akersten

I wish the author got more into the weeds of anitcheat and how it evolved over time. Jagex was banning bots based on mouse movement heuristics in like 2005. 20 years later and there's some JS framework on the front page here heralding that same kind of analysis as some revolutionary new approach. I can only imagine what the modern anticheat engine entails, especially in the era of LLMs that can reliably emulate a human player. (Some of them can even write quite technical blog posts that almost escape detection ;)

The brazen crime of asking for a resource and receiving it.

You have the power, and should exercise it, to rate limit bad actors

> People interpret business as hostility because they cannot conceive of the idea that they themselves should pay for a service.

If that's what the business really believed, they'd put up a paywall instead of literally giving away their content. Some businesses do believe that. Most of them realize it's more profitable to sell data about you instead. So screw 'em and screw this victim-blaming "well we wouldn't need all this invasive tech if it weren't for those pesky adblockers, you'll need a TPM to browse the internet because you didn't play along with my bad business model" nonsense. The internet existed before big adtech, and it will exist after. Long live free computing.

> Like if you don't want to be kicked around, you need to be the one kicking.

This is a punk stance but somehow the argument is "be punk and whip out the credit card?" My argument is "be punk and adblock."

It's just drivel from the Economist, it's not surprising that it makes all these errors. Their real goal is to shape the narrative and get people through their turnstyle. They really don't care about finer minutae like correctness and philosophy. They just chain words together until it sounds approximately agreeable. Come to think of it, do we know if The Economist is conscious?

Well, all one has to do is look at the bigger picture of how rooted devices are being shuffled into 3rd rate/totally blocked experiences and the overall direction of things starts to take very clear shape.

At over a decade old, still prescient as ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

A desperate attempt to establish their version of regulatory capture and not have to pay licensing fees to the other guy

> I think there is a good argument for being able to distinguish AI generated image and video...

Neat but that's not what's being built here. What's being built is "we can trace back this content to who made it" which is bad. Doesn't matter if today that it's limited to AI generated content. Won't be tomorrow. Your devices should not act against your best interests. No cop in my pocket please.

On a big page with lots of collapsed content, I want control+f to search it and find anything in the collapsed sections without having to manually expand them all before I hit control+f

> or operating outside their depth and giving unqualified feedback to the models

I wonder if the labs are sufficiently prepared to filter this kind of stuff out. I see a lot of non-developers asking development things of Claude, getting confused when they're in over their depth, and getting upset that they don't understand what the model is providing them, giving it bad feedback, and subsequently making the AI worse for the rest of us who know how to use the tool.

> They promise to get you to your destination.

Critically they promise "by a certain time" as well. Surely with so many miles you are aware of the "significant disruption to my travel plans" aspect to getting compensated for a service that they failed to deliver.

Plane crews timing out on the tarmac at midnight forcing everyone aboard to lose a day of travel is not a "sob story" it is a systemic and purposeful optimization on the airline's part, a gamble that they can put up enough customer service phone menus and hoops that they only have to comp a small portion of customers whose time and money they've misappropriated.

ETA: my example above is to point out that even in the common failure cases airlines are awful, and as OP shares, even worse in the rare engine failure case. Yeah, they don't directly control that the engine failed (unless we start talking about how lack of maintenance and overworked mechanics contribute to that, which we should, and is under their control btw) but a hundred bucks for being stranded in the jungle is an insult no matter how you slice it

I suppose consider yourself lucky that you haven't yet been inconvenienced by an issue completely within the airline's control and been offered $50 in funny money even though you had to pay out of pocket for your dingy hotel and transport in/out of the airport at 11pm/6am the next morning. And no, they won't reimburse that, because you could have slept on the terminal floor for free

I on the other hand will never understand anyone extending any grace to an airline. They are constantly testing just how poor of an experience they can deliver to their customers and stay in business.

For starters, they could have offered more than $100 to OP here

I'm simultaneously hearing that the internet is more addicting than cigarettes to the point where multiple states are finding success levying gigantic fines on companies for having too good of a product, and also that the internet is boring and drab. Are we on two different internets? Is the author simply immune from the hypnosis of social media?

Anyway, the real internet is and always has been/will be smaller forums brought together by a common interest. Think back to the MMORPG private server communities of the 00's/10's. Kind of hacker news fits into that bucket today but even still a lot of the brainrotted brigading and average takes from reddit I'm seeing more often here (not calling out this post in particular; referring to the comment sections mostly).

That such a setting does not exist suggests the feature's true purpose is not for the end user's own benefit!

Neither of those use cases seem good or tasteful to me as a user, I don't think this concept of "secure (from the user) context" should exist, but maybe that's just me

Respectfully, you are all missing the point.

Watermarking is bad not just because of the principled stance that your tool should not be working against your own interests (the passionate argument in TFA), but specifically because it lends credence to the idea that AI detection is a valid and possible thing to do perfectly.

As technologists of course we know "oh well yes but with some confidence interval we can detect AI token bias across a large corpus of text." To JimBob in charge of publishing your paper or reviewing your PhD submission, all he knows is "anthropic says AI detection is possible so this 30% chance your paper was written by AI means you've plagiarized." Do you really think you're winning the argument with the certified, law-approved plagiarism detection machine? No, you're not, and your career is over.

It's irresponsible to develop watermarking because it is not anywhere close to a perfect science, but it will be treated like one by people with the power to ruin your lives. Even if you've never touched AI in your life, your paper is going through the "maybe it says you cheated" box, and you better hope those dice don't come up snake eyes.

They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of `<div>` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

> I mean to go over a large collection of publicly or privately (to you) available pages and parse and collect the data, with idea of using it in other purposes.

I've always called that "learning" but I guess it's called something else when a robot does it :)

> Taking your position to its logical conclusion implies that we shouldn't try to mitigate DDoSes either.

Not really. At any time you can, and should, choose not to reply to traffic that is wasting your bandwidth - ban IPs, use DDOS mitigation services, etc. My position is simply that regulation doesn't belong in this space, and it's ok for the 'net to be a dog eat dog world. Kind of what keeps technology advancing and exciting.

hasn't stopped states from trying to impose their internet rules on visitors everywhere :/

> Is it allowed to use automated tools to interact with any system?

I'd hope so, because that's what we're doing right now. Your browser is automatically speaking HTTP for you so that you don't have to.

Am I having a bit of a laugh? Maybe. But really, services should be user-agent agnostic. That's the whole "agent" part of User Agent and the founders of the Internet had incredible foresight to name it this way.

> Is it allowed to scrape data?

You mean, request data and receive what the other server voluntarily transmits?

> Are there any laws for this?

There was a court case that said the above is fine, thankfully, since that's how the internet works. There's probably other cases going on and I'm sure at least one of them will have some unfortunate tech-illiterate result that makes things worse for anyone who understands this stuff.

Purely greedy or not, there is some measure of "goal outcome" that was previously being solved for with the token selection function, and the goal was "complete this text with the best (surely, otherwise what are we doing?) next part, and sometimes the best next part is a little bit random just to keep things interesting"

Now the goal is either "identify the meaningless interesting bits and swap them out with 0% loss in the direction of the original goal," or "perturb some small selection of the output towards my secondary secret goal of watermarking the text."

It would be quite impressive if they managed to identify with 100% accuracy the tokens that "don't matter" and are free to swap with whatever signalling tokens encode the AI scarlet letter, but most likely they are not 100% accurate, and that means the output is worse off than without the watermarking logic.

Please don't let the arbitrary selection of phrase distract you from the substance of my argument: a product that I pay for is at best no better due to this change, and highly probably worse. Why am I paying for a tool that is beholden to clandestinely satisfy some far away master?

If there is any false positive rate (which, because text will naturally and by chance include tokens from the green and red sets in some pattern, there will be), tools making promises like "detect AI-generated text" are unacceptable. They are going to turn innocent people into pariahs on some unsubstantiated "this content is 37% likely to be AI" claim that the user has no way of verifying or inspecting more deeply, we just have to trust the statistical box and assign some meaning to whatever that number means. 37% of my phrases are AI? There's a 37% chance my entire text is AI written? Part of the fun is not knowing!

This is scripture homeopathy and it's irresponsible.

sure, if we can make words mean whatever we like, yeah

So my code that Claude makes, which previously was using the best (most probable) tokens for the job, will now be getting worse in random positions, to appease a voluntary EU suggestion. Love that.

Not to take one side or another but these assertions are wrong on their face:

> Phillip Morris is fundamentally different as a product because it lacks network effects. I can start smoking, quit smoking, change brands, nothing outside of me really changes.

Missing out on the socialization of smoke breaks is a huge cultural pull. And remember all the 90's/00's campaigns highlighting the dangers of peer pressure. Not to mention the plumes of smoke being blown into the air for passerby to inhale - that is not a public nuisance?

> I would guess

It's going to take a lot more evidence to get me anywhere near consideration that this is a trade worth making. Again, we know that fast food can be attributed to hundreds of thousands of early deaths per anum, but we regulate that not at all. In fact it's sadly a staple of the average kids diet.

Passing laws out of fear is not how any competent legislature should operate.

What's simplistic and unhelpful is falling for the narrative that infinite scroll, boobies, and algorithmic feeds are somehow more harmful than ubiquitous government surveillance of the most powerful communication tool on earth. The Internet, more or less, has been around 30+ years and the Something awful and 4chan generations are now in charge. We're not much worse off. The Internet is actually way tamer these days than it used to be.

We can all agree that yeah sure this social media stuff isn't great, but that's the whole point of freedom. Fast food isn't great either but lawmakers aren't pushing for a junk food attestation framework to make sure you don't consume it more than twice a week. In other words, your best interest is not interesting to them at all. They are happy that you think it is somehow self evident that we should subject ourselves to undue surveillance through!

So, wonder why they're pushing for this so hard. I'll take the brainrot if it means criticism and ideas can spread without permanently being associated with a trackable, unchanging identity.

It's not a fair take in the sense that replacing the backbone of lead solder plumbing and paint in 1960's wasn't a fair take, and plenty of us are still awaiting the lead-free replacements.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.