8 ms·
I love the initiative, but I'm starting to get scared of what a post-GPT-3 world will look like. We are already struggling to distinguish fake news from real on
by anticristi 6y ago
I love the initiative, but I'm starting to get scared of what a post-GPT-3 world will look like. We are already struggling to distinguish fake news from real ones, automated customer request replies from genuine replies, etc. How will I know that I have a conversation with a real human in the future?
On the other side, the prospect of having an oracle that answers all trivia, fixes spelling and grammar, and allows humans to focus on higher level information processing is interesting.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y agoPhotoshop has existed for decades. Is it really that big of a problem for photo news?
- technocratius 6y agoThe difference between Photoshop and generative models is not in what it can technically achieve, but the cost of achieving the desired result. Fake news photo or text generation is possible by humans, but scales poorly compared (more humans) to a algorithmically automated process (some more compute).
- draugadrotten 6y agoYes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Hajj_photographs_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Hajj_photographs_controv... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55140848 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55140848 and many more
- Agentlien 6y agoWow, that first Adnan Hajj photograph looks absolutely terrible.
- danielscrubs 6y agoTouch ups where done before photoshop but now it’s ALWAYS done. The issues this has created in society might have a bigger emotional impact than we give it credit for. Regarding photo news there has been quite a lot of scandals to the point that I’d guess the touchups is more or less accepted.
- Pyramus 6y agoI conducted a workshop in media compentency for teenage girls and one of the key learnings was that every image of a female subject they encounter in printed media (this was before Instagram) has been retouched. To hammer the point home I let them retouch a picture by themselves to see what is possible even for a completely untrained manipulator. It was eye-opening - one of the things that should absolutely be taught in school but isn't.
- IndySun 6y ago"one of the things that should absolutely be taught in school but isn't." Namely, critical thinking?
- darkwater 6y agoI don't think "critical thinking" is the point here. Because first you need to know that such modifications CAN be done. And not everybody knows what can be retouched with PS or programs. So yeah, if you see some super-model on a magazine cover, and you don't know PS can edit photos easily, it would be not that immediate to think "hey maybe that's not real!". As an extreme example: would you ever checked 20 years ago a newspaper text to know if it was generated by an AI or by a human? Obviously no, because you didn't know of any AI that could do that.
- Pyramus 6y agoExactly this. There is a secondary aspect of becoming aware that society has agreed on beauty standards (different for different societies) and PS being used as a means to adhere to these standards.
- IndySun 6y agoI think I made my point badly because I also agree. I am lamenting that teenagers were, in this day and age, surprised at what can be done with Photoshop. And that let loose on the appropriate software were surprised at what can be altered and how easily. My point is suggesting this may be so because people have not been taught how to think for themselves and accept things (in this case female images) 'as is', without a hint of curiosity. It is also a problem but at the other end of the stick, with many young people I work with considering Wikipedia to be 100% full of misinformation and fake news.
- Rastonbury 6y agoThe concern is not so much AI generated news, but malicious actors misleading, influencing or scamming people online at scale with realistic conversations. Today we already have large scale automated scams via email and robo call. Less scalable scams like Tinder love catfish scams or Russian/China trolls on reddit are now run by real people, imagine it being automated. If human moderators cannot distinguish these bots from real humans, that is a scary thought, imagine not being able to tell if this comment was written by a human or robot.
- hooande 6y agowhy does this matter? the internet is filled with millions of very low quality human generated discussions right now. There might not be much of a difference between thousands of humans generating comment spam and thousands of gpt-3 instances doing the same
- mekkkkkk 6y agoIt does matter. The nice feeling of being one of many is a feature of echo chambers. If you can create that artificially for anything with a push of a button, it's a powerful tool to edit discourse or radicalize people. Have a look at Russias interference in the previous US election. This is what they did, but manually. To be able to scale and automate it is huge.
- ccozan 6y agoBut careful, the human psyche has some kind of tipping point. Too much fake news, and it will flip. Too less, no real influence is made. The exact balance must be orchestrated by a human.
- visarga 6y ago> imagine not being able to tell if this comment was written by a human or robot I think neural nets could help finding fake news and factual mistakes. Then it wouldn't matter who wrote it if it is helpful and true.
- Yetanfou 6y agoThat is like saying "black powder has existed for centuries, are nuclear weapons really that big a problem?". The difference between an image editor like Photoshop and an automated image generation program is the far greater production capacity, speed, the lower cost and the fact that anyone with the right equipment can use it whereas the end result of of an image editor only is as good as the person using it,
- turing_complete 6y agoDon't read news. Go to original sources and scientific papers. If you really want to understand something, a news website should only be your starting point to look for keywords. That is true today as it will be "post-GPT-3".
- yread 6y agoPrimary sources need to be approached with caution https://clas.uiowa.edu/history/teaching-and-writing-center/guides/source-identification/primary-source https://clas.uiowa.edu/history/teaching-and-writing-center/g...
- gmueckl 6y agoAnd so does every other source. You can play that analysis game with any source material. The problem is that the accuracy and detail of the reporting usually fades with each step towards mass media content.
- savolai 6y agoThis scales badly today and will scale even worse in the future. Those without education or time resources will at best manage to read the news. Humanity will need a low effort way to relay reliable information to more of it's members.
- anticristi 6y agoBesides the time scalability aspect highlighted by someone else, I am worried that GPT-3 will have the potential to produce even "fake scientific papers". Our trust fabric is already quite fragile post-truth. GPT-3 might make it even more fragile.
- op03 6y agoI wouldn't worry about the science bit. No one worries about the university library getting larger and larger or how its going to confuse or misguide people even though everyone knows there are many books in there, full of errors, outdated information, badly written, boring etc etc etc. Why? Cause there is always someone on campus who knows something about a subject to guide you to the right stuff.
- taneq 6y agoThe fake news thing is a real problem (and may become worse under GPT3 but certainly exists already). As for the others - to quote Westworld, "if you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?"
- Drakim 6y agoWhat scares me personally is the idea that I might be floating in a sea of uncanny valley content. Content that's 98% human-like, but then that 2% sticks out like a nail and snaps me out of it. Sure, I might not be able to tell the difference the majority of the time, but when I can tell the difference it's gonna bother me a lot.
- mistermann 6y agoDo you not already have this feeling on a fairly regular basis? (Serious question)
- fakedang 6y agoTo me, a lot of content seems to be digital marketing horseshit tbh.
- phreeza 6y agoGenuine question, why is this a problem? Sure, someone may be able to generate thousands of real-sounding fake news articles, but it's not like they will also be able to flood the New York Times with these articles. How do you worry you will be exposed to these articles?
- xerxespoy 6y agoJournalists are paid by the word.
- hnlmorg 6y agoIf recent times have told us anything, it's that the biggest distributor of "news" is social media. And worse still, people generally have no interest in researching the items they read. If "fake news" confirms their pre-existing bias then they will automatically believe it. If real news disagrees with their biases then it is considered fake. So in theory, the rise of deep fakes could lead to more people getting suckered into conspiracy theories and other such extreme opinions. We've already seen a small trend this way with low resolution images of different people with vaguely similar physical features because used as "evidence" of actors in hospitals / shootings / terrorist scenes / etc. That all said, I don't see this as a reason not to pursue GPT-3. From that regard the proverbial genie is already out of the bottle. What we need to work on is a better framework for distributing knowledge.
- normanmatrix 6y agoYou will not. Welcome to the scary generative future.
- anticristi 6y agoI was hoping for a "yes, we can" attitude here. :D
- Agentlien 6y agoDeep fakes still feel quite uncanny valley to me. Even if they move beyond that convincing fake images have existed for a long while. As for support, I don't really see why it matters if I'm talking to a clever script or an unmotivated human.
- falcor84 6y ago> already struggling to distinguish ... automated customer request replies from genuine replies I hope it's not only due to a decline in the quality of human support. If we could have really useful automated support agents, I for one would applaud that.
- anticristi 6y agoI agree. As long as it is transparent that I am speaking to an automated agent and I can easily escalate the issue to a human that can solve my problem when the agent gets stuck.
- bencollier49 6y agoWe'll go full circle and you'll be forced to meet people in person again.
- gianlucahmd 6y agoWe already live in a post-GPT3 world, but one where all its power is the hands of a private company. The conversation needs to move on whether making it open and democratic is a good idea, but the tech itself is here to stay.
- stellaathena 6y agoEleutherAI’s unofficial motto is “anything safe enough for Microsoft to sell for profit is safe enough to release.” You’re kidding yourself if you think Microsoft cares who they sell it to. There are worthwhile conversations to have about democratizing technology, but this stuff is already out there regardless of what you or I do.
- dkjaudyeqooe 6y agoI know! One day it's going to get so bad people are going to have to deploy critical thinking instead of accepting what they read at face value and suffer the indignity of having to think for themselves.
- gmueckl 6y agoCritical thinking won't help you when the majority (or all) of your sources are tainted and contradictory. At some point, the actual truth just gets swamped.
- inglor_cz 6y agoThis. Robots can spout 1000x more content than humans, if not more.
- spion 6y agoThis is already happening, just with humans networked into social networks that favor quick reshare over deep review
- thelastwave 6y ago"the actual truth"
- hooande 6y ago10,000 years of human civilization and this hasn't happened yet, huh? Any day now, I'm sure
- emphatizer2000 6y agoMaybe somebody could create an AI that evaluates the factfulness of articles.
- visarga 6y agoThis is possible, especially with human in the loop.
- 6y ago
- visarga 6y ago> How will I know that I have a conversation with a real human in the future? This problem should be solved with cryptography, not by banning large neural nets.
- namelosw 6y agoIt's likely to be bad, such as: Massively plagiarize articles and the search engine probably have no way to identify which is the original content. It's like to rewrite everything on the internet using your own words, this may lead to the internet filled with this kind of garbage. Reddit and platforms alike filled with bots say bullshits all the time but hard to identify by the human in the first place (current model is pretty good at generating metaphysical bullshits, but rarely insightful content). People may be surrounded by bot bullshitters and trolls, and very few of them are real. Scams at larger scales. The skillset is essentially like customer service plus bad intentions. With new models, scammers can do their things at scale and find qualified victims more efficiently.
- stellaathena 6y agoIt’s a lot less expensive to hire a dozen teenagers to write fake news than use GPT-3. The cost to train GPT-3 is about the same as the cost to hire 1,000 people and pay them $10/hour to write responses for a year. Not to mention the fact that inference isn’t free.