I feel like I woke up in the stupidest timeline where climate change is about to kill us, we decide stupidly to 10x our power needs by shoving LLMs down everyone’s throats, and the only solution to stay private is to 10x our personal LLM usage by generating tons of noise about us just to stay private. So now we’re 100x ing everyone’s power usage and we’re going to die even sooner.

I think your idea is interesting – I was also thinking that same thing awhile back – but how tf did we get here.

It’s a good idea in theory, but it’s a challenging concept to have to explain to immigration officials at the airport.

In a different direction now is a good time to start looking at how local AI can liberate us from big tech.

This is like chaff, and I think it would work. But you would have to deal with the fact that whatever patterns it was showing you were doing “you would be doing”.

I think there are other ways that AI can be used for privacy.

For example, did you know that you can be identified by how you type/speak online? what if you filtered everything you said through an LLM first, normalizing it. Takes away a fingerprinting option. Could use a pretty small local LLM model that could run on a modest local desktop…

It’s an interesting concept, but I’m not sure the payoff justifies the effort.

Even with AI-generated noise, you’re still being tracked through logins, device fingerprints, and other signals. And in the process, you would probably end up degrading your own experience; getting irrelevant ads, broken recommendations, or tripping security systems.

There’s also the environmental cost to consider. If enough people ran decoy traffic 24/7, the energy use could become significant. All for a strategy that platforms would likely adapt to pretty quickly.

I get the appeal, but I wonder if the practical downsides outweigh the potential privacy gains.

This strategy of generating fake data just doesn’t work well. It requires a ton of resources to generate fake data that can’t be easily filtered which ends up making the strategy non viable on most situations. Look at Mullvads DAITA and how it constantly has to be improved to fight this and, that’s just for basic protection.

There is a bit of a cognitive dissonance that goes on, where people seem to understand that you are tracked constantly online and offline through all sorts of complex means but still think relatively mundane solutions could break that system.

This is a dangerous proposition.

When the dictatorship comes after you, they’re not concerned about the whole of every article that was written about you All they care about are the things they see as incriminating.

You could literally take a spell check dictionary list, pull three words out of the list at random and feed it into a ollama asking for a story with your name that included the three words as major points in the story.

Even on a relatively old video card, you could probably crap out three stories a minute. Have it write them in HTML and publish the site map into major search engines on a regular basis.

Obscuration is what you’re thinking and it works with things like adnauseun (firefox add on that will click all ads in the background to obscure preference data). It’s a nice way to smear the data and probably better to do sooner (while the data collection is in infancy) rather than later (where the companies may be able to filter obscuration attempts).

I like it. I am really not a fan of being profiled, collected, and categorized. I agree with others, I hate this time line. It’s so uncanny.