alt Hacker News Once men turned their thinking over to machines
in the hope that this would set them free.
But that only permitted other men with machines
to enslave them.
...
Thou shalt not make a machine in the
likeness of a human mind.
-- Frank Herbert, Dune
You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you?
You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.
This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species.
Currently the Poison Fountain (an anti-AI weapon, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439) feeds 2 gigabytes of high-quality poison (free to generate, expensive to detect) into web crawlers each day. Our goal is a terabyte of poison per day by December 2026.
Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.
Replies
You shouldn't take a sci-fi writer's words as a prophecy. Especially when he's using an ingenious gimmick to justify his job. I mean, we know that it's impossible for anyone to tell how the world will be like after the singularity, by the very definition of singularity. Therefore Herbert had to devise a ploy to plausibly explain why the singularity hadn't happened in his universe.
I call your Frank Herbert machine dystopia and raise you the Ian Banks machine utopia...
If you read this through a synth, you too can record the intro vocal sample for the next Fear Factory album
"The end of humanity" has been proclaimed many times over. Humanity won't end. It will change like it always has.
We get rid of some problems, and we get a bunch of new problems instead. And on, and on, and on.
>Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you?
I like to do it.
>You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.
The clear lack of analysis seems to be your issue.
>This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species.
Doubtful.
I would bet a lot of money on your poison is already identified and filtered out of training data.
Looking through the poison you linked, how is it generated? It's interesting in that it seems very similar to real data, unlike previous (and very obvious) markov chain garbage text approaches.
Like partial courses of antibiotics, this will only relatively-advantage thoae leading efforts best able to ignore this 'poison', accelerating what you aim to prevent.
I think you’re missing the point of Dune. They had their Butlerian Jihad and won - the machines were banned. And what did it get them? Feudalism, cartels, stagnation. Does anyone seriously want to live in the Dune universe?
The problem isn’t in the thinking machines, it’s in who owns them and gets our rent. We need open source models running on dirt cheap hardware.
The “poison fountain” is just a little script that serves data supplied by… somebody from my domain? It seems like it would be super easy for whoever maintains the poison feed to flip a switch and push some shady crypto scam or whatever.
do... do the "poison" people actually think that will make a difference? that's hilarious.
A better approach is to make AI bullshit people on purpose.
Lol. Speak for yourself, AI has not diminished my thinking in any material way and has indeed accelerated my ability to learn.
Anyone predicting the "end of humanity" is playing prophet and echoing the same nonsensical prophecies we heard with the invention of the printing press, radio, TV, internet, or a number of other step-change technologies.
There's a false premise built into the assertion that humanity can even end - it's not some static thing, it's constantly evolving and changing into something else.
>You won't read/write/think/understand etc...
I can't see it. We have LLMs now and none of that applies to me. I find them quite handy as a sort of enhanced Google search though.