If it isn’t depressing, is it really The Great Gatsby?

Garage motor special $100 off? Hooray!

Now if only I could afford a garage…

This is false. Godels incompleteness theorems only prove that there will be things that are unprovable in that body of models.

Good news, Newtons flaming laser sword says that if something can’t be proven, it isn’t worth thinking about.

Imagine I said, “we live in a simulation but it is so perfect that we’ll never be able to find evidence of it”

Can you prove my statement? No.

In fact no matter what proof you try to use I can just claim it is part of the simulation. All models will be incomplete because I can always say you can’t prove me wrong. But, because there is never any evidence, the fact we live in a simulation must never be relevant/required for the explanation of things going on inside our models.

Are models are “incomplete” already, but it doesn’t matter and it won’t because anything that has an effect can be measured/catalogued and addded to a model, and anything that doesn’t have an effect doesn’t matter.

TL;DR: Science as a body of models will never be able to prove/disprove every possible statement/hypothesis, but that does not mean it can’t prove/disprove every hypothesis/statement that actually matters.

Damnit I think I combined her with Artemis because that’s one of the weird birth stories I was talking about. Also yeah I really can’t believe I missed one of the main gods.

For fun I’m going to try listing as many Greek deities as I can from memory, this will pale in comparison to the real total but it will be fun nonetheless (I’ve probably made many spelling mistakes)

1. Zeus, king of pantheon of the gods who rules the sky and weather etc.
2. Hera, wife of Zeus… one of the goddesses of fertility? And peacocks?
3. Poseidon, god of water and horses and earthquakes
4. Hades, god of the underworld who has a helm of invisibility
5. Persephone, daughter of Demeter and wife of Hades goddess of spring
6. Demeter, goddess of agriculture
7. Hermes, god of messengers and thieves, has winged shoes
8. Dionysus, god of wine and festivities
9. Aphrodite, goddess of beauty (born of the corpse of the father of the titans… Ourous?)
10. Artemis, goddess of strategy …and the moon?(multiple weird birth stories but all from Zeus’s body if I recall)
11. Apollo, god of the sun, son of Zeus
12. Ares, god of war
13. Phobos, demigod or lesser god of fear, related to Ares
14. Demos, same as above but for “terror”
15. Hephaestus, god of machines and husband of Aphrodite
16. Hestia, goddess of the hearth
17. Lethe, river in Hades and god of sleep
18. Eris, goddess of chaos
19. Prometheus, titan who defied Zeus to give humanity fire and got his liver ripped out by eagles indefinitely
20. Helios, titan of the sun (having multiple deities for the same thing happens a lot)
21. Kronos, titan of time
22. Gaia, Mother Earth and mother of titans
23. Nyx, goddess of poison? Treachery?
24. Charon, ferryman/guide of the dead (id call him a deity since people give him “offerings”)
25. Hercules, half human, became a god via golden apples after completing tests intended to kill him
26. Europa, titan, i don’t remember, exploration? She’s the namesake of Europe though, also I think she’s the one who fucked Zeus when he was a cow or something.
27. Vulcan, titan of fire? Volcanos?

I don’t remember if Orion the hunter is just a hero/demigod or if he is a god. Same for Perseus.

Damn. That’s less than I thought. Can I name all nine muses still?

1. Calliope (voice)
2. Erato (you know)
3. Uterpe (joy? Also I feel like there’s another name but I only remember this one because it’s weird)
4. Thalia (song? )
5. Urania (poets?)
6. Clio (history?)
7. Polyhymna (geometry?)
8. Melpomene (tragedy)
9. … I want to say turpentine which is definitely wrong, but I think it does begin with turp- and she’s the muse of dance?

Idk like half the muses are muses of song and there’s significant overlap in all of them if I recall correctly.

Anyway it’s late so I’m going to bed, I’ll see how wrong I was when I woke up lol

Oh also I have never played the game you mentioned but I have siblings who were very into the Percy Jackson books lol

I work in a lab, so yes, I understand how data science works. However, I think you have too much faith in the people running these scrapers.

I think it’s unlikely that ChatGPT would have had those early scandals of leaking people’s SSNs or other private information if the data was actually “cleared by a human team” The entire point of these big companies is laziness; I doubt they have someone looking over the thousands of sites worth of data they feed to their models.

Maybe they do quality checks on the data but even in that event, forcing them to toss out a large data set because some of it was poisoned is a loss for the company. And if enough people poison their work or are able to feed poison to the scrapers, it becomes much less profitable to scrape images automatically.

I previously mentioned methods for possibly slipping through automatic filters in the scraper (though maybe I mentioned that in a different comment chain).

As for a scraper acting like a human by use of an LLM, that sounds hella computationally expensive on the side of the scrapers. There would be few willing to put in that much effort, fewer scrapers makes DDOS like effect of scraping less likely. It would also take more time which means the scraper is spending less time harassing others.

But these are good suggestions. I suppose a drastic option for fighting a true AI mimicking a human would be to make all links have a random chance of sending any user to the tarpit. People would know to click back and try again, but the AI would at best have to render the site, process what it sees, decide it is in the tarpit, and then return. That would further slow down the scraper (or very likely stop/trap it) but that would make it slightly annoying for regular users.

In any case, at a certain point, trying to tailor an AI scraper to avoid a single specific website and navigate the traps for it would probably take more time and effort than sending a human to aggregate the content instead of an automated scraper

Oh when you said arms race I thought you were referring to all anti-AI countermeasures including Anubis and tarpits.

Were you only saying you think AI poisoning methods like Glaze and Nightshade are futile? Or do you also think AI mazes/tarpits are futile?

Both kind of seem like a more selfless version of protection like Anubis.

Instead of protecting your own site from scrapers, a tarpit will trap the scraper, stopping it from causing harm to other people’s services whether they have their own protections in place or not.

In the case of poisoning, you also protect others by making it more risky for AI to train on automatically scraped data which would deincentivize automated scrapers from being used on the net in the first place

With aggressive scrapers, the “change” is having sites slowed or taken offline, being basically DDOSed by scrapers ignoring robots.txt.

What is your proposed adaptation that’s better than countermeasures? Be rich enough to afford more powerful hardware? Simply stop hosting anything on the internet?

Okay, so I’m definitely not the most knowledgeable hacker, but the issue with an active AI hunter, to hunt and kill instead of setting tarots, is that you’d have to actually create an AI capable of of hacking the scraper.

This would mean tracing it back to the actual source and then hacking that source to destroy the scraper, and I’d bet that’s not an easy task even for a human.

But yeah honestly, creating an AI capable of hacking and fucking up certain systems and then setting it loose on the net really could cause a Datakrash like event if it can replicate itself like a virus on the hardware it infects.

Even better if you could find some way to have it mutate as it goes along but that’s pretty far fetched even for this already far fetched hypothetical.

Isn’t that what the arms race is? Adapting to new situations?

I guess diversity of tactics probably is a good way to stop scrapers from avoiding the traps we set. Good on you for helping out. Also I like the name lol

On a slightly unrelated note, is rust a web dev language? I’ve been meaning to learn it myself since I’ve heard it’s basically a better, modern alternative to C++

Oh wow I’m dense, I didn’t even think about the fact that scrapers probably don’t render the full webpage and instead just seek out images in the HTML lol

This seems like a much easier to set up trap than creating a tarpit and then serving bullshit images.

Would it negatively impact the loading times for regular users? Like would it take significant amounts of time for the webpage to load if you added hundreds of these hidden images?

That’s the intent behind Nightshade right?

Would overlaying the image with a different, slightly transparent image be enough to shift the weights? Or is there a specific method of pseudorandom hostile noise generation that you’d suggest?

I’d imagine the former is likely more computationally efficient, but if the latter is more effective at poisoning and your goal is to maximize damage regardless of cost, then that would be the better option.

Nice straw man infographic, but I’m not sure how it’s relevant.

My post was about methods to poison art scraping models. I said nothing about my reasons for doing so, maybe I just like fucking up corpos. Maybe I just like thinking about interesting topics and hearing other people’s ideas.

Kind of sad that you’re worked up enough about this to both miss the point, and to have an infographic on hand just in case you get offended by anyone not praising generative AI.

If you do have any knowledge of how AI functions, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the topic which, again, is on how to poison models that use image scrapers, not the ethics of AI or lack thereof.

That thread was hard to read. I do sometimes feel bad for people who don’t understand artists because they don’t realize they have the capability to be artists themselves.

I do realize that any poisoning of models won’t stop backups of the pre-decay models from being utilized, but if we make the web unscrapable, it will slow or even prevent art from being stolen in the future.

I highly doubt the big AI companies get people to screen the scraped images (at least not all of them) because the whole point in their mind is to remove the need to pay people for work lol

This thought did cross my mind, but I bet the quality filters probably check for the relevancy of words. And if they don’t already, it wouldn’t take long for them to implement a simple fix.

Generating an AI image based on the text you randomly generate would satisfy this and still cause model decay, but in both cases, generating AI images is pretty costly which means it’s not a very viable attack option for most people.

I’d heard of Glaze before and Nightshade seems useful, but only Glaze protects against mimicry and the Nightshade page makes it seem like the researchers aren’t sure how well the two would do together.

It looks like Nightshade is doing what I described (though on a single image basis) of trying to trick the AI into believing the characteristics of one thing apply to another, but I’d imagine that poisoning could be much more potent if the constraint of “still looks the same to a human” were voided.

If you know you’re feeding an AI, you can go all out on the poisoning. No one cares what it looks like as long as the AI thinks it’s valid.

As for the difficulties in generating meaningful images, it would certainly be more intense than Markov chain text generation, but I think it might not be that hard if you just modify the real art from the site.

Say you just slapped a ton of Snapchat filters on an artwork, or used a blur tool in random places, or drew random line segments that are roughly the same color as their nearby pixels, and maybe shift the hue and saturation. I bet small modifications like that could slip through quality filters but still cause damage to the model.

Edit: Just realized this might sound like I’m suggesting that messing up the art shown on the site through more destructive means would be better than Glaze or Nightshade. That’s not what I meant.

Those edit suggestions were only for the art shown in the tarpit, so you’d only make those destructive modifications to the art you’re showing the AI scrapers. The source images shown to human patrons can remain unedited.

Thanks, idk if op needed this but I did

Okay but see, in the case of CleanFlicks, that makes sense. It’s terrible because someone purposefully butchered it, not because it was a terrible film to begin with.

Coincidentally, the family member I mentioned in my rant is still very Mormon and is the kind that wants VidAngel so they can watch movies like that.

I remember watching Iron Man with them on it and yeah, you couldn’t really follow the movie at all. Plus, Iron man isn’t even that “inappropriate” to begin with, I can’t imagine how short an R-rated movie would be with the “filth” removed.

Not always, if the headline is “How do we stop (insert capitalism-caused problem)?” Then the answer is revolution.