It's crazy how far i had to scroll to find someone saying exactly what i was thinking - how come AI sloppy writing like this is showing up on Hn front page?

I'm sure there are some good advice in there but lots of slop as well

It does feel a bit sloppy, but overall it's a decent article and I think everything it claims is accurate.

The thing I learned that surprised me was in the fine print of the one of the sample labels. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, but I hadn't realized that there was such as thing as Taiwanese grown cacao! https://damecacao.com/cacao-plantations-taiwan/

Chill my dude. This is just a sane default which will catch normies copy pasting stuff from claude and chatgpt. It's good enough.

Do you not want "normies" to have local AI? Do you believe that your ability to use esoteric software makes you special, makes you immune to law? The days where you can find refuge in running "weird hacker crap" instead of 100% goobermint approved software are numbered because news flash: AI means there are no normies anymore. Anyone can do anything.

No, I will not chill. The war on general purpose computing is gonna get real hot real soon.

Pasting it where?

Homework assignments, spam emails, LinkedIn

the api to detect if text is AI generated will be for large bespoke companies, governments etc. not teachers or the general public,

Universities are functionally large companies

Oh so you already knew that?

If they give it to every teacher it’s the same as giving it to everyone so they’re not going to do that.

And giving it to employees of a large company is materially different in what way?

I mean what are they doing right now at Google? Optimizing data centres? Pretty lame compared to this. Even if they completely fail, i'm sure there'll be good lessons.

Imo it definitely has to do with politicians and governments trying to appear strong on the topic of protecting kids from the harms of social media. I also believe a lot of it is well intentioned, albeit poorly executed

I'm with you on the well-intentioned aspect.

But it's not a question of poor execution -- there is simply no way to execute this. There is no way to achieve the goal (age-restricting websites) without identity verification. There are any number of half solutions that will solve 80% of the problem, but to move the needle past that requires identity verification. Even then, as the article points out, we only move to 90%.

It'll be funny when we have Robots, "The user's facial expression looks to be consenting, I'll take that as an encouraging yes"

That's literally a Portal 2 joke. "Interpreting vague answer as yes" when GLaDOS sarcastically responds "What do you think?"

The simplest solution is to open the other pod bay’s door, but the user might interrupt Sanctuary Moon again with a reworded prompt if I do that.

</think>

I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.

With that model, you're basically toast if you're "the human". It only cares about "my humans" ;)

Murderbot reference, in this economy?

This is really just how the tech industry works. We have abused the concept of consent into an absolute mess

My personal favorite way they do this lately is notification banners for like... Registering for news letters

"Would you like to sign up for our newsletter? Yes | Maybe Later"

Maybe later being the only negative answer shows a pretty strong lack of understanding about consent!

Worse yet, instead of a checkbox to opt in/out of a newsletter or marketing email when signing up or checking out, it simply opts the user in. Simply doing business with a company is consent to spam, with the excuse that the user can unsubscribe if they don’t want it.

Tactics like these should be illegal, but instead they have become industry standards.

Not everyone. If your business is chill and you are REEEEALY thoughtful and respectful with newsletters you will be rewarded with open rates well in excess of 50%…

Companies that do that instantly get reported as spam. Thrres a good reason beyond regulation to not do it that way.

There is no "lack of understanding" here. The people responsible for these interfaces understand consent perfectly well, they just don't care for it.

Or the now-ubiquitous footer:

"Store cookie? [Yes] [Ask me again]"

How would it know not to ask again if it can't store a cookie?

At least if this "Store cookies?" question is implicitly referencing EU regulations, those regulations don't require consent for cookies which are considered essential, including a cookie to store the response to the consent question (but certainly not advertising tracking cookies). So the respectful replacement for "Ask me again" is "Essential cookies only" (or some equivalent wording to "Essential" like "Required" or "Strictly necessary"). And yes, some sites do get this right.

I’ve not seen a site that remembers your selection of “reject all”/“essential only”. It would actually be hard to argue that it would count as an essential cookie, nothing about the site depends on remembering your rejection. I guess that makes “maybe later” more reasonable since it’s going to ask you every time until you relent.

"Reject all" doesn't have to be cookie, the answer could go to the browser storage.

Basically it just exists in your browser, telling it "the user didn't agree to cookies, so don't send this data and don't render those blocks". The only thing that web server knows is that requests come from someone who didn't send any cookies.

I believe it's a very common implementation.

Huh? Of course those get remembered, and of course it's allowed by GDPR. If the websites you visit don't remember "reject all", they're doing it maliciously (or out of incompetence, I guess).

It could know by respecting the DNT flag and don't even ask in the first place.

At least we haven’t gotten to Elysium levels yet, where machines arbitrarily decide to break your arm, then make you go to a government office to apologize for your transgressions to an LLM.

We’re getting close with ICE for commoners, and also for the ultra wealthy, like when Dario was forced to apologize after he complained that Trump solicited bribes, then used the DoW to retaliate on non-payment.

However, the scenario I describe is definitely still third term BS.

That raises an interesting point. Imagine we have helper bots or sex bots and they get someone killed or rape them or something. Who is held responsible?

These current “AI” implementations could easily harm a person if they had a robot body. And unlike a car it’s hard to blame it on the owner, if the owner is the one being harmed.

The more I hear about AI, the more human-like it seems.

We trained the computers to act more like humans, which means they can emulate the best of us and the worst of us.

If control over them centralizes, that’s terrifying. History tells us the worst of the worst will be the ones in control.

You can frame the "unpaid voluntary labor" as "creative work" and it would start making a whole lot of sense. "Creative work thrives despite being unpaid in capitalist society."

Hard disagree. You can't just one day wake up and double your energy infrastructure.. China is way ahead.

Regardless of the usefulness of llms, if you don't work at anthropic, how gullible are you to believe that claim at face value?