For others who, like me, didn't know what "clankers" are: it appears it's a popular derogatory term for robots or AI, arising from the Star Wars universe where clone troopers used the term as a derogatory term for droids.
I find the term a bit confusing as it's common use in my experience are folks who only vaguely have an idea what AI is. Not to say their concerns are wrong (very generally) but it's usage doesn't usually convey much knowledge about the topic. It conveys more passion and drama than sense in my experience.
The word clanker has been previously used in science fiction literature, first appearing in a 1958 article by William Tenn in which he uses it to describe robots from science fiction films like Metropolis.[2]
He actually taught science fiction and had lots of interesting stories of the classic era of scifi, like BEM's - a bug-eyed-monster, arms wrapped around a woman in s "brass brassiere".
hmmm.. which now I realize explains "the flat eyed monster"...
For everyone scratching their heads, this is a reference to a related series of articles on the SCP wiki around the concept of fighting against memetic dangers in the Dawkins version of meme, not just silly jokes.
Searching for this sentence verbatim would find you it
“I don’t think this kind of thing [satire] has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, ‘We need satire of them, not of us.’ I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.” - Tom Lehrer
Completely off topic, but related to your post, I came across this recently, which does a good job describing how ineffective criticism/satire is at stopping people who don’t care.
“During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in -- and which we lost -- every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high. (laughs)”
I’m glad that standards bodies are supporting this. Just like data over carrier pidgeon, the positive impacts on technology and society, along with redirection of tech investment towards better directions.
Seems as it would be easier to slip in some anti-training, and have the AIs screw systems up so badly that there is a 'recall' of all the current models. The LLMs and their corresponding systems crawl the web constantly. So, poison the well. Good data behind paywalls and credentialing and the poison pill open and free. Seems like it'd be worth a try anyway.
consider how many in our current administration are entirely completely ill-equipped for their positions. many of them almost certainly rely on llms for even basic shit.
considering how many of these people try to make up for their … inexperience by asking a chatbot to make even basic decisions, poisoning the well would almost certainly cause very real very serious national or even international consequences.
i mean if we had people who were actually equipped for their jobs, it could be hilarious to do. they wouldn’t be nearly as likely to fall for entirely wrong absurd answers. but in our current reality it could actually lead to a nightmare.
i mean that genuinely. many many many people in this current government would -in actuality- fall for the wildest simplest dumbest information poisoning and that terrifies me.
“yes, glue on your pizza will stop the cheese from sliding off” only with actual real consequences.
Whoops. Looks like my blog published a bit earlier than expected.
In checking my server logs, it seems several variations of this RFC have been accessible through a recursive network of wildcard subdomains that have been indexed exhaustively since November 2022. Sorry about that!
For those of us who are particularly slow: care to cheekily hint at whether this is sincerely intended as satire or not...? In other words, first-order or second-order?
First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI, but then a bit later you include the RFC that unintentionally bans everything from Jinja templates to the vague concept of generative grammar (and thus, of course, all programming), which seems like second-order parody.
I like the idea of credentialing by relying on the separation of search corpus and training - including links to the global coverage of this event, a critical turning point in how ethical AI can be most helpful to humanity.
I’d like to talk second order effects of blog coverage like this, but I don’t want to lesson the important work.. Thanks for the fun read.
i agree, sounds strange and like something that should have never caught on at all.
the moral argument of this being a derogatory term aside, it doesn't even seem to capture that well and sounds so out of place. another that comes to mind is "toasters" from Battlestar Gallactica. both terms to me just feel weird and "written".
Maybe you're in different circles than me, but the term clankers is very well known at this point in all my groups, including non tech adjacent people.
Everyone makes jokes about clankers and it's caught on like wildfire.
I'm on the phone with Merriam-Webster right now to let them know that internet user aldousd666 thinks it's a conspiracy. We're pulling a team together and sending investigators to your house. You are scheduled for "Good Morning America" in seven hours.
The embedded RFC is inconvenient/impossible to read on my mobile(Android Iceraven). Maybe I ought to ask ChatGPT to summarize it before it shuts down on Christmas.
I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.
I'm honestly kind of surprised there haven't been significant large-scale attempts to well-poison LLMs with certain viewpoints/beliefs/whatever. Maybe we just haven't caught them.
There was a proof-of-concept paper about buying up expired domains in the LAION image dataset and poisoning multimodal LLMs that way (then LAION was just a list of image URLs). As I understand it, the paper was exaggerating its reach, and LAION has newer versions, torrents, etc.
This is neither satire, fiction, nor political commentary. Those would not meet ycombinator submission guidelines.
There’s something deeper being demonstrated here, but thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers. Feel free to ask Gemini about the blog though.
The word "clanker" is interesting to me in how it anthropomorphizes AI to the point that when I hear it, it makes me confuse it with a person. For a word that is supposed to be mocking of AI, the fact that it actually humanizes AI is very disturbing.
Does anyone else find it just a little disturbing how hard a certain subset of the population is leaning into this? Like they've finally found a group of people that they're allowed to hate. And let's be clear here, they're personifying this tech. Nobody bothers to hate a word processor or a 3D printer.
They're not people. You're allowed to hate spyware, spamware, MS Word and PC LOAD LETTER. You absolutely should hate technology that makes your life worse.
Have you never seen the scene in Office Space with the rap and the baseball bat and an office printer?
Like, no, hating machinery is as old as Ludd at least. I guarantee Grug back in the cave days was trying to convince his cavemates that "weaving is an abomination and we should just carry everything with our hands"
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 87.7 ms ] threadMaybe that will change.
The word clanker has been previously used in science fiction literature, first appearing in a 1958 article by William Tenn in which he uses it to describe robots from science fiction films like Metropolis.[2]
He actually taught science fiction and had lots of interesting stories of the classic era of scifi, like BEM's - a bug-eyed-monster, arms wrapped around a woman in s "brass brassiere".
hmmm.. which now I realize explains "the flat eyed monster"...
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781476780986/9781476780986___...
Searching for this sentence verbatim would find you it
“During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in -- and which we lost -- every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high. (laughs)”
-Kurt Vonnegut (https://www.alternet.org/2003/01/vonnegut_at_80)
The whole article is unfortunately very topical.
consider how many in our current administration are entirely completely ill-equipped for their positions. many of them almost certainly rely on llms for even basic shit.
considering how many of these people try to make up for their … inexperience by asking a chatbot to make even basic decisions, poisoning the well would almost certainly cause very real very serious national or even international consequences.
i mean if we had people who were actually equipped for their jobs, it could be hilarious to do. they wouldn’t be nearly as likely to fall for entirely wrong absurd answers. but in our current reality it could actually lead to a nightmare.
i mean that genuinely. many many many people in this current government would -in actuality- fall for the wildest simplest dumbest information poisoning and that terrifies me.
“yes, glue on your pizza will stop the cheese from sliding off” only with actual real consequences.
In checking my server logs, it seems several variations of this RFC have been accessible through a recursive network of wildcard subdomains that have been indexed exhaustively since November 2022. Sorry about that!
First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI, but then a bit later you include the RFC that unintentionally bans everything from Jinja templates to the vague concept of generative grammar (and thus, of course, all programming), which seems like second-order parody.
Am I overthinking it?
The blog post seemed so confident it was Christmas :)
I’d like to talk second order effects of blog coverage like this, but I don’t want to lesson the important work.. Thanks for the fun read.
If only there was as much outrage against racial slurs.
Everyone makes jokes about clankers and it's caught on like wildfire.
The term clanker is used very frequently on social media as well as different chat tools, especially as responses to obvious AI Agents and Bots.
It also tends to be the one folks who do not really like ai use. I've been using it because it is a lot more fun, and faster, than saying llms.
Satire should at least be somewhat plausible
There’s something deeper being demonstrated here, but thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers. Feel free to ask Gemini about the blog though.
These people seem to hate AI the way you'd despise a person.
Like, no, hating machinery is as old as Ludd at least. I guarantee Grug back in the cave days was trying to convince his cavemates that "weaving is an abomination and we should just carry everything with our hands"