Have you talked to an artist like a musician, an illustrator or a web designer about AI? It's ripping off their work without credit and making them unemployable.
A lot of them already use AI already, such as for example Photoshop AI features. It also seems to be a bimodal distribution, there are those who use it without caring what anyone else says about it, especially the loud minority, and there are those who don't use it.
> I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization.
I'm not saying that isn't a valid critique, but from 2001 to 2019 so much more of out culture, politics, and protest have shifted to online spaces (for better or worse). Do you think that the EFF just has _more_ to do now because of the shifting needs of our online spaces and the increased governance on them?
I mentioned that interpretation very briefly in my post.
If EFF had continued to be better at political neutrality, I'm sure many observers would have been surprised at times that it declined to take positions on some of the hot issues of the day. That hypothetical reticence could have been interpreted as cowardice or irrelevance, or as saving up political capital to really focus on a smaller number of more fundamental issues.
For example, I have an ill-formed notion that EFF might be more effective in fighting against age verification mandates right now if the organization were seen as less leftist. Among other things, this is because there's one narrative where age verification is something the right wants and the left doesn't. I say "ill-formed" because I haven't been close to this issue and haven't seen exactly how various audiences have parsed it in practice.
The culture war part of this question is how good or bad it is when it's easy for young people to talk to strangers in spaces that aren't overseen by adults (or approved by their parents). I guess forms of this issue are possibly among the most divisive questions in the world.
However, you could also look at questions like online anonymity, privacy, data breaches, competition, ad targeting, decentralization, FOSS, and user control of technology, which are all being impacted by these measures. EFF cares about these things a lot and has cared about them for a long time. I would hypothesize that some of those concerns are now getting dismissed by audiences that think EFF's "true objection" is anti-parental-control and that the other issues are just noise. Again, I haven't been close to this and I'm not positive that this is how it's actually playing out.
To be slightly more (maybe less) fair from an admittedly leftist bias, I think that the example of age verification misses another important component that has been pulled into the culture wars: a lot of age verification laws also target things like sexual education, which in some cases is construed to mean anything that touches on queer identities, even biographies and basic educational material.
The religious right tends to be against all forms of sexual education that aren't based around abstinence and usually want explicit parental involvement, but many on the left feel a basic but complete sexual education is important to educate kids about consent and bodily autonomy, which often helps children recognize things like grooming and assault where other forms of education fail.
Unfortunately that is an emotional topic and quickly gets into an area where classic libertarians (and there doesn't seem to be many left, these days) prioritize parental choice over freedom of speech. The EFF still needs to navigate these issues to be effective, but I don't think the old coalition holds like it used to.
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Unfortunately that is an emotional topic and quickly gets into an area where classic libertarians (and there doesn't seem to be many left, these days) prioritize parental choice over freedom of speech.
Since I don't live in the USA, I might miss some US-specific political nuances, but I would say that
- I am both for freedom of speech and parental choice
- What I am against is control and surveillance by government and big tech - and this is what the age verification discussion is all about.
I didn't claim there is actually a conflict between freedom of speech and parental choice. My point is that libertarians in the US have been manipulated by years of propaganda, to the point where they now side with government control of speech under the guise of parental choice, instead of standing on principle for freedom of speech. That is the problem.
This reads to me like you are putting effort into presenting your car is sick a way that satisfies your version of objectively neutral. I wonder if that is at the expense of details, because your claims provide no specifics for us to weigh independently.
As objective as you may want to sound, without any objective specific facts, all those words just boil down to "I'm a libertarian who used to support the EFF but don't like the way they're message anymore."
I don't understand what you think should happen here. I honestly don't think that the EFF has shifted nearly as much as people have in this hyper partizan environment. The trouble with being "center" is that you get pulled around by the most extreme. The flag is tied to the center of the rope right? If the right pulls away should the EFF compromise their values just to be seen as less leftist?
When being the center is the principle value, you stop being defined by your own values. If you're the flag, you don't get to have a say. One side could hook a tractor up to their end of the rope. The flag has no agency.
Do I think the EFF should have more outreach to the right? Sure. But that outreach can't be: we compromised our principles to chase the moving target loosely defined as "the center" of the moment.
Of course the EFF had more allies on the right during the Obama years. They were suing the Obama administration! There is always going to be a nontrivial amount of tribalism going on. How do you think suing the Trump administration has affected the left? They are eating it up!
No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"
That's the thing: They choose leftist allegiances over their ostensible job. For example, search for "twitter files" on the EFF's Twitter account. Nothing. Blatant government effort to censor people. Zip, zilch, nada.
Now they abandon X that's become more free, and head for Bluesky and Mastodon, which are basically recreations of the stifling atmosphere of pre-Musk Twitter.
Freedom for their favoured people to do what they like, perhaps. But for me and others? Nah, not on the program.
It's obvious to me that EFF should sue every administration. I started working at EFF during the first George W. Bush administration, and I worked there throughout that administration, the Obama administration, and the first Trump administration. EFF sued all of them, I worked on all of those cases, and I supported all of those cases.
As you correctly point out, people who liked each of these administrations were often unhappy when we sued them, and often assumed that we were politically biased against them. I always encountered people who effectively said "my party is using power appropriately for good purposes, and you should not question how we use power; that only helps my opponents". Part of the civil liberties framework and something that EFF has done well (including since the time it's become significantly left-leaning) is questioning how every administration uses power.
So, I'm absolutely not suggesting that EFF should praise or celebrate the Trump administration or not sue it.
> No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"
Because AI is not a search engine. It does not return the best search result every time.
What it considers best, is what occurs most often, which can be the most average answers. Unless the service is tuned for search (perplexity, or google itself for example), others will not provide as complete an answer.
How well we ask can make all the difference. It's like asking a coworker. Providing too little information, or too much context can give different responses.
Try asking the model to not provide it's most common or average answer.
That’s exactly right for global PageRank, which is why I recommended Personalized PageRank specifically.
A cluster of sybil agents endorsing each other has no effect on your trust scores unless they can get endorsements from nodes you already trust.
That’s the whole point of subjective trust metrics, and formally why Cheng and Friedman proved personalized approaches are sybilproof where global ones aren’t.
But you can have genuinely helpful agents in your attack network. Agents that create helpful pages and get linked by other helpful pages but then later link to malicious pages. It all follows when the cost of page creation goes to zero.
That’s a real attack vector and it applies to every reputation system. The standard mitigations are temporal decay, trust revocation, and anomaly detection.
You've obviously not read the 13th amendment...
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