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One of the things are about fakes is that they evolve over time. Believe it or not, an incident in 1917 involving Arthur Conan Doyle, inventor of Sherlock Holm
by joe_the_user 8y ago
One of the things are about fakes is that they evolve over time.
Believe it or not, an incident in 1917 involving Arthur Conan Doyle, inventor of Sherlock Holmes, is instructive.
The "Cottingley Fairies" were imagined when a couple of teenage girls took photographs of themselves with pictures of fairies. [1]
The thing that is important is that, to my eyes and I think to a typical person of this era, these photos of girls with cutouts of fairies look like ... exactly that. When I first saw these pictures, I couldn't believe anyone could be fooled by them. But this period, circa 1917, was a period when photos only recently had appeared and so only recently had photo fakes. So the skill to spot the difference had only recently appeared.
Which is to say, I'm pretty sure the author is correct that deal of the OpenAI text generated isn't intelligent text generation but stuff with enough of the markers of "real" text that people might not notice it if they weren't paying attention.
Moreover, I strongly suspect that if this sort of sham were to become more common, the average person's ability to notice it would increase significantly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
- justwalt 8y agoThat’s a really good point. Thanks for the food for thought.
- onion2k 8y agoThat's probably right, but as with the fairy pictures the technology to make the fakes is also advancing, and no one can tell a whether a picture that's been made recently is fake or not just by eye. As fake text becomes more common the tools to make it will become more advanced to the point where we can't tell it apart from the real thing.
- thom 8y agoSurely the only worry about 'fake text' is scale? People have been able to write down lies for thousands of years.
- ajuc 8y agoScale is a big problem, though. If it's cheaper to automatically create noise than it is to automatically remove it - public debate in internet becomes impossible.
- Haga 8y agoPosting per Post 1 Cent
- ajuc 8y agoThat's a startup idea. Reddit where each account has bitcoin wallet connected. Every comment/post/upvote costs like 0.1 cent, every upvote on your comments/posts gives you 0.09 cent. The rest is used for running the website (so no adds).
- yenda 8y agoIt's one of the direction explored by status.im (full disclosure I work there) with tools such as visibility stake and tribute to talk
- ajuc 8y agoCould you say more? Is it already available?
- yenda 8y agoThe app itself is already available in beta on Android. It is an ethereum client for mobile, and it includes a messenger that uses whisper, a gossip protocol to transmit data (at least for now), which provides darkness and encryption. The first iteration of Tribute to Talk will be pretty basic with a simple transactional model. A pays B to start talking to B, B can block A at any time. But the smart contract developers are working on more sophisticated schemes for the future. Here are two related discussions on our discuss forums: Visibilty Stake for Public Chat Room Governance https://discuss.status.im/t/visibilty-stake-for-public-chat-room-governance/133 https://discuss.status.im/t/visibilty-stake-for-public-chat-... PRBS protocol proposal - An incentivized Whisper like protocol for status https://discuss.status.im/t/prbs-protocol-proposal-an-incentivized-whisper-like-protocol-for-status/849 https://discuss.status.im/t/prbs-protocol-proposal-an-incent... If you want more precise answers don't hesitate to post there, Ricardo loves to discuss these topics
- close04 8y agoVery relevant article [0]. The second picture of the article is a real eye opener on the obviousness of fakes. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/25/ai_roundup/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/25/ai_roundup/
- coldtea 8y ago>The thing that is important is that, to my eyes and I think to a typical person of this era, these photos of girls with cutouts of fairies look like ... exactly that. When I first saw these pictures, I couldn't believe anyone could be fooled by them. But this period, circa 1917, was a period when photos only recently had appear and so only recently had photo fakes. So the skill to spot the difference had only recently appeared. Tons of people believe in crude "ufo" and "bigfoot" and "chupacabras" and "lock ness" and such photos, well into today though.
- ljcn 8y agoLoch Ness.
- drdeca 8y agoNitpick, but, isn’t Loch Ness just the name of the lake?
- jvanderbot 8y agoHow do you know the lake is real?
- kaybe 8y agoI've seen it. It could have been a very convincing fake, but.. if that doesn't count, then nothing does.
- IIAOPSW 8y agoHow do I know you're not in on the conspiracy.
- Apocryphon 8y agoMaybe it was just an oversized puddle, and not actually a lake.
- 8y ago
- dalbasal 8y agoIt'll be interesting to see which evolves faster.
- walterstucco 8y agoTechnology evolved as well AI today fight against other AIs either to improve or to spot one another It's already too hard for many people to tell the difference The equivalent of the fairies picture today is the ability to win Brexit, not just fool someone into thinking fairies were real (and I'm quite sure many more were skeptical at the time, those that believed in it just wanted to believe)
- isolli 8y agoIt reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Na%C3%AFvet%C3%A9_of_interrogators_and_the_anthropomorphic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Na%C3%AFvet%C3%A9_... I remember reading once that a machine had finally passed the Turing test, but when I looked in detail at what some of the judges on the panel had thought was a human talking, I realized how subjective the test was.
- Shorel 8y agoRight now people talk to bots every day, in the form of customer support. People's modern perceptions about bots are much more evolved than when the test was first theorized, so now it is the time to do an actual Turing test. It will probably fail, but we are surely close to the point where an AI will actually pass it. My guess is we are 10 years away from that moment. It will be like the movie "Her".
- jvanderbot 8y agoOh man ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cottingley_Fairies_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cottingley_Fairies_1.jpg What is wrong with her hands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies#/media/File:CottingleyFairies2.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies#/media/File... Clearly motion blur, but none in the supposedly flying fairy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottingleyFairies3.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottingleyFairies3.jpg Looks exactly like roger-rabbit style splicing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottingleyFairies4.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottingleyFairies4.jpg
- leesec 8y agoI don't think that's true at all. People can rarely tell the difference between an article without facts or sources and a well sourced article. It's only going to get worse when the bots can generate convincing 'fake news'.
- the8472 8y agoOf course this is more or less what the NPC meme is about, insinuating that others are on autopilot and swayed by fake news.
- donaldknuth123 8y agoI could not disagree more. Companies like AP are already using algorithms to generate basic news stories and I doubt very much that an average person was either aware of that or could detect that from text. Human Vision is extremely high fidelity and as such strangeness in images is easy to notice. The same cannot be said about reading text which is already several layers of abstraction deeper than simply seeing an image, this even ignores the fact that Average Reading Comprehension in the US is around the 7th grade level. Given the generally poor literacy of average people and the current rate of NLP progress I'd say that in 10 years its reasonable to think it would be nearly impossible for an average person to be able to detect Algorithm generated text.