AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

Ultimately, it comes down to the halting problem: If there's a mechanism that can be used to alter the measured behaviour, then the system can change behaviour to take into account the mechanism.

In other words, unless you keep the poisoning attack strictly inaccessible to the public, the mechanism used to poison will also be possible to use to train models to be resistant to it, or train filters to filter out poisoned data.

At least unless the poisoning attack destroys information to a degree that it would render the poisoned system worthless to humans as well, in which case it'd be unusable.

So either such systems would be insignificant enough to matter, or they will only work for long enough to be noticed, incorporated into training, and fail.

I agree it's an interesting CS challenge, though, as it will certainly expose rough edges where the models and training processes works sufficiently different to humans to allow unobtrusive poisoning for a short while. Then it'll just help us refine and harden the training processes.

On the one hand I agree with you but on the other sometimes I wonder just how insulated we are in the tech community and especially in sites like this.

At some point in the last few months I realized that my friend group is basically a bubble of people making mid 6 figures that all work in tech and while I wouldn’t call it “anti-ai sentiment” even some of them are extremely conservative in their praise.

With that being the case you have to wonder what the average person is feeling about it.

Then I have good news for you: If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence, there actually will no longer "be an active community of people who loathe AI and work to obstruct it"

I can guarantee there will be at least a few small ones, especially in the wake of the Sam Altman attacks and the "Zizian" cult. I doubt they'll be very organized and they will ultimately fail, but unfortunately at least a few people will (and have already) die(d) because of these radicals.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/18/sam-altma...

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/17/tech/anti-ai-attack-sam-a...

https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/mar/0...

Are you making big money from the hype?

There were never such wide scale and, above all, centralized efforts to coerce and shame people into using the Internet or smart phones in spite of their best efforts.

Let say person A wants everyone to be rich.

Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer.

One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich.

However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in ways that reduce and harm other peoples ability to access information, like hiding attribution or misrepresenting the data and sources, people who advocate for free information can have a consistent view and also work against such use. It is not a shift. It is only a shift if we believe that copyright will be removed, works will be given to the public for free, and companies will no longer try to hide and protect creative works and information.

We welcomed the vampires in and wonder why our necks hurt.

"Information wants to be free" is a small part of the hacker ethos venn diagram. There are many hacker ethos traits that aren't about cracking, specifically.

Also, the server "information" isn't free (as in beer) to begin with, it costs server availability. Coming up ways to penalize greedy actors is not only well within the server operator's perogative, it's an interesting tit-for-tat problem that could pique any hacker's interests.

A bonus hacker trait is that these poisoning responses are individualistic, i.e. the government doesn't get involved, where certainly more aggressive anti-AI sentiments could (wrongly) call for that.

So I'd say this type of LLM-resistance falls squarely in the original hacker ethos, even though it incidentally counteracts one minor aspect of "information availability". Though I'd certainly agree that the picture today is a lot different than it was. Ironic even.

People are in general for whatever they think will benefit them, and against what they think will harm them.

So piracy is ok when it benefits the little guy and not ok when it benefits the big guy. Unions are good when they stand up against employers, and bad when they discriminate against non-union workers. There's no contradiction there.

Still, people were saying all kinds of inane stuff 25 years ago too.

NOW: "We can violate your copyright because we want to."

YOU: "Where's mine, and how do I make more people click on these ads?"

I say this as someone whose notions exist orthogonal to the debate; I use AI freely but also don't have any qualms about encouraging people to upend the current paradigm and pop the bubble.

Abusive, sneaky scraping is absolutely through the roof.

Since AI crawlers don't obey any consent markers denying access to content, it makes sense for content owners who don't want AI trained on their content to poison it if possible. It's possibly the only way to keep the AI crawlers away.

This is true. Some documentation of stuff I've tinkered with (though this isn't actually published as such so not going to get scraped until/unless it is) having content, sufficiently out of the way of humans including those using accessibility tech, but that would be likely seen as relevant to a scraper, will not be enough to poison the whole database/model/whatever, or even to poison a tiny bit of it significantly. But it might change any net gain of ignoring my “please don't bombard this with scraper requests” signals to a big fat zero or maybe a tiny little negative. If not, then at least it was a fun little game to implement :)

To those trying to poison with some automation: random words/characters isn't going to do it, there are filtering techniques that easily identify and remove that sort of thing. Juggled content from the current page and others topologically local to it, maybe mixed with extra morsels (I like the “the episode where” example, but for that to work you need a fair number of examples like that in the training pool), on the other hand could weaken links between tokens as much as your “real” text enforces them.

One thing to note is that many scrapers filter obvious profanity, sometimes rejecting whole pages that contain it, so sprinkling a few offensive sequences (f×××, c×××, n×××××, r×××××, farage, joojooflop, belgium, …) where the bots will see them might have an effect on some.

Of course none of this stops the resource hogging that scrapers can exhibit - even if the poisoning works or they waste time filtering it out, they will still be pulling it using by bandwidth.

In fact, given this many parameters, poisoning should be relatively easy in general, but extremely easy on niche subjects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78pHB0Rp6eI

Tell me more? I'm guessing you might say: neither connects with everyday people, they have misaligned incentives*, they (like most corporate leaders) don't speak directly, they have more power than almost any elected leader in the world, ... Did I miss anything?

My take: when it comes to character and goals and therefore predicting what they will do: please don't lump Amodei with Altman. In brief: Altman is polished, effective, and therefore rather unsettling. In short, Altman feels amoral. It feels like people follow him rather than his ideas. Amodei is different. He inspires by his character and ideals. Amodei is a well-meaning geek, and I sometimes marvel (in a good way) how he leads a top AI lab. His media chops are middling and awkward, but frankly, I'm ok with it. I get the sense he is communicating (more-or-less) as himself.

Let me know if anyone here has evidence to suggest any claim I'm making is off-base. I'm no oracle.

I could easily pile on more criticisms of both. Here's a few: to my eye, Dario doesn't go far enough with his concerns about AI futures, but I can't tell how much of this is his PR stance as head of A\ versus his core beliefs. Altman is a harder nut to crack: my first approximation of him is "brilliant, capable, and manipulative". As much as I worry about OpenAI and dislike Altman's power-grab, I probably grant that he's, like most people, fundamentally trying to do the right thing. I don't think he's quite as deranged as say Thiel. But I could be wrong. If I had that kind of money, intellect, and network, maybe I would also be using it aggressively and in ways that could come across as cunning. Maybe Altman and Thiel have good intentions and decent plans -- but the fact remains the concentration of power is corrupting, and they seem to have limited guardrails given their immense influence.

* Here's my claim, and I invite serious debate on it: Dario, more than any corporate leader, takes alignment seriously. He actually funds work on it. He knows how it works. He cares. He actually does some of the work, or at least used to. How many CEOs of the companies they run actually have the skills to DO the rank-and-file work? Even the most pessimistic people probably probably can grant this.

Fortunately no-one sane enough among us, computer programmers, believes in that bs, we all see this masquerade for what it mostly is, basically a money grab.

Wayback Machine

https://web.archive.org/web/20260420203809/https://stephvee....

Categorically dismissing anger as "cringe" seems like a path to disconnecting from reality and morality.

I do find value in mindfully using models - perhaps I've got a weird thing to troubleshoot on my Linux server and I just don't want to spend the time or mental effort in tracing it back.

Because I do tend to use AI mindfully, I strongly dislike Microsoft's strategy in constantly pushing their AI solution Copilot. I would rather use it when I feel its right rather than always be reminded its a thing I can use to save time and increase my efficiency around every corner.

I think AI as a proper utilized tool, is amazing, I think our lack of restraint when just throwing it into everyone's hands without understanding of the tools they are using, is horrifying. I'd imagine a lot of the community here echos that same sentiment, but maybe not, and i am just making assumptions.

Right now there are companies which hire software devs or data scientists to just solve a bunch of random problems so that they can generate training data for an LLM model. Why would they be in business if self play can work out so well?

But they will probably use self-play soon. See https://www.amplifypartners.com/blog-posts/self-play-and-aut...

You're just picking random problems with tech and blaming them on AI.

I'd say the notion that expensive acts of sabotage (that can be cheaply neutralized) are a worthwhile pastime and anything other than virtue signaling is somewhat perplexing. (Not in a good way.)

There is way too much to gain if anything approaching ASI is possible, and too much to risk if a rival super power gains supremacy first. AI is not going away, the bubble is not going to pop. Maybe some valuations will crash but ultimately the technology will continue onward.

I am mostly an optimist because I find it a more comfortable way to live. My hope, and also my expectation is that AI will progress incrementally and over the medium or long term will do the same as most other technology progress, and make the median person alive better off in the future.

I reject the claims that dystopia is more likely.

Given all the borderline apocalyptic articles how students are using it to cheat and teachers have no way to stop them, I'd be honestly surprised by that.

Most people don't care if something is written by an AI as long as it is reasonable, and reflects the intent of the human who prompted the AI.

If consuming material online (videos, web sites, online forums) is not something you do a lot of, you're relatively unimpacted by LLMs (well, except the whole jobs situation...).

We have evidence to the contrary. Two blog articles and two preprints of fake academic articles [0] were able to convince CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity AI of the existence of a fake disease, against all majority consensus. And even though the falsity of this information was made public by the author of the experiment and the results of their actions were widely published, it took a while before the models started to get wind of it and stopped treating the fake disease as real. Imagine what you can do if you publish false information and have absolutely no reason to later reveal that you did so in the first place.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y

HN comments: "I just don't understand why people hate AI".

If AGI is let loose on the world I am confident millions of people are going to die.

Sure, LLMs are "revolutionary". So were the Chicxulub impactor and the Toba supervolcano.

But otherwise you are wrong. There has been plenty of successful resistance to technology. For example a many cities, regions, and even entire countries are nuclear free zones, where a local population successfully resisted nuclear technology. Most countries have very strict cloning regulation, to the extent that human cloning is practically unheard of despite the technology existing. And even GMO food is very limited in most countries because people have successfully resisted the technology.

Neither do I think it is normal for people to resist ground breaking technology. The internet was not resisted, neither the digital computer, not calculators. There was some resistance against telephones in some countries, but that was usually around whether to prioritize infrastructure for a competing technology like wireless telegraph.

AI is different. People genuinely hate this technology, and they have a good reason to, and they may be successful in fighting it off.

We've had literal generations of experience with vaccines, tons of data with formal systems to collect it, and most of the "resistance" traces back to "I dun wanna" and hearsay.

In contrast, LLM prompt-injection is an empirically proven issue, along with other problems like wrongful correlations (both conventional ones like racism and inexplicable ones), self-bias among models, and humans generally deploying them in very irresponsible ways.

Like, my aunt just lost the job she had for 33 years working at an insurance company. The company claims it is because of AI (whether companies lie about this sometimes is immaterial, it is sometimes true and becoming more true every month). She’s smart, but at age 60 I do think she’ll have a hard time shifting to a totally different knowledge work paradigm to keep up with 20-something AI natives.

What do we tell people in this position? That they should be happy? That UBI is coming? My aunt has bills to pay now, UBI is currently not in the Overton Window of US politics, and is totally off the table for Republicans (who have the white house through at least 2028).

I’m personally very excited about AI, but the lack of seriousness with which I see tech people talk about these issues is frustrating. If we can’t tell people a believable story where they don’t get screwed, they will decide (totally rationally from their perspective) that this needs to stop.

I don't think it's all that complex tbh. The freeing from labor, both in the past and now, has been achieved largely by firing people, abandoning them to starve while power concentrates in the already-powerful.

This is the exact same thing the Luddites were taking issue with. Because they partly succeeded, we have better labor laws today.

I don't believe that, though. The output will be owned by an elite. The rest of us will be useless and fighting for scraps. No utopia with UBI or similar.

Edit: wow, many made the same comment while I was reading the article. I should remember to refresh before starting to write.

No, AI will only free us from our jobs, while still keeping the need to find money to feed ourselves.

"When harnessed correctly" is exactly what wont happen, and exactly what all the structural and economic forces around AI ensure it wont happen.

I think this is easily explained: Sequencing matters. It I lose my job due to AI and it takes just 1-2 years for AI benefits to arrive at my door, that is plenty of time to be very anxious about my life. If I was guaranteed the AI benefits before I potentially lose my job, very different story.

That seems hard to set up, but alas.

What is your source on them being "the exact same types"?

We’re automating the interesting work with AI and leaving the drudge work for humans.

Who said it has to be AI?

"Capitalism sucks" has become a pretty universal slogan, but traditionally, leftists didn't want less labor (that's what the capital owners want), but more control about their labour.

What they're really saying with "Capitalism sucks, free us from our labor" is "free us from wealth inequality." It remains to be seen whether AI can actually help with wealth inequality (I don't think it can, personally), but right now most people associate AI with job loss which is not helpful vis-a-vis inequality at all.

Disclaimer: I'm long-term bearish on the impacts of AI, but I'm also bearish on "Capitalism sucks" and don't make a habit of hanging around groups dedicated to shitting on either topic.

It might be, but I saw it happen to two people in my immediate social circle. And I'm pretty anti-social.

Hating on Waymo is trendy.

Hating on Tesla is the logical result of vehicles with door handles that won't open from the inside when the power is cut.

The people who think capitalism sucks are not the ones "harnessing" AI. The capitalists are. There is zero precedent that capital will do anything but exploit and oppress with this fancy new tool they've got (that everyone hates).

No way. The people that run these companies all watched Star Trek and learned the exact wrong lessons from it. If you meant by "free you from your labor" that you will get laid off from your job and have to take up residence under an overpass, I would agree, that is what the want to do.

This is all embedded in their future growth prospects. Nobody is interested in subsidizing AI as a public service forever. They're interested in "AI is going to make this company go 100x".

I think you fundamentally misunderstand leftists/Maxists here. They don't want to be "freed from labor". They want to own the value they produce instead of bartering their labor. In fact, Marxists tend to view Yang style UBI as a disaster because their analysis of history is one of class struggle, and removing the masses from the thing that gives them an active role in that struggle (their labor) effectively deproletariatizes them. Can't exactly do a general strike to oppose a business or state's actions when things are already set up to be fine when you're not working. You instead just become a glorified peasant, reliant on the magnanimity of your patron but ultimately powerless to do anything if they make your life worse except hope they don't continue to worsen it.

I'm not arguing the Marxist view of history and class struggle here, just making it clear that outside of some reddit teenagers going through an anarchist phase, actual anti-capitalists don't think work will disappear when their worldview materializes.

If they could choose complete emancipation from poverty OR completely getting rid of the concept of billionaires - they would choose the second one. Their intention is not the absolute status of a human but how they are relative to others.

This is a machine that has been trained on vast amounts of stolen data.

This is a machine that is being actively sold by the companies that build it as something that will destroy jobs.

This is a machine that has a lot of cheerleaders who are actively hostile to people who say "I do not like that this plagarism machine was trained on my work and is being sold as a way to destroy a craft that I have spent my entire life passionately devoted to getting good at".

This is a machine whose cheerleaders are quick to say that UBI is the solution to the massive unemployment that this machine is promising to create, and prone to never replying when asked what they are doing to help make UBI happen.

Sure, you can say that most of the problems people have with AI are problems with capitalism. This isn't wrong. But unless you can show me an example of how these giant plagarism machines and/or the companies diverting ever-larger amounts of time and money into them are actively working to destroy capitalism and replace it with something much more equitable and kind, then your "this machine will free you from your labor" line is a bunch of total bullshit.

Care to explain why?