Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
2 months ago by supersquirrel to c/techtakes
Edit: I'd like to preemptively clarify I don't have anything against these specific examples, nor am I trying to invalidate the work that went into creating them or any other examples of anti-AI fonts. This post is meant to critique the idea itself. I'm not trying to put-down anyone here!
I think this is a good perspective but...
AI systems are never going to start getting dumber.
...hasn't this already happened many times???
The end result will probably be some sort of copy-protection system which will benefit those who want to censor the web and create paywalls and other gatekeeping methods to block access to content. We're better off with the web as it is now, written entirely in plaintext. Besides, obfuscation goes against the spirit the World Wide Web was founded on: free and open access to information for the benefit of humanity.
Emphatically agreed. The open web was already being closed down before the LLM hyperscalers; it is closing down even more rapidly, partly to defend against the LLM hyperscalers dunning every website with pointless scraping all the time.
If we respond by obfuscating the text on the web, we hurt ourselves enormously and still won't stop the LLM hyperscalers from ruining the web. It's a misguided, technical non-solution, for something that needs a political response.
AI systems are never going to start getting dumber.
…hasn’t this already happened many times???
I'm not sure what you've got in mind.
Well, OpenAI and Anthropic have repeatedly degraded their service through unacknowledged quantization and/or dynamically swapping models on the user. /r/singularity has gotten sick of it to the point it is a meme. It is because they can't actually afford to offer quality SOTA models at the price point people will actually pay for them.
AI systems are never going to start getting dumber.
…hasn’t this already happened many times???
I mean, I guess it can be seen as technically true, because LLMs (the subset of AI they're clearly talking about here) already know exactly zero about reality or what's true. Can't know less than that.
The principles...
"open source software, the code, by license, is free to use and modify and redistribute"
ai gobbles up open source code
"NO NOT LIKE THAT HOW DARE YOU STEAL COPY WHAT IS FREE!"
Which one is it? Open source is intended to prevent this very thing of privatizing information, but this is where we're all going now. It's the two guns at two targets scenario - save open source and ai prevention gets shot dead. Add ai prevention but then open source, freedom of information as a concept gets shot dead. You can't take both outcomes, because they are diametrically opposed, and the ones holding the guns are a lot faster at pulling the trigger than you.
It is very simple, you modify your open source software license to say
"“open source software, the code, by license, is free to use and modify and redistribute by humans NOT AI”
Then you use human beings and their connections within communities to enforce this social norm. This does not need to be 100% enforceable with some draconian authentication mechanism such as you suggest, it can be a culturally enforced rule that whenever someone blatantingly starts violating becomes a massive issue for them and throws a wrench in the rest of their connections by ruining community trust in them.
Also corporations owned by billionaires tearing through public information to build LLMs is NOT WITHIN the spirit of public use, rather it represents the obliteration of public spaces for private benefit...?
Why not? The definition of "open" is unescapably political, there is no neutral definition of open.
It's the first step towards censorship. Once you're okay with this, you will be okay with the next restriction, and the next, and the next.... until you've arrived at the desired endpoint - everything is private and proprietary again.
Why not?
Because words have meanings and organizations like the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation, who control the definitions of terms of art like "Open Source" and "Free Software," have made it very very clear what the definition is and that it does not include the types of restrictions you propose.
You're right that "Open Source" (or better yet, "Free Software") is inherently political, but it is entirely ideologically opposed to what you apparently want.
To be clear: I don't like this big-tech AI shit any more than you do. But trying to pervert the definition of Open Source into something it's not is not the way to fight it.
@awful.systems
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
go to feed...
@awful.systems
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
go to feed...
Yeah, this is a take of someone who apparently doesn't understand how they work, and believes that they actually are an intelligence rather than the overwrought way of simulating such that they actually are.
save