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In a GPT-3 World, Anonymity Prevents Free Speech
- api 6y agoI've thought this for many years, but I've never come up with so succinct and perfect a way of expressing it. Anonymity prevents free speech by making it easy to just drown any legitimate speech or valuable information in a torrent of bullshit. This was always somewhat true due to the prevalence of human trolls and propagandists, but the ability to generate content automatically makes the problem orders of magnitude worse. In the world of deep fakes and stuff like GPT-3 (which can be used for what amounts to deep fakes for text), any information without clear provenance is worse than worthless. It's a form of pollution whose result is to confuse, misdirect, misinform/disinform, and indoctrinate, and it's impossible to use it for anything legitimate since it's completely unverifiable and could easily be fake. Right now it's possible to detect deep fakes, but it probably won't be long until the technology is good enough that this is very hard. Then there's the fact that a lot of people won't even check. People just believe claims in stupid memes and forward them. Example: a photo of a supposed Denver International Airport mural depicting kids in masks with different flags on them was going around a while back. The claim was that this showed some kind of foreknowledge of COVID-19 going all the way back to the 1990s. Turns out the photo was of a recent painting that was not from DIA. It was totally fake. I've still seen it making the rounds. I've been predicting that deep fakes will make an appearance this October in the Presidential election. I think there's a really good chance. It'll be at the last minute so nobody has time to perform any analysis or fact check anything.
- RealityVoid 6y agoCan't expand the ideea right now too much, but think of Satoshi, anonynous, but consistent and the possibility to prove provenance.
- cosmojg 6y agoSatoshi is pseudonymous, not anonymous. Public key cryptography (like that used with Bitcoin) allows the former but not the latter.
- starfallg 6y agoYou're right, but in the context here, there isn't any significant difference. A pseudonymous machine account that is indistinguishable to a human carries the same type of risks to online discourse as an anonymous account.
- api 6y agoCode is a very different thing. It's possible to run code and objectively see whether it does what it says or not. Political speech and whistleblower type stuff is very different. Without a really deep investigation it's impossible to verify anything. Let's say someone dumps an anonymous video showing Donald Trump or Joe Biden molesting a child. How would you verify that? For a CS analogy: would you trust anonymous elliptic curves provided with no background or provenance? How can you prove they're not somehow weak in a way known only to the generator? This is why some people are suspicious of the NIST elliptic curves, though in that case they've been around for so long and used to protect so many high value targets they're believed to be probably safe. They've had what amounts to a huge bounty on them for quite a while.
- m0zg 6y agoBut there already exist authentic videos of Joe Biden sniffing children without their consent. Doesn't seem to harm him any. I guess we'll see if this is even an issue. Lying by making shit up is not as effective as lying by omission, and the mainstream press are _experts_ at the latter.
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- thaumasiotes 6y ago> In the world of deep fakes and stuff like GPT-3 (which can be used for what amounts to deep fakes for text) Exactly what is GPT-3 doing in the example? You can already write whatever you want, better than GPT-3 can. You can attribute it however you like. People have been attributing undesirable positions to their political opponents and personal enemies for thousands of years. Where does GPT-3 come into it?
- amatecha 6y agoEnabling automated "could be real" spam/noise
- api 6y agoWriting propaganda is labor intensive. GPT-3 could do it well enough and almost for free. Think automated troll farms and spam that can be generated in unlimited quantity and that is close enough to real text that it can't be filtered. Basically it does for spam what the machine gun did for open field warfare.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoWriting propaganda is labor intensive if you care what it says. But if you care what it says, you won't be trying to have it generated automatically.
- api 6y agoThere is a big difference between some labor and zero labor. That's the whole reason spam is a problem.
- swayson 6y agoMeme warfare is not a new idea, but appears growing ever more sophisticated. Implication being, the value of attention and critical thinking is increasing exponentially as people struggle to navigate the information explosion online and to discern what really matters. Curious how people will evolve.
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- cosmojg 6y agoZero-knowledge proofs solve this problem. Hell, even simple private key cryptography solves this problem. Distribute private keys to anonymous individuals who somehow prove their eligibility and only allow key holders to participate in the community. Easy peasy.
- taftster 6y agoJust to challenge the easy part (or is this a challenge to peasy), can you please expand on "somehow"? What is your strategy here to ensure that only "real" people can get access to the private keys (and not real people proxying for an automaton)? How do you maintain this assurance for a long running period of time?
- Reelin 6y agoWeb of trust (or something substantially similar) solves this on an algorithmic level. The problem is that, to the best of my knowledge, we lack friendly and accessible UI tooling to support such a scheme. Naive web of trust algorithms are likely to threaten anonymity in their own way though. Zero knowledge proofs might be able to facilitate a solution to that. > and not real people proxying for an automaton You can't prevent this under any scheme, only detect it after the fact. An authenticated individual will always be able to deliberately take actions on behalf of someone else.
- amelius 6y ago> You can't prevent this under any scheme, only detect it after the fact. So do I understand correctly that if someone posts 100 messages "anonymously", and in the last one they accidentally reveal themselves, all the other 99 messages are traceable to that same person?
- Reelin 6y agoThe part of my comment you quoted was referring to preventing people from disingenuously proxying for another entity, not to maintaining their own personal anonymity. Regarding accidentally revealing oneself, that's always a risk. If you create an anonymous HN identity but then inadvertently link it back to yourself then all previous posts under that account are immediately traceable as well. Web of trust itself is easy and already widely used by many free software communities as a decentralized means of securing reputation based identities (anonymous or otherwise). The challenge is in allowing an established identity (established either via reputation, government ID, in person interaction, whatever) to perform an anonymous but trusted (ie authenticated) interaction with the network. In other words, to implement a web of trust scheme that supports anonymized but otherwise verified interactions via zero knowledge proofs.
- zucker42 6y ago> the marginal cost of distributing astroturfed propaganda online has firmly hit zero. This is just not true. GPT-3 costs money to train, use, customize, and maintain. I would guess that paying people is still the more cost effective way to astroturf. Also, if the argument is we have to ban anonymity, I strongly disagree. Obviously people shouldn't carelessly trust anonymous sources, but that's just common sense. Banning anonymity would prevent people anonymously sharing insight into companies, whistleblowing, talking freely without threatening their employment (e.g. SSC), etc. It would increase the chances of physical threat due to online action, and it would provide the people in power with far to much sway over speech.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThe concern is that low-quality anonymous sources will become so common that, even if anonymity isn't formally banned, most people will have to proactively filter anonymous writing the same way they filter anonymous phone calls today.
- zucker42 6y agoI would prefer that to banning anonymity. I don't disagree that you should be extra suspicious of anonymous sources.
- pixl97 6y agoThe future won't attack your freedom of speech. It will attack everyone's attention limits.
- riverlong 6y agoVery well put. I wish I had included that phrase in my essay.
- phkahler 6y agoI've been advocating for traceability by default. Then if a site wants to strip identity from comments they can. But then we have a clear distinction between places where you're not anonymous and those where you are. People can then choose who they want to interact with and listen to.
- avivo 6y agoGeneralization: When "more speech" is too easy, "more speech" prevent "free speech".
- draugadrotten 6y agoAnonymous - in what context? For most purposes, a pseudonymous account is anonymous. Not that many people can doxx my account here at HN, but I'm not even trying to be anonymous here. Anonymity towards a state actor or similar is very different problem and as is shown by TOR, it's a rather hard problem to solve even without considering GPT-3.
- superkuh 6y agoMore speech doesn't prevent anyone from speaking. You're mistaking a negative liberty, the idea of free speech, for a positive liberty, the idea that everyone should have an equal amount of attention.
- globuous 6y agoI think it's in the internet boy (but maybe just some other interview) that Aaron Swartz says that unlike before, where the difficulty was being able to broadcast an idea (to the masses), now it's about being listened to. We can all spin up a website or a YouTube channel, but who's gonna visit it, subscribe to it. I found that contemplation fascinating ^^
- pixl97 6y agoWell, if you can generate enough crap speech you could possibly create a world that is filter by default, which I think would tend to trend towards status quo.
- brokenkebab 6y agoIt's one of those discoveries of "the end of the X as we know it", but actually have been existing for quite a long time already. The author somehow misses the fact that governments has been engaging small number of opinionmaking professionals (journalists, advertisers, writers, celebs etc.) to create the feeling of majority support since the time when majority opinion became important. State controlled TV, and radio existed for decades, and they always talk on behalf of "majority" which supports gov't. And in a more democratic country a small number of people who do news, or control social platforms can do the same out of solidarity, shared economic interests, or just because. To say that thousands generated Twitter accounts are more powerful than Twitter itself, or even more than TV channels used to be just 30 years ago is obviuos exaggeration. We have been living with this for quite a long time already, and while it's often works, one can't do it for a long time, because there will be inevitable cultural response: people stop believing, or just paying attention - examples are all over the recent history.
- joe_the_user 6y agoDefinitely, Moreover, the claim that GPT-3 is a good tool for astroturfing is unproven so far and I am extremely skeptical. I don't think the supply of trollish garbage has even been the barrier to troll-speech shutting down constructive speech. I don't think even the limit on the ability of individual, "real" people to spout Trollish garbage has been the limit. In the GPT-3 text I've read and the GPT-2 systems I've played with, what I read is a system that "weaves" a group of sentences that seem "well written and plausible" on the surface (maybe more well and more plausible than a lot of trolls). But any detailed look seems to show each reason step as both implausible and "weird", senseless. It's impressive but it's got the "talking dog effect" - people are going to be impressed by a talking dog even if the dog's statements aren't impressive otherwise. Moreover, I think most would-be astroturfers have very specific aims. "Because of value X shared by group Y, group Y should hate group Z and like group Q", "Politician X violates strong social taboo Y" and similar formulas. Fifty people in boiler room in a third world country can be hired to make variations on the basic "payload" the astroturfer specifies for less than one silicon valley data scientist customizing GPT-3 and they have less chance of producing GPT-3 weirdness IMO. Some even larger-scale hybrid system might automate the process further. But for the purposes of the astroturfer, it's hardly necessary.
- catalogia 6y agoI never expected to see "On the internet, nobody knows your a dog" become a new moral panic. Here's the pragmatic solution that doesn't involve entrusting so much power to governments: communicate with people you know. If you choose to communicate with strangers, be aware that they may be lying about anything they say.
- Barrin92 6y agoThis isn't new and it's not even a technological issue. This is how everyone in a minority position feels. be that an expert, a religious minority, a sexual minority, or anyone else who faces a crowd. In 1931 it was 100 Authors against Einstein. I seriously wonder why it took some people twitter and gpt-3 to figure out that "more speech is the solution to bad speech" is actually complete nonsense that people who work at Facebook repeat because it increases their stock value. The author isn't even really looking for free speech, they're just re-using the term because it's apparently the only acceptable adjective in front of 'speech'. What the author is figuring out is that free expression doesn't necessary produce truth or justice.
- gridlockd 6y agoBeing heard is about quality, not quantity. If a hundred nobodies argue on the internet, nobody is listening anyway. It does not matter if they are bots. If a hundred nobodies leave a reply to some statement by a person that matters, it does not cancel out that statement. Free speech is necessary, but not sufficient, to find truth and pursue justice.
- Reelin 6y ago> Free speech is necessary, but not sufficient, to find truth and pursue justice. I wholeheartedly agree! However, regarding the rest of what you said. Propaganda can and does influence public opinion; numerous verified historical examples exist. It was already an issue that needed to be solved (IMO) long before GPT-3 was created. Advanced ML techniques seem likely to further exacerbate a problem that already exists.
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- bmc7505 6y agoCuriously, the author "Jay Riverlong" doesn't appear to exist prior to a month ago, right around the time when GPT-3 came out. For a "professional poker player" who "travelled extensively throughout South America and Europe", it is interesting. Could be a pseudonym, but it's hard to tell whether the author is a real person. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=riverlong https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=riverlong https://github.com/jayriverlong https://github.com/jayriverlong https://twitter.com/jayriverlong https://twitter.com/jayriverlong https://jayriverlong.github.io/about/ https://jayriverlong.github.io/about/ edit: I have pinged him on Twitter. Let's see what happens. https://twitter.com/breandan/status/1287148374077186059 https://twitter.com/breandan/status/1287148374077186059
- pcstl 6y agoIf they really aren't a real person, they might be trying to make their point through that. :P
- BbzzbB 6y agoInteresting. FWIW, the profile picture could very well be from thispersondoesnotexist.com, a cropped face smiling at the camera with the typical blur behind, plus there's a single picture available of the author. Picked carefully, the telltale signs of the source are non-obvious (unintended swirls and warps, peculiarities in the hair and around the mouth). Not knowing if it is a fake person makes it interesting to dissect, but also very awkward if it turns out to be a real Jay so I won't dwell on it. I will however mention the suspicious blur/pixelation at the chin and below the right ear.. which makes me inclined to agree with the thesis (sorry if I'm wrong M. Riverlong). Not sure what the link with GPT3 would be tho.
- Sebb767 6y agoFor the record, he replied: https://twitter.com/jayriverlong/status/1287153385427226624 https://twitter.com/jayriverlong/status/1287153385427226624
- andreyk 6y agoBased on the variety of tweets and blog posts this seems to me like it's being done by a real person, but I am guessing this Jay is a fake persona and made to try and make the point that it's easy to create a fake person. Having a digital presence so thin and a profile pic so like GAN creations definitely is quite strong evidence of this, so if this is true their point is kind of weak given how easy it is to spot the suspicious signs.
- mattlondon 6y agoYou can say what you want, but you've never had the right to force people to listen to what you say. I don't see what has changed in that regard. Perhaps no one ever read your banner supporting X in the first place...
- ThefinalResult 6y agoSurprisingly confused. Some kernel of truth in here. It's not really free speech that's at issue here is it? It's discourse populated by other human beings, or the "right" to be clearly heard. That's already contested, without AI. No transparent attribution.
- skybrian 6y agoIn journalism, anonymous reports are verified to some extent by the journalists. You're basically relying on the newspaper's reputation. This might work in other cases, where you have some known reputable third party that can vouch for the anonymous account, at least to verify that they're a real person and not a sock puppet. Wikipedia does the opposite, where most editors are anonymous and untrusted worker bees, but they are supposed to cite reliable sources. That can work too. Teach a GPT-3 successor to cite things correctly and you might have something useful, sort of like a search engine that can combine data from multiple places. But if all you have is an anonymous account, it's basically a rumor and you shouldn't trust it. Isn't it rather weird to expect strangers on the Internet to believe what we say without knowing anything about us?
- coderintherye 6y agoReal world identification doesn't solve this problem. Forcing it would just lead to growth in the market of buying (and stealing) ids.
- scottlocklin 6y agoAnyone who disparages anonymity is a fed. Or in this case, an obvious bot.
- cityroasted 6y agoThis idea is explored in the first part of Neal Stephenson's novel from last year,Fall; or Dodge in Hell. I'm still reading so no spoilers please.
- tectonic 6y agoI was just thinking how GPT-3 could be that novel's method of generating so much noise as to inoculate everyone against astroturfing.
- pcstl 6y agoI think this might have been written by GPT-3.
- renewiltord 6y agoI know you got your profile photo off thispersondoesnotexist.com. There is a better adversary network out there and it can detect you, FYI. 2A224B042AC1EA9BF37F0FD43C36AF022C2ADEAB
- greyface- 6y agoWhat's the hash?