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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

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nerdponx

Time to start including deliberate bugs. The correct version is in a private repository.

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And what purpose would this serve, exactly?

Spite.

They used to do this with maps - eg. fake islands - to pick up when they were copied.

while I think this is a fun idea -- we are in such a dystopian timeline that I fear you will end up being prosecuted under a digital equivalent of various laws like "why did you attack the intruder instead of fleeing" or "you can't simply remove a squatter because its your house, therefore you get an assault charge."

A kind of "they found this code, therefore you have a duty not to poison their model as they take it." Meanwhile if I scrape a website and discover data I'm not supposed to see (e.g. bank details being publicly visible) then I will go to jail for pointing it out. :(

Look, I get the fantasy of someday pulling out my musket^W ar15 and rushing downstairs to blow away my wife^W an evil intruder, but, like, we live in a society. And it has a lot of benefits, but it does mean you don't get to be "king of your castle" any more.

Living in a country with hundreds of millions of other civilians or a city with tens of thousands means compromising what you're allowed to do when it affects other people.

There's a reason we have attractive nuisance laws and you aren't allowed to put a slide on your yard that electrocutes anyone who touches it.

None of this, of course, applies to "poisoning" llms, that's whatever. But all your examples involved actual humans being attacked, not some database.

Thanks that was the term I was looking for "attractive nuisance". I wouldn't be surprised if a tech company could make that case -- this user caused us tangible harm and cost (training, poisoned models) and left their data out for us to consume. Its the equivalent of putting poison candy on a park table your honor!

That reminds me of the protagonist of Charles Stross's novel "Accelerando", a prolific inventor who is accused by the IRS to have caused millions of losses because he releases all his ideas in the public domain instead of profiting from them and paying taxes on such profits.

I think if we're at the point where posting deliberate mistakes to poison training data is considered a crime, we would be far far far down the path of authoritarian corporate regulatory capture, much farther than we are now (fortunately).

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