I totally share the anger and frustration of this YouTuber. AI is basically slop, and if I pirate a single movie to watch it for free, a judge here in Germany might decide to cut my internet connection. But when video-streaming and AI companies allow grifters to steal from precarious and independent content creators, and profit from the theft, it’s “a failure of content moderation.”
On the other hand, as an archivist and a proponent of open formats, I’m really disappointed. This type of arms race is going to be a disaster for anybody wanting to make this content accessible to future generations…
Nifty idea, inserting invisible off-screen subtitles to mess with scrapers.
A year and a half ago, I made a WP plugin with a similar goal to deter AI scraping. It used a variety of esoteric unicode whitespace characters, inserting zero-width chars in the middle of words, and using non-standard whitespace between words, all to disrupt scraping.
The catch of course is, it’s bad for accessibility, and once known, a cleanup process would be able to filter them out.
Seems pointless and counterproductive. I don’t see how this won’t just be worked around trivially by companies with large budgets to do so while adding considerable noise that everyone else will have to deal with on their own.
If you want to hinder AI my suggestion is that you vote for representatives / contact your representatives and advocate for policies that restrict how they’re trained.
Just like the evolutionary race turns intelligence it a game of deception, competitive pressures will turn AIs into a game of deception. A never-ending war of AIs lying to each other and seeing through each other’s lies…
Soon we’ll be using AIs just filter out the slop produced by other AIs, and you’re going to need to upgrade your AIs when the slop AIs get better. Yeah… :D
Awesome. Big AI will just transcribe every video wasting more energy, and accessibility tooling becomes more useless unless it’s dependent on that same transcription logic.
It brings me endless joy that all of humanity has banded together to fight slop
This just makes me sad…
I totally share the anger and frustration of this YouTuber. AI is basically slop, and if I pirate a single movie to watch it for free, a judge here in Germany might decide to cut my internet connection. But when video-streaming and AI companies allow grifters to steal from precarious and independent content creators, and profit from the theft, it’s “a failure of content moderation.”
On the other hand, as an archivist and a proponent of open formats, I’m really disappointed. This type of arms race is going to be a disaster for anybody wanting to make this content accessible to future generations…
Nifty idea, inserting invisible off-screen subtitles to mess with scrapers.
A year and a half ago, I made a WP plugin with a similar goal to deter AI scraping. It used a variety of esoteric unicode whitespace characters, inserting zero-width chars in the middle of words, and using non-standard whitespace between words, all to disrupt scraping.
The catch of course is, it’s bad for accessibility, and once known, a cleanup process would be able to filter them out.
Seems pointless and counterproductive. I don’t see how this won’t just be worked around trivially by companies with large budgets to do so while adding considerable noise that everyone else will have to deal with on their own.
If you want to hinder AI my suggestion is that you vote for representatives / contact your representatives and advocate for policies that restrict how they’re trained.
Would that be helpful? Aren’t they already training on illegal and no consented content anyways? What would a new policy solve in that case?
It’s up in the air whether or not it’s illegal, that’s yet to be determined by the courts in multiple ongoing cases in the US.
Just like the evolutionary race turns intelligence it a game of deception, competitive pressures will turn AIs into a game of deception. A never-ending war of AIs lying to each other and seeing through each other’s lies…
Soon we’ll be using AIs just filter out the slop produced by other AIs, and you’re going to need to upgrade your AIs when the slop AIs get better. Yeah… :D
Neal Stephenson’s 2008 book Anathem contains a passage with this exact thought. A quick search led me to this comment that summarises it.
Awesome. Big AI will just transcribe every video wasting more energy, and accessibility tooling becomes more useless unless it’s dependent on that same transcription logic.