So, you want to participate on Manifold Markets, but don't want to create, enslave, and obliterate thousands of probably self-aware/sentient minds deal with the ethical issues relating to Large Language Models? There's no Manifold equivalent of UDM14 for Google or the NoAI subdomain for DuckDuckGo, but the site is still usable, if you're careful. Here's some tips:

• When creating a market, make sure that your connection is disabled until you've finished putting in the market details. The system otherwise is constantly running LLMs every few keypresses to attach tags and guess the close date. In many browsers, you can easily stop all those LLM orders by using the developer tools (press F12), selecting "Network", and then moving the throttle option from "No throttling" to "Offline" until you're ready to submit your market.

• All comments on markets, whether you're the creator or not, will activate an LLM. If you're not the creator, it'll run in order to check whether to notify the market creator that something needs clarification because apparently a simple checkbox would be too much work, and if you are the creator it will run to check whether a comment resolves such an issue or to append a pile of AI slop to your market description. Workarounds:

  • If you're creating the market, you can create a forum post (listed or unlisted) and designate it as the comments section for that market, linking it in the description.

  • If you're the creator and didn't create an associated forum post, and you need to clarify something, just edit the market description.

  • You can ask questions to a market creator by sending direct messages. If necessary, the market creator may edit the description.

• Numeric and Date markets can't be created without forcing an LLM to check what (usually inaccurate) "midpoint" to assign to each option. The only workaround is to just use ordinary multi-choice markets instead.

• When viewing comments in a market, make sure not to sort by "Best", which commands an LLM to order them. Sorting by "Newest" is safe.

• As far as I'm aware, all actual bets are safe.

A bit of a hassle, and not a great user experience, but I feel like I get enough benefit from the site for it to still be worth it.

What if Manifold keeps increasing LLMs until the site becomes unusable? Unfortunately, I don't know of any alternative sites that have the same feature set. Backups to consider: Futuur (doesn't allow everyone to create markets), Metaculus (isn't structured as a "market"), https://playmoney.dev/ (tiny), https://brierfoxforecast.com/ (running SocialPredict https://github.com/openpredictionmarkets/socialpredict , isn't up and running yet).

Best to just hope that the developers don't do anything like that. Keep advocating for ethical software!