patrick.net

Gout - figure out what triggers it and stop eating it.

Creatives fight back with Nightshade, a new software that “poisons” AI models.

Computer scientists at the University of Chicago have developed two free softwares to combat AI scraping.

Their first software was called Glaze, and it works defensively by confusing AI, showing brush strokes and colors to the programs that aren't actually there, effectively disguising the artists' styles.

The second software is an offensive "poison" for AI programs called Nightshade.

Nightshade shows the data scraping programs images that aren't actually there.

"For example, human eyes might see a shaded image of a cow in a green field largely unchanged, but an AI model might see a large leather purse lying in the grass."

For someone using the AI programs, that means that if Nightshade infected images are scraped into the dataset, prompting AI to generate a cow flying in space, it might generate a purse in space instead.

But paradoxically, the sudden appearance of this new technology is also even more mysterious than it seems, since all artificial intelligence-based technology sprouts from a common large-language model that even the developers admit they do not fully understand...

Maybe I’m wrong. But I cannot believe that an invention as significant as artificial intelligence sprang from some serendipitous lab accident. Post It notes — yes. Rubber — yes. Antibiotics — okay. But not artificial intelligence, which requires millions of lines of computer code to operate. Accidentally discovered? No. Impossible.

So then, where did the ‘spark’ of intelligence come from? Is A.I. demonic, a malicious gift whispered into the ear of some luckless scientist who sold their soul for access? Maybe. But my preferred theory is it was dished out of a DARPA skunkworks lab somewhere, for some sinister military purpose. I don’t know. I just find it utterly remarkable that developers say they don’t really understand how AI works — and everybody is just fine with that!