Bots flooding GC

[cheerfulgreek]

Is that what happens? The more interesting the site, the more bots that show? I don’t understand what they collect and the importance of what they collect. And then where does what they collect go?

[John]

Originally Posted by carnation

Can they be blocked?

Usually, yes. But not always. Depends on how determined the bot/spider operators are.

I rerouted these particular bots in a way which should minimize their impact on GC. Similar to what I did with the bots from approx 2 weeks ago.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

Is that what happens? The more interesting the site, the more bots that show?

Yes, that's pretty much how it goes as far as I know. At least with search engine type bots as search engines want to direct their users to interesting & useful sites.

GoogleBot is a good example of a beneficial bot as that bot indexes sites & helps increase listings in search which might result in more new website visitors.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

I don’t understand what they collect and the importance of what they collect.

The bots from Bytedance / TikTok seem to be AI data scraper bots. But might also be search engine related as well.

They might be training AI / artificial intelligence chatbots using conversations that they scrape from forums all throughout the Internet.

Around a decade ago the world entered a new era of AI. Way back in the day one way AI was made was with programmers creating decision trees to determine what to do depending on different scenarios and that would be many levels deep. Modern AI doesn't do that. Instead, modern AI gives the engine, the neural network, as much labeled data as possible which the AI trains on in order to recognize patterns within the data. The AI is trained & tested over and over, repeatedly. Constantly refining, tweaking the neural net while continually improving accuracy. AI recognizing patterns in images is a good example of this type of training.

With GC being text based conversations, AI data scraping on that is likely to be for training AI language models. Basically very sophisticated chatbots. Similar to ChatGPT if you're familiar with that. Huge amounts of data, as much as possible, is used in training these AIs.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

And then where does what they collect go?

My guess is that if used for training AI, the data is refined and is used for training AI now and maybe even in the future. Could be one giant combined dataset of many different online forum discussions that they continually add to & improve. All that data may be used for training AI, but might never actually be seen by anyone other than the AI researchers and/or data engineers working on it.

[cheerfulgreek]

Based on your post, John, it sounds like bots will be the reason for a future AI takeover. I mean, with the information they’re getting, it’s eventually going to be used for AI in everything. That’s the way it reads.

[John]

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

Based on your post, John, it sounds like bots will be the reason for a future AI takeover. I mean, with the information they’re getting, it’s eventually going to be used for AI in everything. That’s the way it reads.

I'd probably blame the future AI takeover more on math & programming in general. Modern AI probably boils down to highly accurate pattern matching that is enabled by complex math & statistics. Programming enables it to be automated and fast.

But it does need lots of data for training, so bots are a part of it.

Modern AI is such a revolutionary advancement that any businesses (or governments) that can benefit from it need to adopt it or eventually they will be surpassed. The disruption will be similar, probably more significant, to when the Internet started being commercialized and ecommerce was disrupting businesses in all different industries.

[cheerfulgreek]

Originally Posted by John

I'd probably blame the future AI takeover more on math & programming in general. Modern AI probably boils down to highly accurate pattern matching that is enabled by complex math & statistics. Programming enables it to be automated and fast.

But it does need lots of data for training, so bots are a part of it.

Modern AI is such a revolutionary advancement that any businesses (or governments) that can benefit from it need to adopt it or eventually they will be surpassed. The disruption will be similar, probably more significant, to when the Internet started being commercialized and ecommerce was disrupting businesses in all different industries.

Yep. I totally get that AI is going to be big business, if it isn’t already. It’s just that the possibilities for future AI systems are limited by what we currently know about the nature of intelligence. And then, I think it’s going to be a huge mess, because based on the way I see things happening with AI, it seems like all evidence suggests that human and machine intelligence are radically different. Know what I mean? Don’t you think it will be more problematic than beneficial, based on that? I mean, you’d know better than me, but I just don’t see the benefits.

[John]

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

AI systems are limited by what we currently know about the nature of intelligence

I think "AI" might be more correctly referred to as "APM" / "artificial pattern matching." AI systems aren't "intelligent" but they can in many ways now replicate the patterns of intelligence well enough to convince us of AI "intelligence" and that ability/feature of AI will certainly improve in the future. Future AI will be so good at doing that most people will likely believe that what they are seeing is actual intelligence when it's just pattern matching.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

seems like all evidence suggests that human and machine intelligence are radically different

In regards to how the brain does what it does and how AI does what it does I would probably agree that it's radically different. But the end result I think is quite similar. Humans, as far as I understand, do much of our learning based on patterns that we perceive with new or more complicated learning often or usually based on the patterns that we previously perceived. That is very similar to AI in that AI is an extremely sophisticated pattern matching calculator, in a sense.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

Don’t you think it will be more problematic than beneficial, based on that?

Great question. Probably both more problematic and more beneficial. But I'm not sure which one will be more significant.

I guess in comparing possible end results... AI could make life significantly better, more productive, more advancement, more efficient, more possibilities, etc. But future AI could also result in disaster, or maybe be used by people in order to cause a disaster scenario. So from that perspective, maybe AI will be more problematic because of the potential for serious harm.

But that cat is out of the bag, no going back in. Even if it's regulated it's probably too late. Those who are regulated from developing new AI will simply be those who lose out to the people who take advantage of the technology.

Consider Google's AI AlphaGo beating world master champions in the game of Go. AlphaGo was trained based on actual games between people. Then Google AI devs went and made AlphaGo Zero which was given the rules of Go and trained itself, basically played itself for a period of time and learned to master the game that way. AlphaGo Zero defeated AlphaGo significantly. I think at first it was just by a relatively small margin, then after some changes AlphaGo Zero won 100% against AlphaGo. I don't know the exact history of it, but it was something like that.

So that was a game that an AI mastered versus people and another AI completely defeated the first AI.

Consider that the military has war "games" for training & analyzing scenarios, etc. The US military not only should be using AI, they must be. They have to. Because if they are not and an enemy or future potential enemy develops AI that can defeat all the human military war game "players," like the AIs in the actual game Go, the side that does not have that advantage probably loses. And it might be that the government which reaches AI superiority first is the one that wins it all.

Then there are governments that will use massive data collection & AI training/development against their own people.

Lots of great benefits but also lots of very serious potential problems.

[cheerfulgreek]

^^^ Oh wow! I didn’t look at it from any of the perspectives you’re looking at it from, John. So true, and you make a lot of sense. I think greed will be the downfall of it, though. I mean, for like the other side of the benefits. The bad side. It’s just that a lot of companies now launch AI teams because they’re afraid of falling behind other companies/competitors, without fully knowing where or for what purpose they’ll use AI. And then too, a lot of companies pretend to use AI when they don’t, just to increase their chances of obtaining funding. That’s the greed part. That’s the part I think will get worse. There’s like also a fair amount of general confusion about what AI can and can’t do.

What’s interesting though is that we now use it a lot, daily, sometimes without even realizing it. Do you think it can or will get out of control? I mean, right now AI is completely under human control, but in the future, it might not be under our control anymore. Seems like eventually every single task is going to be done by AI.