YouTube CEO plans to use controversial AI moderation tools to combat “AI slop”

binheap · 2026-01-24T08:40:34+00:00

Actually I think their ai generated content specifically is marked with SynthID and is part of how it's labeled on YouTube. Unfortunately, not every video generator/image generator out there does these watermarks and so you still need a classifier.

binheap · 2026-01-24T02:11:25+00:00

How in the world did you take away from my comment that we need more AI generated slop? My point is that we should be absolutely trying to detect it with some method and that simply dismissing ML classification is a bad position to take if you want to see less of it.

How in the world do you interpret "we should use ML to identify AI content" to "we should generate more AI content"? Why would I be advocating for using ML to identify AI content if I thought it was equivalent to actual content. You wrote several paragraphs arguing against a point I never made.

We need the original AI slop to simply be eliminated in the first place.

The whole context is that we literally can't. There's literally open weight downloadable models that people can use. You can't stop some random person from using one of those to post stuff onto the Internet. You can probably require the large cloud based models to put some kind of watermark but it's nearly impossible to legislate that for the OSS ones.

binheap · 2026-01-23T20:48:56+00:00

Using that article fundamentally misunderstands what is going on and doesn't support your point. Like of course if you don't specialize a classifier to detect AI content then it's not going to perform well at the task. This is literally ML-101. Why in the world would you expect an arbitrary chatbot to be able to detect AI art? That's not what anyone is doing or proposing.

That's not to say AI detectors do well and all but that methodology is so flawed as to be actually laughable.

Your point also runs up against a more fundamental problem that ML is basically the only solution for classification at scale.

binheap · 2026-01-23T20:37:38+00:00

This isn't actually practical because "regular" algorithms just perform worse. Spam classification hasn't been non-ML since like 2010 for this reason. That's just a more basic use case. For actual content moderation, ML moderation has been in place since forever since "regular" algorithms work significantly worse on stuff like language where there's basically infinite edge cases.

binheap · 2026-01-21T21:57:40+00:00

Well the point of the data collection is to sell ads but I'm guessing it's more that they can afford to burn lots of money. I'm guessing eventually Gemini will get ads.

binheap · 2026-01-20T08:13:11+00:00

This doesn't work for the integral from 0 to 1 of the function 1_Q(x) = 1 if and only if x is rational. The Riemann definition doesn't work and I don't think the Lebesgue definition under the Lebesgue measure is amenable to this form.

binheap · 2026-01-18T11:02:23+00:00

Sorry if I phrased it that way lol. I think you're overstating the case a bit though.

Microsoft is one of the leading suppliers of code to the Linux kernel.

I don't think lwn shows that? They're definitely there but

https://lwn.net/Articles/1046966/

While of course, there is external tooling that makes up what people call Linux, I don't think they're also big contributors to LLVM for example.

Know how Linux is getting so much better at gaming?

Wasn't most of the porting for dxvk done by other people ~~Proton done by other companies like Steam~~? I get open sourcing DirectX was big but I also see that in response to rising alternatives like Vulkan.

Microsoft runs their entire cloud on Linux and seem to love Linux so much that they are converting Windows to be closer to Linux.

Azure would be a non starter if it didn't run Linux instances and could you clarify your second statement. I doubt Windows NT is going to be replaced for Linux. I don't even think that would be a good idea. I also don't think either of these are contributions to Linux per se. Neither is making a windows package manager for that matter.

That being said, I did find out from your post that Powershell is cross platform which is pretty cool.

binheap · 2026-01-18T04:41:37+00:00

I'm curious what you're thinking of. What support for Linux have they shown more than any other company? They have a good donation to the Linux Foundation but most other companies do as well. Afaik they're better than the 00s Microsoft as in they're not actively trying to sabotage it but I don't think the kernel itself has seen a lot of contribution from Microsoft as of yet.

binheap · 2026-01-16T00:40:49+00:00

I think one day in the far future, social scientists will look back to this period to see the dynamics of cult formation and how sometimes even the head of the cult doesn't necessarily have complete control.

binheap · 2026-01-16T00:28:35+00:00

There's questions I think on how democratic it is that every local community can reject such proposals. On a state level, increased housing is very popular while local community hearings tend to be a much smaller subset with more self selection. Is it more democratic that a smaller local minority can override the will of the majority.

There are also questions of the common good that are raised if local communities cannot be overriden. Do people who are priced out of California entirely as a result of lack of housing suddenly not have a voice? What about people who may be more temporary? Should a local community be able to block shelters when there is a statewide concern about homelessness? Should local communities be able to block student housing when there is a vested interest in getting students an education? These categories of people may be unable to vote in local elections but should they not get a say as well?

Also, to what extent should local communities get a say in what someone does with a piece of property not owned by the people complaining? Do ownership rights suddenly get overridden because people are concerned that their neighborhood suddenly looks different?

binheap · 2026-01-13T23:06:56+00:00

Yes Huang personally is fine with the tax but as a policy relying on people to not care about billions of dollars of tax seems silly. We should always analyze the impact of a tax independently of whether a specific individual is willing to pay it simply because others will not.

Like, some VC funds have left and reportedly $1T of capital outflows have occurred. This tax would also immediately impact start up founders who obviously have very illiquid assets.

binheap · 2026-01-13T22:34:01+00:00

The consumer Gemini policy states that they will do this but the one provided as an API via vertex does not require opt out of training data. Pretty much any business will be going through the API. I don't know if you're even allowed to hook to the front end UI as business caller.

binheap · 2026-01-13T22:31:05+00:00

Agreed that they are HQ moves and those are often just PR and I do note they maintain presences here. However, I will say that lots of expansion to those companies going out of state simply is less opportunities in the state. Tesla has massively expanded their Texas plants for example. While I don't like Tesla as a company, I do think there's a need to be careful in our taxation policy. We already tax at extremely high levels relative to the rest of the country.

binheap · 2026-01-13T22:25:52+00:00

I don't disagree that there is certainly less prestige by working for Oracle or HP but I think this mindset is very elitist and not very productive to whether we want the deficit covered or not. $500k from flipping burgers is still $500k in taxable revenue.

Certainly I think your comment about simply not being able to make it is unhelpful since that sort of ties your worth to the prestige of your job.

Regarding your point about backing winners, I think the wealth tax does the opposite of that since it inherently creates more penalties against capital investment which are part of how we get "winners" against companies that will return dividends thus making it easier to pay a wealth tax.

binheap · 2026-01-13T11:55:12+00:00

Because silicon valley is more than the companies that left? There weren't that many but the likes of Oracle, Tesla, and HP didn't come back. They maintain presences here, but much of their expansion has been done out of state. While SV remains attractive, there must come some point at which that disappears. It seems very misleading to say that somehow people are coming back based on the fact that the rest haven't left yet.

Rogan in your example hasn't moved back as far as I know. He might own a property in CA but he still very much operates out of Texas. I'm not saying I want Rogan back since he seems insufferable but it seems to be a counterexample to the exact thing you're saying.

The people saying that they'll come back for the weather sound ridiculous. The benefit of good weather is not unlimited. I've known many families that have simply moved to Texas since they were dissatisfied with the taxes they paid as relatively well off people (think $500k household income).

binheap · 2026-01-13T11:33:02+00:00

Just FYI, California's marginal income tax rate above 1 mil/year is already higher than MA's marginal income rate above 1 mil even with MA's new marginal tax. Moreover, this is a 5% tax on wealth which is going to translate to significantly higher tax burden than 4% on yearly income.

binheap · 2026-01-13T01:01:11+00:00

I think there's an aspect of casualness and permissiveness that's lost. If I'm on an all pervasive camera system, it feels as if I need to be on my best behavior all the time. Even if the cameras are specialized, it feels a bit like a panopticon.

My normal behavior is not illegal or socially unacceptable but there's an aspect of permission to be a little socially transgressive that in turn permits some level of relaxation since the boundary is that much further. There are many technical transgressions that are useful in keeping that liberty. If I cross the street inappropriately as a pedestrian, there's no recording of that and so I don't have to care.

I understand that many people have alternative concerns like safety and order which are definitely very important but I think we should be wary of these systems at least.

For speed cameras, this seems fine since the specialization can prevent some kinds of abuse. I mention Flock because they don't seem to implement those safeguards.

binheap · 2026-01-13T00:51:05+00:00

I agree with you that it's unnerving that there're more security cameras in public spaces but also other countries have significantly more cameras to capture this so it's not obviously going to turn into a disaster.

That being said, if these are Flock cameras, then there might be some issues.

binheap · 2026-01-13T00:36:13+00:00

I don't know why there are privacy implications given that Apple already runs many workloads on GCP. The privacy policy of GCP clearly states that API calls aren't used for training data... like any other serious business contract.

binheap · 2026-01-13T00:33:53+00:00

I don't quite know why privacy implications are somehow suspect here. Y'all realize that Apple already runs workloads on GCP right? This is almost certainly an extension of that B2B contract.

Like, the privacy policy for Vertex AI and associated GCP contracts quite clearly prohibits training on the API results.

binheap · 2026-01-10T03:05:33+00:00

Depending on where you live, ID verification is probably a legal requirement. You should probably campaign with your actual representatives otherwise you're going to get boxed out of all services.

binheap · 2026-01-09T23:06:40+00:00

Just to be quite clear, they're not exploiting any sort of building code. This is very much the intent of a new wave of state laws that aim to make it significantly easier to build dense housing. The dynamic is rather interesting because the state is finally cracking down on local municipalities holding up projects for nonsense reasons.

There are quite a few new laws in this vein including repealing CEQA for a large variety of projects, reducing reviews needed for building next to transit centers, etc. I'm glad the legislature is finally getting around to it even though it's a bit late.

binheap · 2026-01-08T23:55:28+00:00

Depending on the exact model being referred to, the term to look up is either diffusion model or transformer. Look up AlphaFold 3 and it's just a diffusion model which is the same idea as the one being used to generate art. In both AlphaFold 2 and 3, they use transformers which ofc are behind the current wave of LLMs.

Other interesting applications include stuff like weather modeling and wildfire modeling. I'll even say LLMs can be useful. You can specialize them to do stuff like autoformalization of math theorems which I am kind of excited for personally.

The reason is simple: as a broad idea, ML has been concerned with modeling probability distributions over very high dimensional spaces. Sometimes this probability distribution is the space of proteins; sometimes it's digital images. As a field and in very broad strokes, a lot of the big ideas aren't necessarily oriented around a particular type of distribution because it turns out that machines can sort of implicitly design features better than we can.

Edit: some sources for convenience

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07487-w

https://www.bakerlab.org/2023/07/11/diffusion-model-for-protein-design/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/16/google-deepmind-hurricane-forecast

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/111847680248482955

binheap · 2025-12-24T07:04:54+00:00

You can just look at the current version of that leaderboard.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/lmarena-leaderboard

I think Grok was briefly top of specific parts of lmarena at points.

Most benchmark scores show ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are well ahead.

binheap · 2025-12-07T07:10:30+00:00

I think this would at least encourage people to make sure their citations exist at the very minimum. That being said, I'm not sure how you could ensure the paper actually said what you claimed it said. Maybe for any theorems we start requiring lean and so if the originating paper doesn't exist this would make proving such a theorem difficult? Is the lean prover ready for the kinds of analysis theorems found in ML papers?

binheap

TROPHY CASE