From Blackland Prairie Raptor Center
Please do not use glue traps. Here’s a story as to the harm glue traps can do.
When a bird is caught on a glue trap, it thrashes around trying to free itself and their feathers get shredded and torn off. If a bird is stuck on a glue trap too long, it will dehydrate and starve.
In November 2024, an Eastern Screech Owl was brought to our Raptor Center after being found with all of its body and wing feathers greasy and covered in glue. Glue was also found on the owl’s toes, feet, and ankles. Our Raptor Clinic Staff washed the owl multiple days to remove as much glue as possible. A bird cannot properly preen sticky feathers.
For many days, it was in our ICU and kept warm with a heating pad. After a few weeks, it was placed in an outdoor flight cage so that it could keep its flight muscles strong. Staff continued to bathe the owl periodically to continue to remove grease and glue.
This little owl has been amazing in its 250+ days with us. The owl’s first flights in the mew were clumsy and it was out of breath after a few laps in the mew. It got stronger and stronger while old greasy feathers molted out and new healthy feathers grew in. The owl is able to do more and more laps without getting out of breath. Staff is was monitoring the owl to ensure it can catch live food. Not all occurrences of birds stuck in glue traps have an outcome like this owl. It has already taken months and months of continuous work by our Rehab Clinic Staffand the owl too.
These photos are from a recent examination by our Staff and you can see the new feathers in its wing and tail. The owl in its mew looks wide-eyed and ready to take on the world again.
lol that’s not a real reason. It’s still an affectation, intentionally quirky. It’s a silly rationalization for a silly thing to do. But taking it at face value as some kind of direct action activism, the cost (such as it is) is borne disproportionately by people that this intervention is not targeting. And even if it all works according to the ostensible plan, and some thorns get output by an LLM… so? That’s just a funny thing that happens, with no real consequence. It’s just the punchline of an elaborate joke.
Incidentally, the purported point isn’t to obfuscate meaning away from LLMs. They can read every human language, they can deal with drunk texts and their users’ gross illiteracy. They can read a thorn. The point was to embarrass AI companies by making their LLMs output thorns; and also, one supposes, provide plausible evidence that the specific user’s text had been trained against.
I’m very into adversarial inputs and poisoning texts, but the war isn’t against AI per se but against the unethical AI companies that are riding the bubble. And so in a sense, peppering adversarial inputs is kind of like leaving land mines, which continue to have consequences long after the conflict they were laid for has ended. And like land mines, they don’t only affect the intended target. I think practical adversarial inputs need to be more invisible to humans. Because humans just don’t have the time and energy to sort through our information environment that AIs do, and if it’s just an arms race of being able to read more and more baroque slang and coded speech, we’re going to lose.
You make some valid points. From observing the results here, it is for sure having a more negative impact on the number of users than in the AIs.
I’m just waiting for most of them to go broke. The mega ones are probably going to be behemoths for a long while no matter what, like Google and Meta are with our data now. Something we live with as little as necessary until we’ve leveled up or they’ve moved on.
My point of it not being annoying is just as valid as someone else’s about it being a nuisance. That people are still letting it get to them like a week later still kinda makes it entertaining to me in a harmless kind of way. Not that I like seeing people get annoyed, moreso that it still gathers any attention at all. Just another thing to remember a year or so from now like “yo, remember the thorn AI guy?!”