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the state of this technology after being called 'too dangerous to release'

est31 6y ago
1. GPT-2 was built for generating text, not music nor programming languages. So this is pretty impressive. 2. The "too dangerous to release" refers to the text generation mode of GPT-2 and was mainly targeted at spammers etc. 3. Of course there was a hype component in it. They wanted people to start thinking about the question before it's too late, which they did. I doubt that we'll get any kind of attempted world control takeover by AI (unless someone explicitly tells AI to do it, at which point it's a guy trying to seize world control with the help of an AI tool), but even if the chance is very small, if you multiply it with the damage, you should at least start wondering about countermeasures.
ehsankia 6y ago
As mentioned in the other comment, this is a very deceitful comment. GPT-2 was made for generating text, and the specific thing it's dangerous for is disinformation bots on twitter/reddit as well as fake generated articles, two things the original model quite excels at. It's like claiming that nuclear bombs aren't dangerous because they're not good at taking us to space.
- carrolldunham 6y ago
  What I meant by state is status. As in, this type of humble retro styled application is where we find GPT-2 in 2020 instead of dominating the news cycle with what you claim it is so good at. If it excels at text, where are the fake articles and tweets? It's just not that good.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    By definition, if the tweets and articles are good, they are unnoticeable from real ones. That's exactly what makes them dangerous. If you could detect them, then they wouldn't be dangerous anymore.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      You should see the too-dangerous-to-release AI model my team built. It actually governs nations in a manner indistinguishable from a human. There are nations currently under its thrall that you wouldn't even imagine. The world leaders of these nations merely speak what speeches it writes for them.
  - djannzjkzxn 6y ago
    Have you been reading the mass comments/tweets on political stories lately? Some of it does seem bot-like to me. I don’t have a strong opinion about how much this is happening. But I know I could personally run a bot that generates political spam with GPT-2. I know a lot of people want to influence the political conversation. I mean, people get paid salaries to write comments online. So I can’t help but suspect that someone is using tools that allow it to be done a lot more cheaply.
    - seanwilson 6y ago
      Saying that it could be is wide use but you wouldn't be able to detect it is an impossible to falsify claim though.
      - djannzjkzxn 6y ago
        The way to falsify it is to track down the identity of the human author of every internet comment. Simple! To get philosophical I won’t say that I “know” it’s happening. Most of the world consists of things I don’t know about. The best I can do is build a mental model based on what I do know.
  - gwern 6y ago
    It does work, though. Here's an example: https://techscience.org/a/2019121801/ https://techscience.org/a/2019121801/ There's also https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.09203.pdf#page=48 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.09203.pdf#page=48 Why aren't bad actors using it in the wild? I think it's a combination of them being technically unsophisticated and conservative, propaganda not actually working nearly as well as people like to think it does, and lack of detection of competent actors (things like StyleGAN being used for fake FB profiles are detected through carelessness like leaving the faces exactly aligned).
visarga 6y ago
> the state of this technology after being called 'too dangerous to release' One trained model is not enough to judge transformers. Listed to this: https://magenta.tensorflow.org/piano-transformer https://magenta.tensorflow.org/piano-transformer

1. GPT-2 was built for generating text, not music nor programming languages. So this is pretty impressive. 2. The "too dangerous to release" refers to the text generation mode of GPT-2 and was mainly targeted at spammers etc. 3. Of course there was a hype component in it. They wanted people to start thinking about the question before it's too late, which they did. I doubt that we'll get any kind of attempted world control takeover by AI (unless someone explicitly tells AI to do it, at which point it's a guy trying to seize world control with the help of an AI tool), but even if the chance is very small, if you multiply it with the damage, you should at least start wondering about countermeasures.

ehsankia 6y ago

As mentioned in the other comment, this is a very deceitful comment. GPT-2 was made for generating text, and the specific thing it's dangerous for is disinformation bots on twitter/reddit as well as fake generated articles, two things the original model quite excels at. It's like claiming that nuclear bombs aren't dangerous because they're not good at taking us to space.

carrolldunham 6y ago
What I meant by state is status. As in, this type of humble retro styled application is where we find GPT-2 in 2020 instead of dominating the news cycle with what you claim it is so good at. If it excels at text, where are the fake articles and tweets? It's just not that good.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  By definition, if the tweets and articles are good, they are unnoticeable from real ones. That's exactly what makes them dangerous. If you could detect them, then they wouldn't be dangerous anymore.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    You should see the too-dangerous-to-release AI model my team built. It actually governs nations in a manner indistinguishable from a human. There are nations currently under its thrall that you wouldn't even imagine. The world leaders of these nations merely speak what speeches it writes for them.
- djannzjkzxn 6y ago
  Have you been reading the mass comments/tweets on political stories lately? Some of it does seem bot-like to me. I don’t have a strong opinion about how much this is happening. But I know I could personally run a bot that generates political spam with GPT-2. I know a lot of people want to influence the political conversation. I mean, people get paid salaries to write comments online. So I can’t help but suspect that someone is using tools that allow it to be done a lot more cheaply.
  - seanwilson 6y ago
    Saying that it could be is wide use but you wouldn't be able to detect it is an impossible to falsify claim though.
    - djannzjkzxn 6y ago
      The way to falsify it is to track down the identity of the human author of every internet comment. Simple! To get philosophical I won’t say that I “know” it’s happening. Most of the world consists of things I don’t know about. The best I can do is build a mental model based on what I do know.
- gwern 6y ago
  It does work, though. Here's an example: https://techscience.org/a/2019121801/ https://techscience.org/a/2019121801/ There's also https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.09203.pdf#page=48 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.09203.pdf#page=48 Why aren't bad actors using it in the wild? I think it's a combination of them being technically unsophisticated and conservative, propaganda not actually working nearly as well as people like to think it does, and lack of detection of competent actors (things like StyleGAN being used for fake FB profiles are detected through carelessness like leaving the faces exactly aligned).

visarga 6y ago

> the state of this technology after being called 'too dangerous to release' One trained model is not enough to judge transformers. Listed to this: https://magenta.tensorflow.org/piano-transformer https://magenta.tensorflow.org/piano-transformer