Perhaps this is where the question of "what is a human right?" becomes important. A human right is not where you are automatically entitled to the thing in question (e.g. food, water, education), but where no entity can prevent you from your pursuit of the thing. Whether the thing qualifies as a human right depends on whether a human can function in society without it. In the earliest, most basic societies, food and water qualified, but not necessarily education, clothing or even permanent housing. Fast forward to the twenty first century, I think now electricity, internet and access to the financial system qualifies. Perhaps in the future, access to machine learning models would qualify too.
This already happened to me. I was blocked by OpenAI from GitHub after I reported an issue and sought technical help. They prefer ignoring their bugs and blocking their users over acknowledging and addressing them.
This was looked at pretty thoroughly in the novella:
https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm
(time for it to be reposted and discussed again since the author's untimely demise? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228759 )
> you’ll have to live in the world as it is instead of playing pretend in AI graphics land!
> you’ll be forced to love your wife for who she is and not her AI generated fake persona!
Seriously…?
Apparently this is some dystopia with or without the AI companies banning you from their services, yet somehow the big scary thing is not having open weight models.
The entire tech world needs to get a grip on reality, like the fact that this random Twitter fanfic gained any traction at all on this site is a massive indictment of the quality of discourse here.
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Imagine a future where the AI can figure out the right prompts on its own.
There's no need for banning to make people economically useless, it's the end goal for AI.
open source is the only way to protect your freedom, your economic viability & your ability to tell these companies to fuck right off.
Open Source is economically viable???
And AI feeds on open source???
Am I missing the sarcasm or something? Or perhaps that an AI bot created this post.
I been part of many discussions on how access to the internet should become a fundamental human right, like access to clean water. Maybe at some point we will have a discussion like that about access to AI?
A bit amusing that this is also posted to a centralized social media platform that will also suspend your account for no reason without a functioning appeal process. Unless you're someone famous or well connected, it becomes impossible to restore your account with all these big tech platforms.
AI is the perfect tool of total permanent authorization control, and it seems inevitable at this point between the ample supply of authoritarian wannabes and the fundamentally compromised institutions that would resist them
Not if you have your own TB of fast RAM.
Besides compute, models can also require up-to-date web cache access for referencing information.
That is the subtext of the linked post.
Ahh, so like the smartphone present in many countries where if the US doesn't like you then it's almost impossible to have a normal economic life?
^^^
agreed, and it's a bit disappointing to frame the very real current problem with dependency on us tech with the framework of 'you won't get all the ai magic'
we have an example of the icc judge who has basically been removed from modern society because of ridiculous sanctions, and there was the threat to the UK for sanctions over the mere suggestion that they would be investigating musk and twitter for the actual csam content and deep fake content being produced
any place and anyone that depends on us tech companies or us payment processors are a single social media post from deranged american politicians away from being removed from modern society -- this is a real and present danger, and it's a bit pathetic to frame it as 'you won't get to enjoy the wonders of ai if you get banned'
Had a plumber do a job in my apartment the other day and he came up with a pipe wrench. Assuming he was an owner operator it would be his to do with as he pleases. It's not going to charge him by the job and the company that made it certainly won't take it off him because they don't like the way he's using it. Yet this is the kind of future some are trying to build, where the tool is only available as a subscription from one of two companies, and where owning the tool makes you an enemy of the state.
This is already the reality if you want to run a business servicing some models of car and tractor.
Don't we do that to felons already? They violated the TOS of society, and are categorically banned from a significant portion of the job market.
Felons are afforded due process. If you've ever tried to get support from an AI company you are keenly aware that the experience is the opposite of due process.
How is this different being banned from smartphones, Microsoft accounts, Google accounts, the banking system or whatever?
Technology enables central control. That has been obvious for decades now. AI makes it a bit worse.
This is correct, even just google alone. Most people have their entire lives linked in some way or another to their email address. One ban and you're pretty screwed...
Well now the accounts are tracked with your real biometry which will be more and more common every month thanks to Persona.
And then, when they ban you, you will not be able to create a new account and continue. Every ban will be forever. Like getting on the no-fly list.
For this reason I try not to intermingle accounts. I won't touch good for email or other services because what happens if they decide using an ad blocker on youtube is bannable?
Owning your email accounts with your own domain is just a good idea given the state of things, even if you ultimately just deliver it into Gmail or whoever. It gives you the ability to spend an hour and have all your email appearing with someone else in the event that a companies algorithm goes haywire and cancels your accounts.
I route my own domain email to Gmail and do a regular Google takeout, but even the domain can be taken away if you're naughty.
Amazing how this doesn’t consider a future where “AI” is non-obligatory.
We already live in a future where trying to get a job offline, not using cell phones, or doing business outside approved tech giants makes you a hermit in all but name.
Mandatory AI for society participation is just the next step.
Nothing is obligatory - you can always choose to starve.
Amazing how this considers people will still be needed to direct AIs for something.
With AWS Bedrock, and similar hosted solutions, you can’t be banned directly by the AI companies.
With local models, you can’t be banned.
While employed, you’re using corporate accounts and can’t be banned.
I got banned from AWS once :)
> While employed, you’re using corporate accounts and can’t be banned.
Google/openai/etc detect that you are using your corporate account from the same home where you use your banned account, corporate account get banned for trying to circumvent the ban.
Can you be sure this will never happen ?
It depends how much money you pay Google annually, because that determines your leverage and access with support.
Uhm...enterprise accounts still have terms of service. Violations could get your employer's entire account banned.
It almost definitely won’t. I don’t think I can ever recall a corporate contract getting cancelled by a vendor because of a rogue employee.
They only ever get cancelled over money
I can run a local model on my 5080 that gets 1/8th of the way to where current evil overlord models are capable… are they going to figure out how to ban that too?
If you can work work 1/8 as capably as the next guy, banning isn't necessary.
The company that built your phone can disable it, making it physically useless. It is not hard to imagine the same tech shipping baked into GPUs.
I assume so, yes. With enough lobbying and political pressure I’m sure hardware manufacturers would be willing to only allow vetted models to be loaded. Is it probable? Who the fuck knows what can happen with the current US admin
retroactively?
It’s amazing what can be made legal or illegal.
At the rate things are changing, retroactivity is moot.
> Who the fuck knows what can happen with the current US admin
The ratchet of authoritarianism has been turning steadily in the US (and the rest of the world) for at least the past 25 years, and a big part of why no coherent opposition to it managed to manifest is how it was turned into a partisan issue. Republicans and the apathetic centre tune out Democratic complaints about the authoritarianism of a Republican administration just as it happened when the party associations were reversed some 5 years ago, because a group resenting its outgroup wielding power is the most unsurprising dog-bites-man event.
At the same time, neither side is willing to criticise authoritarianism by their own, both because they do not want to "stab their soldiers in the back" in the culture war and because in practical terms more power to wield against the outgroup is too useful to forego. Would you still be happy to support a durable circumscription of the current US admin's ability to regulate local AI, if it also meant that no future Democratic administration could interfere with a cataclysmic AI-driven campaign of right-wing misinformation and propaganda that is threatening everything you hold dear?
Right but one side publicly directs the department of justice to investigate its political enemies and interfere in elections and the other side doesn't.
We're doing an interesting study where we interview folks who were in a coma for 5~ years and only woke up recently.
Would you be interested to join?
Lawfare has been an increasing problem for several administrations now. Like the parent poster says, each side is largely blind to their own abuses, but they're still abuses.
And then the other side uses it as justification to escalate further.
What sort of lawfare did the previous regime engage in? Are we at a point where former presidents are immune to prosecution for actual crimes?
Using the word lawfare reveals you are not unbiased.
This must be satire. There's no way you actually think that using the word "lawfare" exposes political bias.
I've mainly seen the word used in suspiciously bot-like GOP-propaganda comments on youtube videos
You don't have to imagine it, it's already happened when a teenage son talking to Gemini on the family iPad managed to get his entire family and all their business accounts banned from all Google services:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3104521/teenagers-gemini-mis...
So all this time the China Social Credit Score meme was just a prophecy for the US.
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> It only makes Google look unprofessional and paranoid
Yet, the stock ticker kept on rising after the incident.
> we’re the guys who defeated them
Are you?
You personally were one of the guys that defeated the nazis?
How about the current leader of America, was he one of the guys that defeated them?
You shouldn't even coast on your own success, but you definitely can't coast on the success of people who are not you, much less do so nearly a century later.
People who never had speech what? No one would agree with banning people for their private speech in Europe.