4 ms·

At a credibility score of 6.91/10, many people will rightly judge that the full GPT-2 model will remain insufficient for malicious use in creating fake news. H

At a credibility score of 6.91/10, many people will rightly judge that the full GPT-2 model will remain insufficient for malicious use in creating fake news. However, even the smaller models are already good enough for spamming/trolling/astroturfing. It doesn’t take a Shakespearean soliloquy to convince people of a point. Just enough of a flood of short 1-3 sentence pro/con comments on a forum can drastically affect the perceived public opinion of an issue. Those comments can then spur real people to reply, which could result in an ultimately organic but directed propaganda vector. Propaganda directors will carefully craft something for people to look at, and the GPT-2 bots will move people’s eyes in that direction. You can see the same happen on r/subsimulatorgpt2, where the longer titles and prompts and replies eventually sprawl into incoherence, but the shorter sentences from the finetuned bots in the comments section are effectively indistinguishable from the kinds of short comments you would find on their respective subreddits. Or in other words, the malicious uses for GPT-2 won’t be a tidal wave, but a flash flood.

gambler 7y ago
Funny how instead of admitting that social media is trash and doesn't facilitate meaningful communication, thus making it impossible to distinguish between humans and low-level bots, Silicon Valley types keep pretending the problem lies everyone except with their systems. The AI it too good, the people are too stupid, etc.
- rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
  There are too many edge cases to throw out the baby with the bathwater though. Reddit has a lot of really great niche communities that work hard to avoid toxicity (although to be fair I don’t go to anything news/politics related there, just memes and machine learning for me). Facebook, likewise, is a trash company with a trash product, but has completely replaced the town notice boards and meeting halls in rural communities, and is indispensable for working with them. I’ve been thinking hard enough to get steam blowing out of my ears trying to figure out a way to slice out that essential function from Facebook and put it on a platform that isn’t predatory and dangerous, but I still can’t square that circle. So in the meantime, if people want to engage and stay engaged with rural communities, Facebook is a necessary evil.
  - AwesomeLemon 7y ago
    Why can't reddit replace facebook as a notice board?
    - rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
      Fantastic question. The simple answer is that most people who are involved in community governance skew older, and older people primarily use Facebook as their social media fix, so getting updates about the goings-on in their communities or taking part in discussions about them is a natural fit between FarmVille updates and photos of grandkids. Reddit works sort of all right for small and medium sized cities, but for most of small town rural America, people just use Facebook, not reddit, so it would likely be extremely hard to move people en masse out of Facebook for community organization. The network effects are simply far too massive to overcome no matter how good the other social network could be made. Chicken and egg problem for people who work with chickens and eggs.
    - incompatible 7y ago
      Why can't reddit replace facebook as a notice board? I'm sure it would be a lot of fun, but a couple things would need to happen. (1) They're just not going to do it (2) There needs to be a lot more attention being paid to this It should be a community board. It's free. It's available to the public. And its a place everyone can get to. You could make it a free-to-enter-only place where people can submit content, but that kind of limits the content to reddit. It really should be a free-to-use board, like a forum.
antpls 7y ago
> Just enough of a flood of short 1-3 sentence pro/con comments on a forum can drastically affect the perceived public opinion of an issue. Even more than public opinion, it can affect the result of sentiment analysis algorithms about a topic. Those algorithms run on all the comments or tweets and output and overall sentiment score, which is then used as "insight" to make actual decisions for human deciders (journalists, analysts, marketers) and/or is used as input for other algorithms.
- rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
  Holy shit I hadn’t even considered that. Thank you, that gives me a lot to think over.

gambler 7y ago

Funny how instead of admitting that social media is trash and doesn't facilitate meaningful communication, thus making it impossible to distinguish between humans and low-level bots, Silicon Valley types keep pretending the problem lies everyone except with their systems. The AI it too good, the people are too stupid, etc.

rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
There are too many edge cases to throw out the baby with the bathwater though. Reddit has a lot of really great niche communities that work hard to avoid toxicity (although to be fair I don’t go to anything news/politics related there, just memes and machine learning for me). Facebook, likewise, is a trash company with a trash product, but has completely replaced the town notice boards and meeting halls in rural communities, and is indispensable for working with them. I’ve been thinking hard enough to get steam blowing out of my ears trying to figure out a way to slice out that essential function from Facebook and put it on a platform that isn’t predatory and dangerous, but I still can’t square that circle. So in the meantime, if people want to engage and stay engaged with rural communities, Facebook is a necessary evil.
- AwesomeLemon 7y ago
  Why can't reddit replace facebook as a notice board?
  - rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
    Fantastic question. The simple answer is that most people who are involved in community governance skew older, and older people primarily use Facebook as their social media fix, so getting updates about the goings-on in their communities or taking part in discussions about them is a natural fit between FarmVille updates and photos of grandkids. Reddit works sort of all right for small and medium sized cities, but for most of small town rural America, people just use Facebook, not reddit, so it would likely be extremely hard to move people en masse out of Facebook for community organization. The network effects are simply far too massive to overcome no matter how good the other social network could be made. Chicken and egg problem for people who work with chickens and eggs.
  - incompatible 7y ago
    Why can't reddit replace facebook as a notice board? I'm sure it would be a lot of fun, but a couple things would need to happen. (1) They're just not going to do it (2) There needs to be a lot more attention being paid to this It should be a community board. It's free. It's available to the public. And its a place everyone can get to. You could make it a free-to-enter-only place where people can submit content, but that kind of limits the content to reddit. It really should be a free-to-use board, like a forum.

antpls 7y ago

> Just enough of a flood of short 1-3 sentence pro/con comments on a forum can drastically affect the perceived public opinion of an issue. Even more than public opinion, it can affect the result of sentiment analysis algorithms about a topic. Those algorithms run on all the comments or tweets and output and overall sentiment score, which is then used as "insight" to make actual decisions for human deciders (journalists, analysts, marketers) and/or is used as input for other algorithms.

rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
Holy shit I hadn’t even considered that. Thank you, that gives me a lot to think over.