> scientists, which are even more rigorous than engineers ;)

You should see the code that scientists write...

More and more apps won't run, again allegedly to keep you safe. You can't run your bank apps on your rooted and custom software. TPMs of desktop, everything needing approval. Yeah you may say tough luck, just use the web. But more and more banks sunset their web UI. It's apps only. And then you'll say "tough luck, start your own bank and offer this feature if you think there is customer demand". Or tough luck, win an election and then you can change the laws etc.

Yeah I'm aware that we can only watch from the sidelines. At least we can write these comments.

The new world will be constant AI surveillance of all your biosignals, age and ID verification, only approved and audited computation, all data and messaging in ID attached non e2e encrypted cloud storage and so on. And people will say it keeps you safe and you have nothing to fear if you are a law abiding person.

You can always find justifications to erode all civil liberties. I think it's a major gap in the way history is being taught that people think that the reasons to remove liberties sound like overt evil mustache-twirling slogans. In reality they always talk about a danger that the benevolent overlord will keep you safe from.

All these changes are attacks on general purpose computing and computing sovereignty and personal control over one's data, and one's digital agency.

Do you think regular desktop computer should be locked down like this too? Scammers can also tell people to run Windows programs. Should that be banned too?

I'm fine with an opt-in lock-down feature so people can do it for their parents/grandparents/children.

Also, just let people get used to it. People will get burned, then tell their friends and they will then know not to simply follow what a stranger guides them to do over the phone. Maybe they will actually have second thoughts about what personal data they enter on their phone and when and where and who it may be sent to.

Same as with emails telling you to buy gift cards at the gas station. Should the clerk tell people to come back tomorrow if they want to buy a gift card, just in case they are being "guided" by a Nigerian prince scammer?

I'm not surprised at all. The ML research community isn't a community any more, it's turned into a dog-eat-dog low-trust fierce competition. So much more people, papers, churn, that everyone is just fending for themselves. Any moment that you charitably spend on community service can be felt as a moment you take away from the next project, jeopardizing the next paper, getting scooped, delaying your graduation, your contract, your funding, your visa, your residence permit, your industry plans etc. It's a machine. I don't think people outside the phd system really understand the incentives involved.

To be clear this is not an excuse but an explanation why I am not surprised.

To be clear, as the article says, these authors were offered a choice and agreed to be on the "no LLMs allowed" policy.

And detection was not done with some snake oil "AI detector" but by invisible prompt injection in the paper pdf, instructing LLMs to put TWO long phrases into the review. They then detected LLM use through checking if both phrases appear in the review.

This did not detect grammar checks and touchups of an independently written review. The phrases would only get included if the reviewer fed the pdf to the LLM in clear violation to their chosen policy.

> After a selection process, in which reviewers got to choose which policy they would like to operate under, they were assigned to either Policy A or Policy B. In the end, based on author demands and reviewer signups, the only reviewers who were assigned to Policy A (no LLMs) were those who explicitly selected “Policy A” or “I am okay with either [Policy] A or B.” To be clear, no reviewer who strongly preferred Policy B was assigned to Policy A.