11 ms·

Condemning the Deployment of GPT-4chan

44 points by py4 4y ago

junofan 4y ago
It’s pretty silly to suggest to suggest running a bot that posts to 4chan “undermines the responsible practice of AI science.” I don’t think the “AI community”—people with access to lots of GPUs—should also get to be the thought police. Too fragile.
- rob74 4y ago
  Ok, so you think it's a good idea and a worthwile application of AI to create a bot that posts inflammatory answers to a toxic community, making it even more toxic?
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    what will that toxicity do to the surface web that is outside the 4chan/8chan universe?
    - rob74 4y ago
      To cite from the article (open letter? petition? whatever): > a community full of racist, sexist, xenophobic, and hateful speech that has been linked to white-supremacist violence such as the Buffalo shooting last month So the question is not what the toxicity does to the surface web, but what people influenced by it will do to other people.
      - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
        why not shut these websites down?
        sgjohnson 4y ago
        why not shut down everything you don't personally approve of?
        w4ffl35 4y ago
        for some people that's the point of life
        bergenty 4y ago
        sgjohnson 4y ago
        What do you mean?
        bergenty 4y ago
        It’s a violent community. It’s way past due.
        nyberg 4y ago
        Just because 4chan has a higher ratio within specific boards doesn't mean it's any worse than other places given that facebook/twitter which often reward cult-like behaviour and boosts calls to violence. The difference here is that with 4chan it's easier to see unpleasant behaviour given that the two containment boards are easily accessible and observable without much effort. Though take note that not all of the site is represented by those two boards and they are `containment boards`.
        sgjohnson 4y ago
        Furthermore, (I don't have any data on this, but) I'm willing to bet that Facebook's body count is much higher than 4chans, although by indirect means. How many people have commited suicide because of mental health issues directly attributable to Facebook? We don't have the data, but it's certainly a non-0 number.
    - drcongo 4y ago
      You don't think the toxicity of 4chan has ever leaked outside of 4chan? It's not just the web it leaks out into, it leaks out into real life and people die.
      - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
        i know that. i know about all those "lone wolves" who have caused deaths to hundreds. my point is, why not shut these "hate factories" down in the first place? if piratebay admins can be jailed, why not these people? why are we "defending" free speech when we know its harmful?
        bdhcuidbebe 4y ago
        Pirate bay admins are out of jail since long ago and the site is still up. Also, pirate bay never did anything harmful like 4chan, they just made some rich companies lose a little profit.
        sgjohnson 4y ago
        because free speech includes potentially harmful speech and speech someone might find offensive.
        cowtools 4y ago
        If you give up your freedom for safety, you will eventually have neither.
      - w4ffl35 4y ago
        > It's not just the web it leaks out into, it leaks out into real life none of that requires AI
        drcongo 4y ago
        Nobody said it did.
  - alchemist1e9 4y ago
    Seems like you are putting words in OPs mouth. I didn’t see them say it was a “good idea”. There is a lot of things in life that are bad ideas but we don’t stop people from doing them. Why exactly this issue is so important or needs attention? Seems like ignoring it is probably best for everyone.
  - HelloNurse 4y ago
    Trolling a toxic community diverts their hating effort towards false targets. It might not be science, but it is potentially useful.
  - cypress66 4y ago
    Yes
  - efitz 4y ago
    What, you mean like Tay[1] posting to Twitter? [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/microsoft-tay-racist-tweets_n_56f3e678e4b04c4c37615502 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/microsoft-tay-racist-tweets_n...
    - bergenty 4y ago
      And they took it down. Let’s shut 4chan down as well then, right?
      - gkbrk 4y ago
        To be clear; they took down Tay (the racist bot that unethical AI researchers from Microsoft created), not Twitter. So the parallel here would be shutting down the bot itself instead of the website it is posting on. And as far as I know the bot has been taken offline for some time already.
        bergenty 4y ago
        The analogy doesn’t work. The current mods of 4chan are racists that support the ideology. It’s no different than shutting down a site hosted by ISIS.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    I don't see how that's different from biological AI (aka humans) doing the same on those particular websites.
- espadrine 4y ago
  > I don’t think the “AI community”—people with access to lots of GPUs—should also get to be the thought police. I understand how it could be perceived that way. However, I don’t think it is the intent. If nuclear researchers had developed a laissez-faire attitude and commonly dumped large amounts of radioactive material they were testing, into aquifers that people drink from, eventually a perception of the whole nuclear field as toxic and lethal would develop. Since researchers don’t want that perception to develop, they keep each other in check and set safety standards. This is researchers keeping each other in check to avoid another AI winter. Look at it this way: Yannick seemingly had a low enough opinion of 4chan that he felt it was OK to dump one message a minute over a week. Someone out there has a low opinion of HN; if there was no consensus among researchers that doing this is bad, they could similarly unleash bots over HN that pass any CAPTCHA, sound like commenters, and yet have an agenda to prop up various companies or scams.
  - fvdessen 4y ago
    > If nuclear researchers Comparing the dangers of AI research with nuclear research is hyperbole.
    - selfhoster11 4y ago
      Both have the potential to cause vast damage. Nuclear tech gone wrong will poison/kill people outright, whereas AI tech can instead cause a Shiri's Scissor[0] scenario that will collapse a society. [0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
      - shitlord 4y ago
        A 4chan shitposting bot isn't going to collapse society.
        selfhoster11 4y ago
        It had an electoral impact, to some extent. It can't collapse society single-handed (if limited only to 4chan), but it can have deleterious influence.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Personally I think posting to 4chan wasn't that big of a deal. Maybe not a great idea, but 4chan users seem to have caught on (probably because of the high volume). Subsequently uploading the model for everyone to use was a mistake worth condemming. The model was released as public download on HuggingFace [1], and despite being taken down there is now obviously available from torrents. I think it's not hard to imagine how the ability to automate harassment might be abused by other people on other platforms. 1: https://huggingface.co/ykilcher/gpt-4chan https://huggingface.co/ykilcher/gpt-4chan
  - w4ffl35 4y ago
    "imagine the ability might be abused" Imagine instead if people took this sheepish terrified approach to everything in life. edit: and I'm not saying you're wrong. But literally everything can be abused, from guns to telephones to cars. kids turn school supplies into weapons in school. additionally, the big corps abuse the technology they claim moral authority over
Canada 4y ago
Maybe Kilcher can use this to train his next model to generate virtue signalling and grand standing.
- boppo1 4y ago
  How do you collect enough of it?
mschuster91 4y ago
For those OOTL: https://thegradient.pub/gpt-4chan-lessons/ https://thegradient.pub/gpt-4chan-lessons/
blueflow 4y ago
> a community full of racist, sexist, xenophobic, and hateful speech Rookie mistake: Taking that sea of piss seriously. I'm not even sure if /pol/ is not already AI-generated nonsense.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  Funnily enough, you can have pretty decent discussions on pol about economy and such. Sure, there will be lots of shit flung at everyone, but as long as you don't take the bait seriously, its gonna be fine. Better than other forums, even, as you can honestly debate it without fearing that you are stepping on anyones toes.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    sure, unless you happen to step on anyone's pet theory about the jews/illuminati that apparently control the world.
    - Akronymus 4y ago
      I didn't say you wouldn't ever step on someones toes. Just that you don't have to care about it. Let the other person rant and rave and realize you aren't beholden to that person.
- krapp 4y ago
  Are people really still taking the line that 4chan is nothing but edgy teenagers, memes and lulz, and that the straight world just doesn't get the irony? Christ, the copium of 4chan fans is even more potent than Trump supporters.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Its worrisome that some people are living in such comfortable, safe environment that they get away with not ever having to learn to shrug off such nonsense. Stop taking 4chan seriously. If you let yourself be enraged by their words, that's exactly what they want, and it means suffering for you. Never, ever show you are vulnerable to this. Do not feed the trolls.
psyc 4y ago
That’s a lot of signatories. Is pearl clutching a part of AI-Researcher culture?
- jterrys 4y ago
- redox99 4y ago
  Maybe some are afraid of not fitting in, or being "canceled" if they don't condemn this.
- redisman 4y ago
  Gives me very low confidence that these people understand society at all. And they’re supposed to be the gatekeepers? According to… themselves I’m guessing? Ah yes a pompous letter where we list all of our impressive formal accomplishments will surely get these rubes to take their hands off of our toys
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    The only reason they are the gatekeepers, is because they are the ones with all the GPUs. OpenAI seems to be counting on that as their moat vs all the plebs who want to use GPT-3 for "unapproved" purposes, at least.
    - w4ffl35 4y ago
      I think they will try to ban us from the technology, or force us to be registered to use it on their system under supervision. my guess is that the future will involve thumb-printing these models in some way to determine where they came from and who developed them.
      - selfhoster11 4y ago
        Good luck. This will take the ban on unlicensed general-purpose computation - which incidentally, has more and more pieces dropping into place thanks to the wonders of DRM.
Hamuko 4y ago
Has anyone made one for Copilot yet?
- w4ffl35 4y ago
  Hopefully that one is filled with the names of lawyers
qwerty456127 4y ago
Political correctness is evil. Taking political incorrectness serious is a sickness which should be treated with all means, including overwhelming ad absurdum. IMHO.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
  Political correctness in AI: - be me - build pattern-recognition machine - machine recognizes patterns - nooo this pattern is bad There is scarcely anything valuable in 4chan patterns, the interesting ones come from elsewhere. Since leftism and political correctness is based upon ignoring those patterns, thinking they are malleable by gigantic bureaucracies and laws, garnished with a lot of wishful thinking and ignoring historical evidence, hilarity then ensues.
  - hnhg 4y ago
    I don't think trying to coerce behaviour by means of bureaucracies and laws is limited to the left or any part of the political spectrum.
- hnhg 4y ago
  What is political correctness? And what's the opposite of it? I don't have enough information to understand what you're trying to say (plus your grammatical mistakes make it difficult to parse meaning too).
  - paskozdilar 4y ago
    According to Wikipedia, it "is a term used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society". However, the problem is that offense is subjective. Anyone can be offended by anything, and by extension, anyone else can claim that someone else is offended by something. Such subjective policies are often used for tyrannical purposes.
  - qwerty456127 4y ago
    Nice! You seem getting it!
kibibu 4y ago
Language model researchers, like social media developers before them, have built this tech under the presumption that it will be applied only with positive intent. GPT-4chan is about the least worst thing somebody could have done with it.
- heresie-dabord 4y ago
  Yes, much worse is possible. Any good AI/ML language-model implementation will produce results indistinguishable from those of a human... And that is (even in the best of current civilisation) a wide range of capacity and behaviours, the folly of which is usually limited only by societal pressure.
bheadmaster 4y ago
> However, Kilcher’s decision to deploy this bot does not meet any test of reasonableness. His actions deserve censure. He undermines the responsible practice of AI science. What "test of reasonableness" are we talking about? Without any concrete test to look at, doesn't this boil down to "we don't like him and he should be cancelled"?
- wongarsu 4y ago
  It also says "we, the AI community, currently lack community norms around their responsible development and deployment". So they don't have a test, but if they had one then GPT-4chan would fail it. I prefer Dr. Oakden-Rayner's "this would never pass a human research ethics board" as an argument. But in the time where anyone can be an AI researcher on a hobby budget, without review by an ethics board, maybe a "test of reasonableness" or guideline of some sort would be useful to have.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > But in the time where anyone can be an AI researcher on a hobby budget, without review by an ethics board, maybe a "test of reasonableness" or guideline of some sort would be useful to have. Common sense would be enough: Don't involve un-consenting others in your research. Facebook discovered this with the backlash they got in 2014 (!) for doing a/b testing [1], it's not like the question of AI/algorithms being used in malicious ways is something new... even though I'd love to see a blanket ban on A/B testing in general. Users are not guinea pigs and A/B testing can amount to gaslighting. Additionally, the whole world has been debating the influence of racist and other discriminatory language on the Internet since at least 2016 with the election of the 45th. By 2022, it should be very clear where the borders of civilization are, and I believe that that Youtuber should have known that. Side note: We definitely need a societal discussion about Youtube and Tiktok. The amount of extremely vile or dangerous stunts people pull for likes/clicks/monetization on these platforms at the expense of others is immense. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-apologises-psychological-experiments-on-users https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...
chank 4y ago
What exactly do they hope to get out of this? Anyone could have told you this would eventually happen and worse to come. The AI box is open, there is no closing it again. Welcome to the future of the internet.
- FooHentai 4y ago
  Yeah, I've been interested in the long-term effects of this kind of thing for a while and AI posts have been part of the landscape for a long time already. Occasionally you see posts where the image tells you to respond in a particular way to prove you're not an AI (the theory being the AI is taking the text post as an input but not parsing the attached image for text). Sure enough, a portion of replies respond only to the text. Not a concrete test, but interesting nonetheless. All of this feels similar to the late nineties and early 2000s where viruses and spyware proliferated against ill-prepared home computers and their users. Tech & culture eventually got a lid on things (mostly), but not without great loss of innocence and a reduction generally in 'openness'. Online discussion is probably going through a comparable phase, and will suffer a comparable loss of innocence/utility as a result. But a more human-like AI chatbot being thrown into the mix is not some game-changing event, just a logical progression of what's been true for a long time already. Perhaps if nothing else it will increase awareness that this kind of thing is basically everywhere online already, and erode the increasingly inaccurate belief that what we read from 'other people' online is genuine. A loss of innocence, sure, but it's fairly obvious that innocence is being hugely exploited already and has been for some time now. It's perhaps going to be a net neutral thing - While more AI posting and responding will result in some real people wasting time conversing with them and reading their unreal opinions, they're also going to suck in other AI and non-genuine (shill etc) posters and waste their time/posts as well. Where this gets dicey is that posting and responding are not the only two sides of the interaction - You also have real people simply reading and not responding. This is where the main outcomes are generated - What they read and how that influences them onwards is really the battleground being fought over here, and where the wider dangers present. Perhaps everything ultimately descends into a SubRedditSimulator type state and real people gradually withdraw from the whole thing as it becomes useless to them.
  - 4y ago
itomato 4y ago
Hold my beer
ginko 4y ago
I wonder if GPT-4chan could be used for moderation. /pol/ is a containment board and taking those topics to other boards on 4chan is generally not well received. Could you use GPT-4chan to rate how "/pol/-like" a reply is and automatically flag it for moderation if it passes a threshold?
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
Yeah, I don't think GPT-4chan is any more problematic than contributing to AI technology for mass-surveillance and adtech. The "AI community" can fuck off.
PedroBatista 4y ago
As much as 4chan is a cesspool, I fail to see exactly what these guys are expecting out of the whole "AI" thing. Given the recent trends, I suspect they are the gatekeepers, masters of their own Babylon gardens and protectors of the plebes. Just look at the wording and the high pedigree names attached of this. Are we supposed to trust these people and eat whatever cake they throw us from their balconies? Somehow this makes me more sympathetic to 4chan's knuckleheads.
carom 4y ago
This is a poorly designed poll, it only has one option.
donatj 4y ago
Huh, I watched GPT-4chan’s creators video and the whole time I was thinking “this is really in the spirit of 4chan, I’m sure they loved it”, I imagine the actual 4chan user who would be upset about it is few and far between. That seems like the only real “test of reasonableness“, would the person be upset to find out they were talking to an AI. Beyond everything else, the entire setup made it clear it wasn’t a real person. This lead the site on a hunt to figure it out. I would imagine few of the signatories have even visited the site let alone spent time there to get a sense of the community.
- avinassh 4y ago
  Can you provide a link to the video
  - sacredSatan 4y ago
    Here you go: https://youtu.be/efPrtcLdcdM https://youtu.be/efPrtcLdcdM
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
It is important to note that AI research is mostly ethically neutral. It only becomes an ethical issue once someone actually decides to implement it in real life. At this point, the ethic issues is on the person who decided to do it. Engineers who work on a self-driving car who killed someone did their best; the responsibility is on the person who made the decision "It's good enough, let's roll it on the streets". Well, it wasn't good enough but you decided to do it anyway, and now put the blame on the engineers.
- Hizonner 4y ago
  Either the engineers goddamned well knew that would happen, in which case they share the blame, or they are naive idiots, in which case they shouldn't be working on life-critical projects... and therefore share the blame. The same applies to any other technology.
VanTheBrand 4y ago
I bet there are multiple GTP type AI accounts posting to hacker news currently with creators who hope the eventual "reveal" will be "impressive." Curious how they are reacting to this.
- bdhcuidbebe 4y ago
  Probably by randomly downvoting legit discussion.
boredumb 4y ago
In the future truth, humor and morality will be decided by whoever buys the most Nvidia cards.
gkbrk 4y ago
The list of people who signed this is amusing. I am supposed to listen to these experts about using AI ethically? Small selection of people who condemn this "unethical use of AI". - Amazon Alexa (internet connected microphone in your house to sell you things) - Google (collect your data and sell targeted ads to the highest bidder) - Facebook (run experiments to make people more engaged/outraged on the website) - HrFlow (automate biased hiring with the power of AI) - Microsoft (collect data from users, launder a ton of GPL and MIT code without adhering to their license with the power of AI)
- ourlordcaffeine 4y ago
  Condemning this is an easy virtue signal to boost their reputation. If some new startup wanted to use AI to identify women getting abortions and offered good money, I reckon that a lot of the signatories here would be sell-outs and offer their expertise. I don't recall a letter like this in the wake of aggregateiq using ML to interfere in elections or clearview conducting intrusive facial recognition
- Hamuko 4y ago
  To be fair, those people might also disagree (at least to a certain extent) with the bullshit that their employers are doing.
  - gkbrk 4y ago
    Perhaps they disagree, but they don't disagree enough to inconvenience themselves or stop publicly associating with their credentials. In fact they proudly sign public documents with their company name. Maybe a normal person might prefer their salary or position over disagreements like this, that's a fair position. But these people put themselves on a higher moral ground by "condemning unethical use of AI". Clearly they need to be more ethical if they judge others based on this.
- bergenty 4y ago
  That’s just insipid what’s purism on your part. None of these are as bad as something whose only purpose is to spew out hate.
Hizonner 4y ago
Most of the people signing that are building systems that they know will be used to manipulate people into, for example, buying stuff that they don't need. Systems that they know will be used to make half-assed decisions about people's lives (even if they're planning to sit around sanctimonously whining about it). ... but trolling 4Chan, that's a bridge too far. Everybody knows that 4Chan users are there to escape from trolling.
raptor99 4y ago
I'm not sure if this statement and action identifies more as cancel culture or clown world.
throawayaiwoke 4y ago
This doesn't add any links to the model or the video in question. They are not letting it to be easy for the people to judge for themselves. This is just virtue signaling and scoring points for the powers that be. It is very trivially easy to download and fine-tune a large language model to virtually any dataset and generate novel content. The fact that he does it openly and publicly makes him an easy target. It's always the small guys who are easy to cancel. I do not understand the actual harm of this. Someone will use this bot to spam other forums or SNSs? They have their own checks and balances. People who post bad comments or troll around, will not even know about this. They will not even bother. They have enough time sitting in their mums' basements. Why use a language model? They simply won't know how. It is just a demonstration. If the people with the same set of values were in the cybersec industry, they would condemn white-hat penetration testing as something unethical. This just shows that this can be done. Enough governments and political parties around the world take help from generative models and bot-farms to sway public opinion. If the party is in power, companies turn a blind eye. Who knows how many of them use open technologies for bad things. I saw something called deepnude ai, that, for a fee, lets you generate naked bodies of women, consistent enough with her face and body to look very real. These people should be arrested and condemned. Lives can be ruined with this tech. But these people don't know them and don't care. Tur k3y government have made ai powered drones that kill without any human in the loop. These half-pant wearing (literally, as you will see in any ai conference) academics can't do anything to them. Cancel culture is high in ai academia. Timnit Gebru got fired for legit reasons, and these "inclusion" advocates made it a race issue. They just want to cancel this guy, because he has a track record of not conforming to cancel-list made by them. Like he hosted Pedro Domingos once. And people literally commented they won't watch his videos again and condemned him. This is one of the follies of being a "hot field". It becomes everyone's playground to implement their agendas. Now that wokism is the Hegelian dominant ideology, everyone must conform to it. If you want to debate in good faith, I am here. Reply to this comment.
clarionbell 4y ago
Interesting that this is what draw their condemnation, and not, for example, certain algos ranking loan applicants or surveillance programs. It almost feels like they are either nearsighted, or that they saw someone they perceive to be an easy target to attack for some cheap publicity.
arein3 4y ago
Wow, do they just assume that it's horrible because it's from 4chan? That's incredibly ignorant and it's actually propagating stereotypes. From what I know anyone can comment there, why automatically catalog them as horrible?
- no_time 4y ago
  If you look at https://4stats.io/ https://4stats.io/ you can get a rough idea why. Pol is by far the biggest and it's not a fun time. I disagree with the generalization too since I'm very fond of the DIY and photography boards.
  - arein3 4y ago
    I understand the idea and I generally agree with some stereotypes. I was joking because I am amazed by those hypocrite people that have their heads so far down a place, that they don't realize they violate all their righteous principles when it doesn't fit their narrative.
dementiapatie 4y ago
Is it 2004 again? What's next, a news report with scary music showing how hackers from 4chan are exploding vans all around the nation using GPT-4?[1]. [1] https://youtu.be/128IR21ZQa0?t=168 https://youtu.be/128IR21ZQa0?t=168
0x_rs 4y ago
What a truly useless, detached from reality statement. Furthermore, this may be a good indication of intent to keep the most sophisticated models away from public, as it really already is, and behind "ethics boards" and such that only our friendly psychopathic corporations and companies such as "Open" "AI" can afford to have — while still objectively being unethical in everything they do from misusing user data in the most malicious ways possible to lobbying regulators, and the list goes on forever. The knowledge to develop those models, as rudimentary as they may be, is already out there and so is the ability to scrape for content to train with online. They most certainly are already being used for malicious purposes that are beyond spamming some website for fun. What are they going to do, condemn criminals with a strongly worded blogpost too?
LeonTheremin 4y ago
That AI is much less harmful than the posters who created the original posts. There is no anonymity if you connect to 4chan using a Silicon Valley designed processor. The "facts" that wannabe shooters are fed there are highly tailored to what they are predisposed to believe already, because the ones posting have complete surveillance of everyone (including of you who reads this - you can thank Eric Schmidt) and know exactly what to post to create a shooter. Silicon Valley has blood on their hands. 4chan is just one of the places used for these operations. Taking it down doesn't matter, because as long as Silicon Valley continues to spy on everybody and give the data to terrorists, innocent people will continue to be murdered.
wuvyew 4y ago
It is worth pointing out that GPT-4chan was initially publicly released on Hugging Face, but was shut down shortly afterwards: https://huggingface.co/ykilcher/gpt-4chan https://huggingface.co/ykilcher/gpt-4chan For those who want to experiment with it, it is still possible to get the model by torrent: https://archive.org/details/gpt4chan_model https://archive.org/details/gpt4chan_model https://archive.org/details/gpt4chan_model_float16 https://archive.org/details/gpt4chan_model_float16 There is also a direct download mirror here: https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/_notpdf_/gpt4chan_model/ https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/_notpdf_/gpt4chan_model/ https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/_notpdf_/gpt4chan_model_float16/ https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/_notpdf_/gpt4chan_model_float16/ This is a basic outline of how to run it. You need lots of RAM (24GB+) or a large GPU (12GB+): https://pastebin.com/g7rSaCfw https://pastebin.com/g7rSaCfw The claims that this model is a "hate speech generator" are unsubstantiated. It encodes knowledge about a wide range of topics, and most of its output is neutral. GPT-3, with an appropriate pre-prompt, becomes orders of magnitude more dangerous than this.

44 points by py4 4y ago

It’s pretty silly to suggest to suggest running a bot that posts to 4chan “undermines the responsible practice of AI science.” I don’t think the “AI community”—people with access to lots of GPUs—should also get to be the thought police. Too fragile.

rob74 4y ago
Ok, so you think it's a good idea and a worthwile application of AI to create a bot that posts inflammatory answers to a toxic community, making it even more toxic?
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  what will that toxicity do to the surface web that is outside the 4chan/8chan universe?
  - rob74 4y ago
    To cite from the article (open letter? petition? whatever): > a community full of racist, sexist, xenophobic, and hateful speech that has been linked to white-supremacist violence such as the Buffalo shooting last month So the question is not what the toxicity does to the surface web, but what people influenced by it will do to other people.
    - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
      why not shut these websites down?
      - sgjohnson 4y ago
        why not shut down everything you don't personally approve of?
        w4ffl35 4y ago
        for some people that's the point of life
        bergenty 4y ago
        sgjohnson 4y ago
        What do you mean?
        bergenty 4y ago
        It’s a violent community. It’s way past due.
        nyberg 4y ago
        Just because 4chan has a higher ratio within specific boards doesn't mean it's any worse than other places given that facebook/twitter which often reward cult-like behaviour and boosts calls to violence. The difference here is that with 4chan it's easier to see unpleasant behaviour given that the two containment boards are easily accessible and observable without much effort. Though take note that not all of the site is represented by those two boards and they are `containment boards`.
        sgjohnson 4y ago
        Furthermore, (I don't have any data on this, but) I'm willing to bet that Facebook's body count is much higher than 4chans, although by indirect means. How many people have commited suicide because of mental health issues directly attributable to Facebook? We don't have the data, but it's certainly a non-0 number.
  - drcongo 4y ago
    You don't think the toxicity of 4chan has ever leaked outside of 4chan? It's not just the web it leaks out into, it leaks out into real life and people die.
    - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
      i know that. i know about all those "lone wolves" who have caused deaths to hundreds. my point is, why not shut these "hate factories" down in the first place? if piratebay admins can be jailed, why not these people? why are we "defending" free speech when we know its harmful?
      - bdhcuidbebe 4y ago
        Pirate bay admins are out of jail since long ago and the site is still up. Also, pirate bay never did anything harmful like 4chan, they just made some rich companies lose a little profit.
      - sgjohnson 4y ago
        because free speech includes potentially harmful speech and speech someone might find offensive.
      - cowtools 4y ago
        If you give up your freedom for safety, you will eventually have neither.
    - w4ffl35 4y ago
      > It's not just the web it leaks out into, it leaks out into real life none of that requires AI
      - drcongo 4y ago
        Nobody said it did.
- alchemist1e9 4y ago
  Seems like you are putting words in OPs mouth. I didn’t see them say it was a “good idea”. There is a lot of things in life that are bad ideas but we don’t stop people from doing them. Why exactly this issue is so important or needs attention? Seems like ignoring it is probably best for everyone.
- HelloNurse 4y ago
  Trolling a toxic community diverts their hating effort towards false targets. It might not be science, but it is potentially useful.
- cypress66 4y ago
  Yes
- efitz 4y ago
  What, you mean like Tay[1] posting to Twitter? [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/microsoft-tay-racist-tweets_n_56f3e678e4b04c4c37615502 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/microsoft-tay-racist-tweets_n...
  - bergenty 4y ago
    And they took it down. Let’s shut 4chan down as well then, right?
    - gkbrk 4y ago
      To be clear; they took down Tay (the racist bot that unethical AI researchers from Microsoft created), not Twitter. So the parallel here would be shutting down the bot itself instead of the website it is posting on. And as far as I know the bot has been taken offline for some time already.
      - bergenty 4y ago
        The analogy doesn’t work. The current mods of 4chan are racists that support the ideology. It’s no different than shutting down a site hosted by ISIS.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  I don't see how that's different from biological AI (aka humans) doing the same on those particular websites.
espadrine 4y ago
> I don’t think the “AI community”—people with access to lots of GPUs—should also get to be the thought police. I understand how it could be perceived that way. However, I don’t think it is the intent. If nuclear researchers had developed a laissez-faire attitude and commonly dumped large amounts of radioactive material they were testing, into aquifers that people drink from, eventually a perception of the whole nuclear field as toxic and lethal would develop. Since researchers don’t want that perception to develop, they keep each other in check and set safety standards. This is researchers keeping each other in check to avoid another AI winter. Look at it this way: Yannick seemingly had a low enough opinion of 4chan that he felt it was OK to dump one message a minute over a week. Someone out there has a low opinion of HN; if there was no consensus among researchers that doing this is bad, they could similarly unleash bots over HN that pass any CAPTCHA, sound like commenters, and yet have an agenda to prop up various companies or scams.
- fvdessen 4y ago
  > If nuclear researchers Comparing the dangers of AI research with nuclear research is hyperbole.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    Both have the potential to cause vast damage. Nuclear tech gone wrong will poison/kill people outright, whereas AI tech can instead cause a Shiri's Scissor[0] scenario that will collapse a society. [0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
    - shitlord 4y ago
      A 4chan shitposting bot isn't going to collapse society.
      - selfhoster11 4y ago
        It had an electoral impact, to some extent. It can't collapse society single-handed (if limited only to 4chan), but it can have deleterious influence.
wongarsu 4y ago
Personally I think posting to 4chan wasn't that big of a deal. Maybe not a great idea, but 4chan users seem to have caught on (probably because of the high volume). Subsequently uploading the model for everyone to use was a mistake worth condemming. The model was released as public download on HuggingFace [1], and despite being taken down there is now obviously available from torrents. I think it's not hard to imagine how the ability to automate harassment might be abused by other people on other platforms. 1: https://huggingface.co/ykilcher/gpt-4chan https://huggingface.co/ykilcher/gpt-4chan
- w4ffl35 4y ago
  "imagine the ability might be abused" Imagine instead if people took this sheepish terrified approach to everything in life. edit: and I'm not saying you're wrong. But literally everything can be abused, from guns to telephones to cars. kids turn school supplies into weapons in school. additionally, the big corps abuse the technology they claim moral authority over

Canada 4y ago

Maybe Kilcher can use this to train his next model to generate virtue signalling and grand standing.

boppo1 4y ago
How do you collect enough of it?

mschuster91 4y ago

For those OOTL: https://thegradient.pub/gpt-4chan-lessons/ https://thegradient.pub/gpt-4chan-lessons/

blueflow 4y ago

> a community full of racist, sexist, xenophobic, and hateful speech Rookie mistake: Taking that sea of piss seriously. I'm not even sure if /pol/ is not already AI-generated nonsense.

Akronymus 4y ago
Funnily enough, you can have pretty decent discussions on pol about economy and such. Sure, there will be lots of shit flung at everyone, but as long as you don't take the bait seriously, its gonna be fine. Better than other forums, even, as you can honestly debate it without fearing that you are stepping on anyones toes.
- cowtools 4y ago
  sure, unless you happen to step on anyone's pet theory about the jews/illuminati that apparently control the world.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    I didn't say you wouldn't ever step on someones toes. Just that you don't have to care about it. Let the other person rant and rave and realize you aren't beholden to that person.
krapp 4y ago
Are people really still taking the line that 4chan is nothing but edgy teenagers, memes and lulz, and that the straight world just doesn't get the irony? Christ, the copium of 4chan fans is even more potent than Trump supporters.
- blueflow 4y ago
  Its worrisome that some people are living in such comfortable, safe environment that they get away with not ever having to learn to shrug off such nonsense. Stop taking 4chan seriously. If you let yourself be enraged by their words, that's exactly what they want, and it means suffering for you. Never, ever show you are vulnerable to this. Do not feed the trolls.

psyc 4y ago

That’s a lot of signatories. Is pearl clutching a part of AI-Researcher culture?

jterrys 4y ago
redox99 4y ago
Maybe some are afraid of not fitting in, or being "canceled" if they don't condemn this.
redisman 4y ago
Gives me very low confidence that these people understand society at all. And they’re supposed to be the gatekeepers? According to… themselves I’m guessing? Ah yes a pompous letter where we list all of our impressive formal accomplishments will surely get these rubes to take their hands off of our toys
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  The only reason they are the gatekeepers, is because they are the ones with all the GPUs. OpenAI seems to be counting on that as their moat vs all the plebs who want to use GPT-3 for "unapproved" purposes, at least.
  - w4ffl35 4y ago
    I think they will try to ban us from the technology, or force us to be registered to use it on their system under supervision. my guess is that the future will involve thumb-printing these models in some way to determine where they came from and who developed them.
    - selfhoster11 4y ago
      Good luck. This will take the ban on unlicensed general-purpose computation - which incidentally, has more and more pieces dropping into place thanks to the wonders of DRM.

Hamuko 4y ago

Has anyone made one for Copilot yet?

w4ffl35 4y ago
Hopefully that one is filled with the names of lawyers

qwerty456127 4y ago

Political correctness is evil. Taking political incorrectness serious is a sickness which should be treated with all means, including overwhelming ad absurdum. IMHO.

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
Political correctness in AI: - be me - build pattern-recognition machine - machine recognizes patterns - nooo this pattern is bad There is scarcely anything valuable in 4chan patterns, the interesting ones come from elsewhere. Since leftism and political correctness is based upon ignoring those patterns, thinking they are malleable by gigantic bureaucracies and laws, garnished with a lot of wishful thinking and ignoring historical evidence, hilarity then ensues.
- hnhg 4y ago
  I don't think trying to coerce behaviour by means of bureaucracies and laws is limited to the left or any part of the political spectrum.
hnhg 4y ago
What is political correctness? And what's the opposite of it? I don't have enough information to understand what you're trying to say (plus your grammatical mistakes make it difficult to parse meaning too).
- paskozdilar 4y ago
  According to Wikipedia, it "is a term used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society". However, the problem is that offense is subjective. Anyone can be offended by anything, and by extension, anyone else can claim that someone else is offended by something. Such subjective policies are often used for tyrannical purposes.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  Nice! You seem getting it!

kibibu 4y ago

Language model researchers, like social media developers before them, have built this tech under the presumption that it will be applied only with positive intent. GPT-4chan is about the least worst thing somebody could have done with it.

heresie-dabord 4y ago
Yes, much worse is possible. Any good AI/ML language-model implementation will produce results indistinguishable from those of a human... And that is (even in the best of current civilisation) a wide range of capacity and behaviours, the folly of which is usually limited only by societal pressure.

bheadmaster 4y ago

> However, Kilcher’s decision to deploy this bot does not meet any test of reasonableness. His actions deserve censure. He undermines the responsible practice of AI science. What "test of reasonableness" are we talking about? Without any concrete test to look at, doesn't this boil down to "we don't like him and he should be cancelled"?

wongarsu 4y ago
It also says "we, the AI community, currently lack community norms around their responsible development and deployment". So they don't have a test, but if they had one then GPT-4chan would fail it. I prefer Dr. Oakden-Rayner's "this would never pass a human research ethics board" as an argument. But in the time where anyone can be an AI researcher on a hobby budget, without review by an ethics board, maybe a "test of reasonableness" or guideline of some sort would be useful to have.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > But in the time where anyone can be an AI researcher on a hobby budget, without review by an ethics board, maybe a "test of reasonableness" or guideline of some sort would be useful to have. Common sense would be enough: Don't involve un-consenting others in your research. Facebook discovered this with the backlash they got in 2014 (!) for doing a/b testing [1], it's not like the question of AI/algorithms being used in malicious ways is something new... even though I'd love to see a blanket ban on A/B testing in general. Users are not guinea pigs and A/B testing can amount to gaslighting. Additionally, the whole world has been debating the influence of racist and other discriminatory language on the Internet since at least 2016 with the election of the 45th. By 2022, it should be very clear where the borders of civilization are, and I believe that that Youtuber should have known that. Side note: We definitely need a societal discussion about Youtube and Tiktok. The amount of extremely vile or dangerous stunts people pull for likes/clicks/monetization on these platforms at the expense of others is immense. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-apologises-psychological-experiments-on-users https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...

chank 4y ago

What exactly do they hope to get out of this? Anyone could have told you this would eventually happen and worse to come. The AI box is open, there is no closing it again. Welcome to the future of the internet.

FooHentai 4y ago
Yeah, I've been interested in the long-term effects of this kind of thing for a while and AI posts have been part of the landscape for a long time already. Occasionally you see posts where the image tells you to respond in a particular way to prove you're not an AI (the theory being the AI is taking the text post as an input but not parsing the attached image for text). Sure enough, a portion of replies respond only to the text. Not a concrete test, but interesting nonetheless. All of this feels similar to the late nineties and early 2000s where viruses and spyware proliferated against ill-prepared home computers and their users. Tech & culture eventually got a lid on things (mostly), but not without great loss of innocence and a reduction generally in 'openness'. Online discussion is probably going through a comparable phase, and will suffer a comparable loss of innocence/utility as a result. But a more human-like AI chatbot being thrown into the mix is not some game-changing event, just a logical progression of what's been true for a long time already. Perhaps if nothing else it will increase awareness that this kind of thing is basically everywhere online already, and erode the increasingly inaccurate belief that what we read from 'other people' online is genuine. A loss of innocence, sure, but it's fairly obvious that innocence is being hugely exploited already and has been for some time now. It's perhaps going to be a net neutral thing - While more AI posting and responding will result in some real people wasting time conversing with them and reading their unreal opinions, they're also going to suck in other AI and non-genuine (shill etc) posters and waste their time/posts as well. Where this gets dicey is that posting and responding are not the only two sides of the interaction - You also have real people simply reading and not responding. This is where the main outcomes are generated - What they read and how that influences them onwards is really the battleground being fought over here, and where the wider dangers present. Perhaps everything ultimately descends into a SubRedditSimulator type state and real people gradually withdraw from the whole thing as it becomes useless to them.
- 4y ago

itomato 4y ago

Hold my beer

ginko 4y ago

I wonder if GPT-4chan could be used for moderation. /pol/ is a containment board and taking those topics to other boards on 4chan is generally not well received. Could you use GPT-4chan to rate how "/pol/-like" a reply is and automatically flag it for moderation if it passes a threshold?

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

Yeah, I don't think GPT-4chan is any more problematic than contributing to AI technology for mass-surveillance and adtech. The "AI community" can fuck off.

PedroBatista 4y ago

As much as 4chan is a cesspool, I fail to see exactly what these guys are expecting out of the whole "AI" thing. Given the recent trends, I suspect they are the gatekeepers, masters of their own Babylon gardens and protectors of the plebes. Just look at the wording and the high pedigree names attached of this. Are we supposed to trust these people and eat whatever cake they throw us from their balconies? Somehow this makes me more sympathetic to 4chan's knuckleheads.

carom 4y ago

This is a poorly designed poll, it only has one option.

donatj 4y ago

Huh, I watched GPT-4chan’s creators video and the whole time I was thinking “this is really in the spirit of 4chan, I’m sure they loved it”, I imagine the actual 4chan user who would be upset about it is few and far between. That seems like the only real “test of reasonableness“, would the person be upset to find out they were talking to an AI. Beyond everything else, the entire setup made it clear it wasn’t a real person. This lead the site on a hunt to figure it out. I would imagine few of the signatories have even visited the site let alone spent time there to get a sense of the community.

avinassh 4y ago
Can you provide a link to the video
- sacredSatan 4y ago
  Here you go: https://youtu.be/efPrtcLdcdM https://youtu.be/efPrtcLdcdM

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

It is important to note that AI research is mostly ethically neutral. It only becomes an ethical issue once someone actually decides to implement it in real life. At this point, the ethic issues is on the person who decided to do it. Engineers who work on a self-driving car who killed someone did their best; the responsibility is on the person who made the decision "It's good enough, let's roll it on the streets". Well, it wasn't good enough but you decided to do it anyway, and now put the blame on the engineers.

Hizonner 4y ago
Either the engineers goddamned well knew that would happen, in which case they share the blame, or they are naive idiots, in which case they shouldn't be working on life-critical projects... and therefore share the blame. The same applies to any other technology.

VanTheBrand 4y ago

I bet there are multiple GTP type AI accounts posting to hacker news currently with creators who hope the eventual "reveal" will be "impressive." Curious how they are reacting to this.

bdhcuidbebe 4y ago
Probably by randomly downvoting legit discussion.

boredumb 4y ago

In the future truth, humor and morality will be decided by whoever buys the most Nvidia cards.

gkbrk 4y ago

The list of people who signed this is amusing. I am supposed to listen to these experts about using AI ethically? Small selection of people who condemn this "unethical use of AI". - Amazon Alexa (internet connected microphone in your house to sell you things) - Google (collect your data and sell targeted ads to the highest bidder) - Facebook (run experiments to make people more engaged/outraged on the website) - HrFlow (automate biased hiring with the power of AI) - Microsoft (collect data from users, launder a ton of GPL and MIT code without adhering to their license with the power of AI)

ourlordcaffeine 4y ago
Condemning this is an easy virtue signal to boost their reputation. If some new startup wanted to use AI to identify women getting abortions and offered good money, I reckon that a lot of the signatories here would be sell-outs and offer their expertise. I don't recall a letter like this in the wake of aggregateiq using ML to interfere in elections or clearview conducting intrusive facial recognition
Hamuko 4y ago
To be fair, those people might also disagree (at least to a certain extent) with the bullshit that their employers are doing.
- gkbrk 4y ago
  Perhaps they disagree, but they don't disagree enough to inconvenience themselves or stop publicly associating with their credentials. In fact they proudly sign public documents with their company name. Maybe a normal person might prefer their salary or position over disagreements like this, that's a fair position. But these people put themselves on a higher moral ground by "condemning unethical use of AI". Clearly they need to be more ethical if they judge others based on this.
bergenty 4y ago
That’s just insipid what’s purism on your part. None of these are as bad as something whose only purpose is to spew out hate.

Hizonner 4y ago

Most of the people signing that are building systems that they know will be used to manipulate people into, for example, buying stuff that they don't need. Systems that they know will be used to make half-assed decisions about people's lives (even if they're planning to sit around sanctimonously whining about it). ... but trolling 4Chan, that's a bridge too far. Everybody knows that 4Chan users are there to escape from trolling.

raptor99 4y ago

I'm not sure if this statement and action identifies more as cancel culture or clown world.

throawayaiwoke 4y ago

This doesn't add any links to the model or the video in question. They are not letting it to be easy for the people to judge for themselves. This is just virtue signaling and scoring points for the powers that be. It is very trivially easy to download and fine-tune a large language model to virtually any dataset and generate novel content. The fact that he does it openly and publicly makes him an easy target. It's always the small guys who are easy to cancel. I do not understand the actual harm of this. Someone will use this bot to spam other forums or SNSs? They have their own checks and balances. People who post bad comments or troll around, will not even know about this. They will not even bother. They have enough time sitting in their mums' basements. Why use a language model? They simply won't know how. It is just a demonstration. If the people with the same set of values were in the cybersec industry, they would condemn white-hat penetration testing as something unethical. This just shows that this can be done. Enough governments and political parties around the world take help from generative models and bot-farms to sway public opinion. If the party is in power, companies turn a blind eye. Who knows how many of them use open technologies for bad things. I saw something called deepnude ai, that, for a fee, lets you generate naked bodies of women, consistent enough with her face and body to look very real. These people should be arrested and condemned. Lives can be ruined with this tech. But these people don't know them and don't care. Tur k3y government have made ai powered drones that kill without any human in the loop. These half-pant wearing (literally, as you will see in any ai conference) academics can't do anything to them. Cancel culture is high in ai academia. Timnit Gebru got fired for legit reasons, and these "inclusion" advocates made it a race issue. They just want to cancel this guy, because he has a track record of not conforming to cancel-list made by them. Like he hosted Pedro Domingos once. And people literally commented they won't watch his videos again and condemned him. This is one of the follies of being a "hot field". It becomes everyone's playground to implement their agendas. Now that wokism is the Hegelian dominant ideology, everyone must conform to it. If you want to debate in good faith, I am here. Reply to this comment.

clarionbell 4y ago

Interesting that this is what draw their condemnation, and not, for example, certain algos ranking loan applicants or surveillance programs. It almost feels like they are either nearsighted, or that they saw someone they perceive to be an easy target to attack for some cheap publicity.

arein3 4y ago

Wow, do they just assume that it's horrible because it's from 4chan? That's incredibly ignorant and it's actually propagating stereotypes. From what I know anyone can comment there, why automatically catalog them as horrible?

no_time 4y ago
If you look at https://4stats.io/ https://4stats.io/ you can get a rough idea why. Pol is by far the biggest and it's not a fun time. I disagree with the generalization too since I'm very fond of the DIY and photography boards.
- arein3 4y ago
  I understand the idea and I generally agree with some stereotypes. I was joking because I am amazed by those hypocrite people that have their heads so far down a place, that they don't realize they violate all their righteous principles when it doesn't fit their narrative.

dementiapatie 4y ago

Is it 2004 again? What's next, a news report with scary music showing how hackers from 4chan are exploding vans all around the nation using GPT-4?[1]. [1] https://youtu.be/128IR21ZQa0?t=168 https://youtu.be/128IR21ZQa0?t=168

0x_rs 4y ago

What a truly useless, detached from reality statement. Furthermore, this may be a good indication of intent to keep the most sophisticated models away from public, as it really already is, and behind "ethics boards" and such that only our friendly psychopathic corporations and companies such as "Open" "AI" can afford to have — while still objectively being unethical in everything they do from misusing user data in the most malicious ways possible to lobbying regulators, and the list goes on forever. The knowledge to develop those models, as rudimentary as they may be, is already out there and so is the ability to scrape for content to train with online. They most certainly are already being used for malicious purposes that are beyond spamming some website for fun. What are they going to do, condemn criminals with a strongly worded blogpost too?

LeonTheremin 4y ago

That AI is much less harmful than the posters who created the original posts. There is no anonymity if you connect to 4chan using a Silicon Valley designed processor. The "facts" that wannabe shooters are fed there are highly tailored to what they are predisposed to believe already, because the ones posting have complete surveillance of everyone (including of you who reads this - you can thank Eric Schmidt) and know exactly what to post to create a shooter. Silicon Valley has blood on their hands. 4chan is just one of the places used for these operations. Taking it down doesn't matter, because as long as Silicon Valley continues to spy on everybody and give the data to terrorists, innocent people will continue to be murdered.

wuvyew 4y ago

It is worth pointing out that GPT-4chan was initially publicly released on Hugging Face, but was shut down shortly afterwards: https://huggingface.co/ykilcher/gpt-4chan https://huggingface.co/ykilcher/gpt-4chan For those who want to experiment with it, it is still possible to get the model by torrent: https://archive.org/details/gpt4chan_model https://archive.org/details/gpt4chan_model https://archive.org/details/gpt4chan_model_float16 https://archive.org/details/gpt4chan_model_float16 There is also a direct download mirror here: https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/_notpdf_/gpt4chan_model/ https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/_notpdf_/gpt4chan_model/ https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/_notpdf_/gpt4chan_model_float16/ https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/_notpdf_/gpt4chan_model_float16/ This is a basic outline of how to run it. You need lots of RAM (24GB+) or a large GPU (12GB+): https://pastebin.com/g7rSaCfw https://pastebin.com/g7rSaCfw The claims that this model is a "hate speech generator" are unsubstantiated. It encodes knowledge about a wide range of topics, and most of its output is neutral. GPT-3, with an appropriate pre-prompt, becomes orders of magnitude more dangerous than this.