As unscrupulous AI companies crawl for more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.
Honestly it seems like in all aspects of society the social contract is being ignored these days, that’s why things seem so much worse now.
It’s abuse, plain and simple.
Well the trump era has shown that ignoring social contracts and straight up crime are only met with profit and slavish devotion from a huge community of dipshits. So. Y’know.
I would be shocked if any big corpo actually gave a shit about it, AI or no AI.
if exists("/robots.txt"): no it fucking doesn'tYeah I always found it surprising that everyone just agreed to follow a text file on a website on how to act. It’s one of the worst thought out/significant issues with browsing still out there from the beginning pretty much.
Most every other social contract has been violated already. If they don’t ignore robots.txt, what is left to violate?? Hmm??
It’s almost as if leaving things to social contracts vs regulating them is bad for the layperson… 🤔
Nah fuck it. The market will regulate itself! Tax is theft and I don’t want that raise or I’ll get in a higher tax bracket and make less!
This can actually be an issue for poor people, not because of tax brackets but because of income-based assistance cutoffs. If $1/hr raise throws you above those cutoffs, that extra $160 could cost you $500 in food assistance, $5-$10/day for school lunch, or get you kicked out of government subsidied housing.
Yet another form of persecution that the poor actually suffer and the rich pretend to.
God the number of people I’ve heard say this over the years is nuts.
And then the companies hit the “trust thermocline”, customers leave them in droves and companies wonder how this could’ve happened.
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I explicitly have my robots.txt set to block out AI crawlers, but I don’t know if anyone else will observe the protocol. They should have tools I can submit a sitemap.xml against to know if i’ve been parsed. Until they bother to address this, I can only assume their intent is hostile and if anyone is serious about building a honeypot and exposing the tooling for us to deploy at large, my options are limited.
hmm, i though websites just blocked crawler traffic directly? I know one site in particular has rules about it, and will even go so far as to ban you permanently if you continually ignore them.
Detecting crawlers can be easier said than done 🙁
i mean yeah, but at a certain point you just have to accept that it’s going to be crawled. The obviously negligent ones are easy to block.
You cannot simply block crawlers lol
last i checked humans dont access every page on a website nearly simultaneously…
And if you imitate a human then honestly who cares.
There are more crawlers than I have fucks to give, you’ll be in a pissing match forever. robots.txt was supposed to be the norm to tell crawlers what they can and cannot access. Its not on you to block them. Its on them, and its sadly a legislative issues at this point.
I wish it wasn’t, but legislative fixes are always the most robust and complied against.
yes but also there’s a point where it’s blatantly obvious. And i can’t imagine it’s hard to get rid of the obviously offending ones. Respectful crawlers are going to be imitating humans, so who cares, disrespectful crawlers will ddos your site, that can’t be that hard to implement.
Though if we’re talking “hey please dont scrape this particular data” Yeah nobody was ever respecting that lol.
Both paragraphs demonstrate gross ignorance
TIL that robots.txt is a thing
what is it?
Robots.txt is a file that is is accessible as part of an http request. It’s a backend configuration file that sets rules for what automatically running web crawlers are allowed. It can set both who is and who isn’t allowed. Google is usually the most widely allowed domain for bots just because their crawler is how they find websites for search results. But it’s basically the honor system. You could write a scraper today that goes to websites that it is being told it doesn’t have permission to view this page, ignore it, and still get the information
just wait until you hear about humans.txt, it really exitst here
No laws to govern so they can do anything they want. Blame boomer politicians not the companies.
This is a very interesting read. It is very rarely people on the internet agree to follow 1 thing without being forced
Also, by the way, violating a basic social contract to not work towards triggering an intelligence explosion that will likely replace all biological life on Earth with computronium, but who’s counting? :)
I don’t think glorified predictive text is posing any real danger to all life on Earth.
Until we weave consciousness with machines we should be good.
That would be a danger if real AI existed. We are very far away from that and what is being called “AI” today (which is advanced ML) is not the path to actual AI. So don’t worry, we’re not heading for the singularity.
I request sources :)
https://www.lifewire.com/strong-ai-vs-weak-ai-7508012
Strong AI, also called artificial general intelligence (AGI), possesses the full range of human capabilities, including talking, reasoning, and emoting. So far, strong AI examples exist in sci-fi movies
Weak AI is easily identified by its limitations, but strong AI remains theoretical since it should have few (if any) limitations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence
As of 2023, complete forms of AGI remain speculative.
Boucher, Philip (March 2019). How artificial intelligence works
Today’s AI is powerful and useful, but remains far from speculated AGI or ASI.
https://www.itu.int/en/journal/001/Documents/itu2018-9.pdf
AGI represents a level of power that remains firmly in the realm of speculative fiction as on date
Ah, I understand you now. You don’t believe we’re close to AGI. I don’t know what to tell you. We’re moving at an incredible clip; AGI is the stated goal of the big AI players. Many experts think we are probably just one or two breakthroughs away. You’ve seen the surveys on timelines? Years to decades. Seems wise to think ahead to its implications rather than dismiss its possibility.
See the sources above and many more. We don’t need one or two breakthroughs, we need a complete paradigm shift. We don’t even know where to start with for AGI. There’s a bunch of research, but nothing really came out of it yet. Weak AI has made impressive bounds in the past few years, but the only connection between weak and strong AI is the name. Weak AI will not become strong AI as it continues to evolve. The two are completely separate avenues of research. Weak AI is still advanced algorithms. You can’t get AGI with just code. We’ll need a completely new type of hardware for it.
Before Deep Learning recently shifted the AI computing paradigm, I would have written exactly what you wrote. But as of late, the opinion that we need yet another type of hardware to surpass human intelligence seems increasingly rare. Multimodal generative AI is already pretty general. To count as AGI for you, you would like to see the addition of continuous learning and agentification? (Or are you looking for “consciousness”?)
That said, I’m all for a new paradigm, and favor Russell’s “provably beneficial AI” approach!
Deep learning did not shift any paradigm. It’s just more advanced programming. But gen AI is not intelligence. It’s just really well trained ML. ChatGPT can generate text that looks true and relevant. And that’s its goal. It doesn’t have to be true or relevant, it just has to look convincing. And it does. But there’s no form of intelligence at play there. It’s just advanced ML models taking an input and guessing the most likely output.
Here’s another interesting article about this debate: https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines
What we have today does not exhibit even the faintest signs of actual intelligence. Gen AI models don’t actually understand the output they are providing, that’s why they so often produce self-contradictory results. And the algorithms will continue to be fine-tuned to produce fewer such mistakes, but that won’t change the core of what gen AI really is. You can’t teach ChatGPT how to play chess or a new language or music. The same model can be trained to do one of those tasks instead of chatting, but that’s not how intelligence works.
Ah, AI doesn’t pose as danger in that way. It’s danger is in replacing jobs, people getting fired bc of ai, etc.
All progress comes with old jobs becoming obsolete and new jobs being created. It’s just natural.
But AI is not going to replace any skilled professionals soon. It’s a great tool to add to professionals’ arsenal, but non-professionals who use it to completely replace hiring a professional will get what they pay for (and those people would have never actually paid for a skilled professional in the first place; they’d have hired the cheapest outsourced wannabe they could find; after first trying to convince a professional that exposure is worth more than money)
It replaced content writers, replacing digital artists, replacing programmers. In a sense they fire unexeprieced ones because ai speeds up those with more experience.
Any type of content generated by AI should be reviewed and polished by a professional. If you’re putting raw AI output out there directly then you don’t care enough about the quality of your product.
For example, there are tons of nonsensical articles on the internet that were obviously generated by AI and their sole purpose is to crowd search results and generate traffic. The content writers those replaced were paid $1/article or less (I work in the freelancing business and I know these types of jobs). Not people with any actual training in content writing.
But besides the tons of prompt crafting and other similar AI support jobs now flooding the market, there’s also huge investment in hiring highly skilled engineers to launch various AI related product while the hype is high.
So overall a ton of badly paid jobs were lost and a lot of better paid jobs were created.
The worst part will be when the hype dies and the new trend comes along. Entire AI teams will be laid off to make room for others.
Your worry at least has possible solutions, such as a global VAT funding UBI.
Yeah I’m not for UBI that much, and don’t see anyone working towards global VAT. I was comparing that worry about AI that is gonna destroy humanity is not possible, it’s just scifi.
Seven years ago I would have told you that GPT-4 was sci fi, and I expect you would have said the same, as would have most every AI researcher. The deep learning revolution came as a shock to most. We don’t know when the next breakthrough will be towards agentification, but given the funding now, we should expect soon. Anyways, if you’re ever interested to learn more about unsolved fundamental AI safety problems, the book “Human Compatible” by Stewart Russell is excellent. Also “Uncontrollable” by Darren McKee just came out (I haven’t read it yet) and is said to be a great introduction to the bigger fundamental risks. A lot to think about; just saying I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss it. Cheers.
good. robots.txt was always a bad idea
Like so many terrible ideas, it worked flawlessly for generations
Why should I care about a text file lol
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🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 “robots.txt is a social contract” 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 🤡
