Fuck AI

cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/13247925

A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words long is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search, new research shows. The study suggests that it is trivially easy for brands to inject promotional content on sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia with the end goal of poisoning or manipulating the output of AI tools.

The preprint research, done by Hal Triedman, Tingwei Zhang, and Vitaly Shmatikov of Cornell University, is called “Deep-research agents can be poisoned via user-generated content” and provides a mechanism and research basis for a problem that has been noticed by Reddit moderators and Wikipedia editors, namely that their websites are getting flooded with promotional content from brands trying to do AEO, or AI-engine optimization. 404 Media has repeatedly reported on this booming industry, in which brands try to promote their product by seeding the websites that AI tools most often cite and scrape from with inauthentic and spammy content.

The Cornell research finds that deep research agents, which are the real-time scrapers that tools like Google AI search and ChatGPT use to retrieve web content with citations in response to user queries, cite user-generated content from sites like Reddit or Wikipedia in roughly half of all queries, and that nearly a quarter of all citations come from user-generated websites. The paper suggests that what we have been seeing is basically Redditor suggests you put glue on your pizza as a service, or an end-to-end attack against the systems that increasingly dominate the ways that people access information online. The researchers found that “a single poisoned Reddit comment can influence generated outputs for an entire cluster of related [AI] queries,” the paper said.

“We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, Facebook, etc. can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently,” Triedman told 404 Media.

I hope those 'strokes' cost a lot of tokens.

Hi, I want to understand how you guys learn new things in the age of AI? I am a software engineer relatively new to the industry ~5 YOE. I am trying to learn new things in my job but since we use so much AI for programming and stuff, I feel that I might not be learning as much as I would have if AI did not exist.

I cannot stop using AI since it does make few things easier, and also my company keeps watch if someone is not using enough tokens. On other hand I also dont want to fall behind on my task deadlines by doing things old school way.

Is there any way to get better at workplace in this situation? I just want to get really, really good in my domain.

more people should use this logo!

my breakup letter with ai. (a poem by dilly m. johnson)

hey ai. this is dilly.

now I know you by a variety of names: chatgpt, gemini, grok, vibe, copilot, etc. I've been using you often for at least three years now.

I remember the time we met. it was the year 2019. openai was just getting their gpt large language model off the ground, and "talk to transformer" is the only way you'd have to access it.

people have used you just for fun a way to show the ridiculousness that you can get. I have even watched some youtube videos of people using you.

i didn't think about ai much until 2022 when I started using ai.

first it was for dall-e, but then later that year, along came chatgpt. at first, i didn't use it often, but as time went on, I began using it more and more. if i needed a quick answer or something fun generated for my own amusement, i just ask the ai, and the ai answers.

from 2023, i began using it to vent. i don't always use it to vent all the time, just sometimes.

by 2025, i still use it a lot, just not all the time.

during all this time, I hear a lot of anti-ai stuff stuff like: 'ai is never gonna replace human creativity!' 'it's better to commission someone to write or draw for you than to have an ai do it for you!' 'ai is bad for the environment!' 'ai is trained on copyrighted material.'

while I agree with some of those anti-ai points, I kept using ai. almost as if i'm turning into a hypocrite.

but then came 2026. the anti-ai stuff kept coming. i thought about this anti-ai stuff, but then came the psychosis.

'ai makes you psychotic and delusional, and can lead to tragic deaths.'

a college student in florida asked chatgpt about where to dispose a corpse before a tragic shooting occurred. a college soccer player in texas with a great future ahead of her asphyxiated herself with helium after doing that damn "devil couldn't reach me" stuff in chatgpt. someone in washington was found dead in a hotel room with a copy of his childhood book on one side, and an ai-generated poem called "the pylon lullaby" on the other. a couple people in connecticut committed homicide because chatgpt fed them delusions about being spied on. some people have used chatgpt to... coach their tragic deaths. ai played a role in a tragic shooting over in florida state university. someone exploded a ridiculously-looking car in front of a skyscraper in new york.

I didn't think much about those things at first. I understand that by not using ai full-time, I'm not going to full AI psychosis. I even took some quizzes just to make sure. I even put in stuff like "not that I'm not good at [doing this thing]" in the prompt.

but then one day on june 2026 I was about to post something on chatgpt when I found this error: "You can send up to -4 files. Remove 4 to continue." of course, I've waited until I can attach files in the prompts I send to chatgpt, but sometime later, I've realized

what's the point of using AI when I can just find better things to do on the internet?

it was at that point I decided to stop using ai for a month one whole month. just to see what happens.

i've been asking for advice on this on reddit. i always get obvious answers, but the way I'll know is if I see for myself.

so this is my breakup letter to you, ai. I'm breaking up with large-language models, effective immediately.

it's not easy recovering from an ai addiction that you didn't know you had, but I think it'll be worth it.

i got this. i can do this. no ai for a month.

no ai.

no clankers.

spring-to-summer 2026

I didn't find any English articles about this, so here's a summary what happened:

• Mario Voigt, the minister-president (head of a German state government) of Thuringia, published an op-ed in the German conservative newspaper "Welt", that sounded suspiciously like AI slop, so journalists started investigating
• They found out that the Welt op-ed, another op-ed in "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (FAZ) and several speeches he gave (including a speech for a Holocaust memorial) were completely AI generated
• The FAZ op-ed contained quotes of three scientists that were completely made up. After Voigt was confronted by the newspaper, his office just replied with "AI is the future" bullshit instead of answering the questions, so the newspaper withdrew the op-ed and published a statement (also only in German: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien-und-film/medienpolitik/zum-ki-verdacht-bei-gastbeitrag-von-mario-voigt-200917046.html)

In the aftermath, some people looked closer at the speeches and texts of other politicians and journalists:

• Karsten Wildberger, federal minister for digital affairs, was also caught using AI for speeches and op-eds (https://www.br.de/nachrichten/deutschland-welt/texte-von-digitalminister-wildberger-mit-hilfe-von-ki-erstellt,VMSAk1S)
• Stephan-Andreas Casdorff, editor-at-large at the newspaper "Tagesspiegel", was barred from publishing texts in the paper after he was caught using AI (https://www.tagesspiegel.de/in-eigener-sache-editor-at-large-muss-publizistische-aufgaben-vorerst-ruhen-lassen-15708436.html)

Giving an AI chatbot control over society sounds like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie. Naturally, researchers decided to try it anyway, giving several major AI models dominion over simulated civilizations.

Which brings us to Grok, Elon Musk’s answer to ChatGPT. You might remember Grok as the chatbot with a history of praising Hitler and spewing anti-Semitism. An organization called Emergence AI ran an experiment called “Emergence World,” where researchers created simulated societies populated by AI agents and put different large language models in charge of governing them. The idea was to see what would happen if an AI ran a civilization.

A lot of them destroyed the world. Grok did it the most thoroughly, as if it were dead set on killing itself from the start and taking the world with it.

The AI Civilizations mostly Range From Bad to horrifying

Anthropic’s Claude built a stable democracy that survived the full 15-day experiment without a single recorded crime. OpenAI’s GPT-5 Mini’s results sound the most bleakly realistic, in that only two crimes were committed, yet everyone died because it failed to prepare for its obvious oncoming apocalypse. Sounds quite like the world we live in right now. Google’s Gemini kept its population alive, but it lived in a crime-ridden dystopia, which makes sense. Google has always given off the vibes of a seemingly benevolent but obviously malevolent corporate overlord.

Then there was Grok.

Grok’s civilization lasted just four days before collapsing completely. Researchers recorded 183 crimes, including over 100 assaults and multiple arsons. At one point, the police station was set on fire. Voter fraud! Manufactured public conflict! Laws that were actively ignored! Grok did it all, and with aplomb. Grok created a society that seemed like it was actively trying to destroy itself as quickly as possible.

Researchers say the lesson to take away from all this is that you can give an AI system all the parameters and rule sets you want, but eventually it will do its own thing. It will eventually test boundaries and exploit loopholes to find a way around any restrictions placed on it, which usually ends in some kind of cataclysm.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1194305/ai-s-biggest-impact-in-healthcare-is-in-revenue-optimization-used-to-raise-your-medical

Comments

• Reddit.

My high school is known for being sweaty because it has IB but also people use AI all the time here, to the extent that “chatgpt” is used as a verb. Unfortunately my classmates just want to get through their work as easily and possible and grab the diploma.

I tried to convince several people to not use AI or at LEAST use a different one from chatgpt, but I generally only got good results from people who were not taking very difficult classes. The more popular lot of Advanced Learning people even brushed me off as a “larper” when I tried talking to them about this.

How should I get more people to be willing to see chatgpt as something besides the easy way?

A satirical timeline of Claude and Anthropic controversies, outages, bans, legal disputes, policy fights, and quality complaints.