Post by @JulianOliver@mastodon.social

Perplexing piece from the author of a new book

Indeed shaming folk for using AI is unhelpful. Yet the author urges our choices are either to use this very harmful tech to keep up, & so reserving a "seat at the table" to demand control of it, or watch AGI end work & presumably us.

Perhaps my absolutism here, but this smacks of flying to climate change conferences, or nationalising oil giants.

To use big AI is always to support it. It does not matter for what. No 2 ways

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/29/ai-replace-humans

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3Jane Tessier Ashpool

@3janeTA@beige.party yesterday

@JulianOliver I’d like to reduce the demand signal for AI. The companies are obviously drug dealing here and giving out free samples to get people hooked and reinforce their inevitability claim. If public shaming makes people stop using it, so be it.

Julian Oliver

@JulianOliver@mastodon.social yesterday

@3janeTA I'm not sure the public shaming is working so well, at least for many. Shame seems to reliably produce a ravine that once cleaved leaves one side very hard to reach. Just as has been the case with smoking, not masking when sick, etc

3Jane Tessier Ashpool

@3janeTA@beige.party 23 hr. ago

@JulianOliver fair

Julian Oliver

@JulianOliver@mastodon.social yesterday

@3janeTA But yes you are right it is clearly working on some. Restaurants, designers, coders I see it work often.

But then, shame itself becomes the thing to avoid, not all the harm this tech is doing, and so if people can get away with using it undetected, they will. I suspect the LLM dealers know that.

Count Holdem

@CountHoldem@mastodon.social yesterday

@JulianOliver #sheeple

xinniw

@xinniw@post.lurk.org yesterday

@JulianOliver i'm always suspicious when anyone is arguing that we should take claims of potential "ASI" seriously let alone arguing (as Lovely more-or-less does here) that those who are skeptical of so-called "ASI" have dismissed themselves from the conversation...

mishandlingboners

@mishandlingboners@social.vivaldi.net yesterday

@JulianOliver

Yeah I've never understood the general 'don't boycott this just push for regulation!!'

Like.. is that not what boycotting is doing?

It sometimes feels like this message is pushed just to give people a script when someone even mentions boycotting

Julian Oliver

@JulianOliver@mastodon.social yesterday

All for strict regulatory controls of this technology, but as a hard brake, not to the ends of some illusory win/win for industry/society. Goals should include getting it the hell out of our public sectors & militaries, shutting down the crawlers that feed on us all, litigating to reimburse and heal the commons, power off the computationally-grotesque AI factories, and so the industry itself.

Then, we could maybe chat about how to do it right.

Can't have a planet, a commons, and eat them too.

Julian Oliver

@JulianOliver@mastodon.social 2 hr. ago

Thinking about strategies other than shaming, it's the economically precarious that come to mind most. Local tradespeople in my area (outside of a city) proudly displaying genAI logos on their vans & trucks, some with vibed sites they could've perhaps never afforded before before this plague. To me, their use of genAI harms their brand, I'd rather the white stencil spray & a phone call, but it may to them feel like finally attaining quality, rising above. Shaming would seem cruel, even classist.

Julian Oliver

@JulianOliver@mastodon.social 2 hr. ago

And this atop a recent trip to see gravely ill family in the majority world, an economically poor country. AI was celebrated as empowerment, from billboards to TV. Useage was endemic, with small companies, from laundromats to street food vendors, using generic genAI logos, some awful, anglo whitewashed slop. Tuktuks/trikes with genAI ads. Some had sites, clearly vibed.

As a westerner, I read it all as inauthentic, ugly, & only perpetuating the harm they live. I felt they may see it otherwise

Dr. Bruce Simpson

@bms@mastodon.bsd.cafe yesterday

@JulianOliver Yeah kinda bummed that the proposed Merkle-Tree Certificates for WebPKI effectively bake the Certificate Transparency logs which those guys are so obviously mining for new sites to train on given they run the CT audit logs anyway, and that no web browsers support DANE yet to allow that to be side-stepped (yet they're all about DANE for protecting email)

gábor ugray

@twilliability@genart.social 5 hr. ago

@bms @JulianOliver lol i literally don't understand a word of this :D

Dr. Bruce Simpson

@bms@mastodon.bsd.cafe 5 hr. ago

@twilliability @JulianOliver It's all about Internet trust, and how that is realized in terms of cryptography. The current system lets bots and crawlers discover new sites just by looking at CT Logs.

Every time a new web site with a fresh X.509 certificate spins up, as required for TLS security in HTTPS, the CT logs are updated. Nowhere to hide -- the Common Name (CN) field in the cert will disclose the site's address.

This can be mitigated to some extent if you're willing to push certificates to end users of a web site in other ways. DANE pushes some of that to the Domain Name System, relying on DNSSEC as an alternative trust anchor; the TLSA records in DNS which DANE uses specify what to trust, and how to trust.

This has been broadly criticised by many cybersecurity professionals as leading the user and site alike to trust nation state actors due to its DNSSEC dependency, however, that only applies to the ability to sign the records thus served.

The site decides which certificates to present. They need not be logged to CT and can be self-signed; in practice, they often are. It's a trade-off.

Ultimately end-users are railroaded into the WebPKI trust model as it exists today, mostly because of control of the web browser space.

Although browser extensions from NIC.CZ for example were published in the early 2010s showing that Chromium and Firefox derived browsers alike could use DANE for web site HTTPS trust chains, they are badly bitrotted and unusable now.

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Dan Stowell

@danstowell@mastodon.social yesterday

@JulianOliver there's diverse crappy logic in that article, multiple instances. Eg the analogy between using social media to advocate, and using genAI to [unspecified]. Handy, it makes it an easy decision to ignore that author in future