allegation, but cursory searching didn’t yield anything. Do you have any sources you can point to? Being as it’s very difficult to actually ‘whitewash’ things from the internet, I would expect there is something to point to. Thanks!

Interesting find, wasn't he selling info to Microsoft?

Thanks (author here). I am working on a follow-up post (and likely posts) with specific recommendations.

LLM providers should only be allowed to train on data in public domain or their models and outputs should interior the license of the training data.

And people should own all data about themselves, all rights reserved.

It's ironic copyright is the law that protects against this kind of abuse. And this is of course why big "AI" companies are trying to weaken it by arguing models training is not derivative work.

Or by claiming that writing a prompt in 2 minutes is enough creative work to own copyright of the output despite the model being based on 10^12 hours of human work, give or take a few orders of magnitude.

From the TFA:

> That’s why we (at DuckDuckGo) started offering Duck.ai for protected chatbot conversations and optional, anonymous AI-assisted answers in our private search engine. In doing so, we’re demonstrating that privacy-respecting AI services are feasible.

I don't know if its a great idea, or just I wonder what does make it feasible, but there is a kind of implied recommendation here.

By "killing innovation" do you just mean: "we need to allow these companies to make money in possibly a predatory way, so they have the money to do... something else"? Or what is the precise concern here? What facet needs to be innovated upon?

the law could be as simple as requiring to blur faces and body silhouettes of all people inside each camera, prior to any further processing in the cloud, ensuring privacy of the CCTV footage.

I'm not a full-time coder, it's maybe 25% of my job. And am not one of those people that have conversations with LLMs. But I gotta say I actually like the occasional banter, it makes coding fun again for me. Like sometimes after Claude or whatever fixes a frustrating bug that took ages to figure out, I'll be like "You son of a bitch you fixed it! Ok, now do..."

I've been learning a hell of a lot from LLMs, and am doing way more coding these days for fun, even if they are doing most of the heavy lifting.

> I think if society were trained to treat AI as NOT human, things would be better.

Could you elaborate on why? I am curious but there is no argument.

Yeah I’ve loved seeing people call them clankers and stuff for that reason.

Especially in the US right now where they are doing whatever it takes to be #1 in ~anything, ethical or not. It’s pure bragging rights and power, anything goes - profit is just the byproduct.

America is in love with privatized surveillance, it helps get around that pesky Constitution that prohibits unwarranted search and seizure.

"Wipeth thine ass with what is written" should be engraved above the doorway of the National Constitution Center.

Don't be hesitant to suggest that YC loves too funding questionable ideas all the time.

That’s the world Los Altos café-goers have, there’s lots of worlds out there to choose from.

Opt out as much as possible.

If spaces like that irk you, stop going there. Limit your use of the Internet to when you're at home on your own network. Do we truly need to be browsing HN and other sites when we're out of the house?

Ditch the smartphone. Most things that people claim you need a smartphone for "in order to exist in modern society" can also be done via a laptop or a desktop, including banking. You don't need access to everything in the world tucked neatly away in your pocket when you're going grocery shopping, for instance.

Buy physical media so that your viewing habits aren't tracked relentlessly. Find hobbies that get you away from it all (I backpack!).

Fuck off from social media. Support hobby-based forums and small websites that put good faith into not participating in tracking and advertising, if possible.

Limit when you use the internet, and how.

It's hard to escape from it, but we can significantly limit our interactions with it.

When you say pervasive, WIFI and Cameras aren't that pervasive. What actually is is quite a bit worse than this.

For example,

The WIFI signals can uniquely identify every single heartbeat in realtime within a certain range of the AP, multiple linked access points increase this range up to a mile. The radio devices you carry around with you unknowingly beacon at set intervals tracking your location just like an animal on a tracking collar. This includes the minute RFID chips sewn into your clothing and fabrics.

The phones don't turn off their radios when in airplane mode. Your vehicle had at least 3 different layers that uniquely beacon a set of identifiable characteristics to anyone with a passive radio. OBD-II uplink, TPMS sensors (one for each wheel), and Telematics.

Home Depot in cooperation with Flock, has without disclosure captured your biometrics, and tracked your minute movements and put that up for sale to the highest bidder through subscription based profiling.

Ultrasonic beacons are emitted from your phone to associate geographically local devices to individual people. All visible to anyone with a SDR, manipulable by those with a Flipper0, and treated as distinct sources of truth in a layered approach.

All aspects of social interaction with the wider world have now been replaced with a surrogate that runs through a few set centralized points that can be turned off/degraded to drive anyone they wish into poverty with no visible indicator, or alternative.

Imagine you are a job seeker, the AI social credit algorithm they've developed to target wealthy people on one side, and to torture/make people better incorrectly identifies you as a subversive, and so they not only degrade your existing services but isolate all your communications from everyone else intermittently through failure following a statistical approach similar to Turing during WW2.

Imagine the difficulty of finding work in any specialized field which you have experience for, where you can never receive those callbacks because they are inherently interrupt driven; and interrupt driven calls are jammed without your ability to recognize the jamming. Such communications are vulnerable to erasure.

Should any system ever exist whose sole purpose or impact has become to prevent a arbitrary target through interference from finding legitimate work, or other aspects to feed themselves or exercise their existential rights.

In effect such a system of control silently makes these people into slaves without recourse, or informed disclosure. It fundamentally violates their human rights and "these systems exist".

Failure of government to timely uphold the social contract promises and specifics of the constitution becomes after-the-fact purposeful intent through the gross negligence and failure to uphold their constitutional oaths. History has shown that repeatedly if the civilization survives at all, it repeatedly reforms itself through violence. Something no good person wants, but given the narrowing of agency and choice to affect the future; it is the only alternative when the cliff of existential exctinction is present (whether people realize that or not).

Legislation or, my favorite, market forces.

But this is not excessive, it's Legitimate Interest and absolutely needed to provide a good service /s

The law really should be "if you cause harm to others you will receive 2x greater harm done to you". And "if you profit from harming others, you will compensate them by 2x of what you gained".

Instead of the current maze of case specific laws.

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> But I think something more profound needs to happen for these things to be truly fixed. I, admittedly, have no idea what that is.

You know, you're just unwilling to think it because you've been conditioned not to. It's what always happens when inequality (of income, power, etc.) gets too high.

> I'm fundamentally a capitalist

Being a capitalist is decided by access to capital not really a belief system.

> But, there really is just too much concentrated wealth in these orgs.

Please make up your mind? Should capital self-accumulate and grant power or not?

Portraying capitalism as some sort of force of nature that one doesn't "know another system that will work better" might be the neoliberals biggest accomplishment.

Doesn't seem the case because they do end up advertising the duckduckgo chatbot as a safe alternative.

You're right on all points, but it's easy to come to such a conclusion. The harder, and more rewarding path, is to organize with others and figure out what can be done even if it seems hard or impossible, because standing around observing our rapid decline isn't good for anyone.

If the government is failing, explore writing civil software, providing people protected forms of communication or modern spaces where they can safely organize and learn, eventually the current generations die and a new, strongly connected culture has another chance to try and fix things.

This is why so many are balkanizing the internet age gating, they see the threat of the next few digitally-augmented generations.

So your hypothesis is that the surveillance state is some sort of necessity that brings an great edge?

While real nukes still work.

What bad thing exactly happens if China wins? What does winning even mean? They can't invade because nukes.

Can they manipulate elections? Yes, so we'll do the opposite of the great firewall and block them from the internet. Block their citizens from entering physically, too.

We should be doing this anyway, given China is known to force them to spy for them.