Digital Immortality | Hacker News Reader

Digital Immortality

dogdogfish.com

It's one thing to write publicly and assume it'll be read by bots, but:

> Everything I write. Everything everybody writes is now food for LLMs.

This is the part of all this AI bullishness I find so incredible and disconcerting. Millions of people are sharing everything they write, their journals, their idle search queries, their medical diagnoses, their idle thoughts, the things they say to their friends and loved ones, etc. with glorified US defense contractors, plugging their Obsidian and Google Drive and chat groups in to an inference server that processes all of it...

Like, do you think OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta can't or won't just hang a Palantir or Clickhouse off the side of their frontend database with all your chat history and tool calls in it even as they claim to not use your chats for further training? Who's going to be the first to feed chat history in to a tool like Flock's Investigate tool? Whose going to be swept up in the next NSA Prism? Will it be me for voicing this concern on the clearnet?

> Will it be me for voicing this concern on the clearnet?

No, because you're no threat to any such powers. For an oppressive regime, the optimal number of critical voices against it is non-zero.

It needs to be enough that people get to vent their anger before it metastasizes into actual actions, but it needs to be too little to spark threatening action.

You're striking that balance perfectly, meaning that you do exactly what it would want for you. => You're good.

>The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Noam Chomsky

What do you mean metastasizes into actual actions, multiple nations already are creating legislature on AI, LLMs and privacy. Posting a comment on HN is not venting anger or frustration lol, that was a fairly level headed complaint compared to what people say publically about Musk and et all.

I think you're overestimating Dario's fanciful empire a bit too much.

>I’m forever statistically smeared across the weights of every model that’s going to be created. And if that isn’t a comfort, I don’t know what is.

So your sense of immortality derives not from your loved ones' memories of you or the reintegration of your physical being with the rest of the natural world, or even any kind of metaphysical reconciliation, but from the nonconsensual posthumous exploitation of your intellectual labor by future capitalistic enterprises? My, what a lovely spiritual philosophy.

It was sarcasm.

Good.

Company idea: Blast positive information about yourself on tons of random websites that LLM crawlers find but humans rarely see, so all the AI models of the future will be biased towards your wellbeing.

Hahaha, To reach full potential we just need some few billions in funding

Poisoning an LLM doesn’t take billions.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...

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

> random websites that LLM crawlers find but humans rarely see

If my experience on random niche web forums is any indication, future AI models will be biased towards the well-being of online casinos.

- what ll your LLM do if I dont write words at all but still convey my ideas?

- https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/

> And if that isn’t a comfort, I don’t know what is.

Same, but actually much of your entire life recorded and trained on.

This is what complete spiritual death sounds like.

No, when people die and rot in the ground - that's a complete spiritual death. I assure you my spirits are in a good shape. And I hope the model will too.

This outlook is materialism, in which the term "spirit" becomes completely superfluous. There is no reason for you to ever use the word spirit at all if you believe spiritual death is synonymous with bodily death. You can just say bodily death and admit that you don't believe you have or need spirit. But your spirit is dead of neglect because you do not know what it is.

Yes, I don't believe in your "spirit", but I certainly believe in mine https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/spirit

I even hinted at the meaning by using "spirits". Next time you may want to use AI to explain usage of words based on their context before jumping to telling me what to do.

I mean you don't even understand that spirit death in the context is not synonymous to bodily death, but a mere consequence of it. Really bad.

If you would like your interlocutors to converse with you as a careful and subtle user of English idiom, I suggest that you first master such basics as the usage of articles in phrases like "in good shape", which you have amusingly written as "in a good shape". Otherwise one will be more likely to assume any other quirks of speech to be mere errors of a novice student of this unfortunate tongue.

I don't for a moment believe in any case that any idiosyncratic materialist notion of spirit constitutes a really meaningful belief for you. On the contrary, I will not be unjustified in assuming that the comfort you purport to draw from this sort of superficial surveillance of self (and of any nonconsenting unfortunates who happen to come to your minders' attention) merely represents the fear of death so typical of our technologists today.

I am however truly sorry to see that, for you, sincerely, and also for all of us stuck dealing with the effects of this spiritual disease. You will not be able to define or contextualize away the reality of spirit, nor substitute it with worldly trivia.

Yes, my 5yo also invents fake reasons to explain why she didn't listen.

> I don't believe you believe in any notion of spirit

See how stupid that sounds now I wrote it in plain terms. You are telling me I lied about believing in the meaning of "high spirits"? What does it have to do with materialism? Materialists can't distinguish a person in high spirits from someone in low? Laughable.

As for your imaginary BS I pray my mental health will never degrade to the point I'd believe it makes any sense.

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