We learned this lesson in the 90s: If you put something on the (public) Internet, assume it will be scraped (and copied and used in various ways without your consent). If you don’t want that, don’t put it on the Internet.

There’s all sorts of clever things you can do to prevent scraping but none of them are 100% effective and all have negative tradeoffs.

For reference, the big AI players aren’t scraping the Internet to train their LLMs anymore. That creates too many problems, not the least of which is making yourself vulnerable to poisoning. If an AI is scraping your content at this point it’s either amateurs or they’re just indexing it like Google would (or both) so the AI knows where to find it without having to rely on 3rd parties like Google.

Remember: Scraping the Internet is everyone’s right. Trying to stop it is futile and only benefits the biggest of the big search engines/companies.

It’s not a shame. Have you tried this? Try it now! It only takes a minute.

Test a bunch of images against ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Ask it if the image was AI-generated. I think you’ll be surprised.

Gemini is the current king of that sort of image analysis but the others should do well too.

What do you think the experts use? LOL! They’re going to run an image through the same exact process that the chatbots would use plus some additional steps if they didn’t find anything obvious on the first pass.

I don’t think it’s irresponsible to suggest to readers that they can use an AI chatbot to examine any given image to see if it was AI-generated. Even the lowest-performing multi-model chatbots (e.g. Grok and ChatGPT) can do that pretty effectively.

Also: Why stop at one? Try a whole bunch! Especially if you’re a reporter working for the BBC!

It’s not like they give an answer, “yes: Definitely fake” or “no: Definitely real.” They will analyze the image and give you some information about it such as tell-tale signs that an image could have been faked.

But why speculate? Try it right fucking now: Ask ChatGPT or Gemini (the current king at such things BTW… For the next month at least hahaha) if any given image is fake. It only takes a minute or two to test it out with a bunch of images!

Then come back and tell us that’s irresponsible with some screenshots demonstrating why.

Or like isn’t the UK the most surveiled country with their camera system?

Ahahah! That’s a good one!

You think all those cameras are accessible to everyone or even the municipal authorities? Think again!

All those cameras are mostly useless—even for law enforcement (the only ones with access). It’s not like anyone is watching them in real time and the recordings—if they even have any—are like any IT request: Open a ticket and wait. How long? I have no idea.

Try it: If you live in the UK, find some camera in a public location and call the police to ask them, “is there an accident at (location camera is directly pointing at)?”

They will ask you all sorts of questions before answering you (just tell them you heard it through the grapevine or something) but ultimately, they will send someone out to investigate because accessing the camera is too much of a pain in the ass.

It’s the same situation here in the US. I know because the UK uses the same damned cameras and recording tech. It sucks! They’re always looking for ways to make it easier to use and every rollout of new software actually makes it harder and more complicated!

How easy is the ticket system at your work? Now throw in dozens of extra government-mandated fields 🤣

Never forget: The UK invented bureaucracy and needles paperwork!

I hope the SCOTUS justices aren’t using 3-strikes-you’re-out ISPs! All it would take is three random DMCA takedown notices and they’d lose Internet.

You jest, but if conservatives have their way, you’ll soon have to verify your ID by uploading a video every time you visit the site (if not logged in). Even for non-adult content!

Because the reason for the ID isn’t to “protect the children” or anything like that. It’s about control. Conservatives want the power to decide what people get to see and ID verification systems are just a small part of that.

Yep! There’s really only ONE operating system that doesn’t do rsync over SSH. Can you guess which one? 😁

BTW: FolderSync does it on Android for free… https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.lite (only OK-ish GUI but it works).

What should be illegal is patents like this!

I just use rsync over ssh via a cron job 🤷

It’s been working fine for over 20 years on all my various PCs.

You know they’re just buildings full of servers, right?

I mean, I’d rather have a data center than some toxic chemical factory or a busy warehouse in my neighborhood. Data centers just… sit there. They use a lot of power and some use a lot of water, but if your region doesn’t have power/water problems it’s not really much of an impact.

A nation’s supercomputing power used to be something people celebrated. Especially one owned and operated by a place like Los Alamos National Laboratory.

This is how the software works:

The business model is hoping that non-professional users will sign up for canva subscriptions in order to take advantage of the AI features. There’s zillions of users like that—far more than the number of professional graphic artists that would pay for this software.

Having a unique password per device is best practices. IoT vendors should be doing that regardless of whether or not they’re giving the end user root.

There’s supposed to be a regulation demanding an IoT “nutrition label” that has that very thing in its list of items. I wonder what happened to that?

Listen, if someone gets physical access to a device in your home that’s connected to your wifi all bets are off. Having a password to gain access via adb is irrelevant. The attack scenario you describe is absurd: If someone’s in a celebrity’s home they’re not going to go after the robot vacuum when the thermostat, tablets, computers, TV, router, access point, etc are right there.

If they’re physically in the home, they’ve already been compromised. The fact that the owner of a device can open it up and gain root is irrelevant.

Furthermore, since they have root they can add a password themselves! Something they can’t do with a lot of other things in their home that they supposedly “own” but don’t have that power (but I’m 100% certain have vulnerabilities).

If I broke into your home, why TF would I carefully take apart your robot vacuum in order to copy your wifi credentials‽

Also, WTF other “secrets” are you storing on your robot vacuum‽

This is not a realistic attack scenario.

NO! It’syour device, you should have root! The fact that the manufacturer gives their product owners root is a good thing, not bad!

I will die on this fucking hill.

Does anyone have the data on the total number of data centers that were being built over time? I’m not convinced that AI is causing that many more data centers to be built. From everything I’ve read, is just that they’re putting more GPUs into them.

WTF? Have you ever been in a data center? They don’t release anything. They just… Sit. And blink lights while server fans blow and cooling systems whir, pumping water throughout.

The cooling systems they use aren’t that different from any office building. They’re just bigger, beefier versions. They don’t use anything super special. The Pfas they’re talking about in this article are the same old shit that’s used in any industrial air conditioner.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that a data center uses 10 times more cooling as an equivalently sized office building. I don’t know about you, but everywhere that I’ve seen data centers, there’s loads and loads of office buildings nearby. Far more than say 10 for every data center.

My point is this: If you’re going to be bitching about pfas and cooling systems, why focus on data centers (or AI, specifically) when there’s all these damned office buildings? Instead, why don’t we talk about work from home policies which would be an actual way to reduce pfas use.

This article… Ugh. It’s like bitching that electric car batteries can catch fire, pretending that regular cars don’t have a much, much higher likelihood of catching fire and there’s several orders of magnitude more of them.

Are Pfas a problem? Yes. Are data centers anywhere near the top 1000 targets for non-trivially reducing their use? No.

Aside: This is just like the articles bitching about data center water use… Data centers recycle their water! They have a great big intake when they’re done being built but then they’re done. They only need trivial amounts of water after that.

Google search: “scientific articles about (whatever)” Then you get tons of ads and irrelevant results.

LLM search: “Find me scientific articles about (whatever)” Then you get just the titles and links (with maybe a short summary).

It’s 100% better and you don’t have to worry about hallucinations since you it’s wasn’t actually trying to find an answer… Just helping you perform a search.

It’s ok: Google and all other ad-supported search is about to go the way of the dinosaur as soon as local AI search catches on. When your own PC runs a search for you, it basically googles on your behalf and you never see those ads.

It’s going to change everything.