4 ms·
This is the hydrogen bomb of propaganda. Imagine assigning every single living human being a dedicated 24/7 con artist to follow them around and convince them
by api 4y ago
This is the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.
Imagine assigning every single living human being a dedicated 24/7 con artist to follow them around and convince them of something. That's what will soon be possible if not already. It will be intimate con artistry at scale driven by big data, a massive DDOS attack on human cognition and our ability to conduct any form of honest discourse.
What hustlers, trolls, and completely amoral companies will do is bad enough. Now throw in state sponsored intelligence agencies, propaganda farms, militaries, special interest groups, and political parties.
Usually I'm anything but a luddite, but with this I can't help but think of many more evil uses than good ones. It doesn't help that the principal business models of the (consumer) Internet seem to center around surveillance, advertising, propaganda, and addictive forms of entertainment (like slot-machine-like mobile games) designed to suck money or time out of people.
Lesser but also very bad concerns include: the end of useful search engines due to a deluge of continuously learning adversarial SEO spam, the collapse of pretty much any open online forum due to same, and addictive "virtual friend" / "virtual relationship partner" hyper-sophisticated chatbots that hook vulnerable lonely people and then empty their bank accounts in various ways.
I really don't fear AI itself. I fear what human beings will do with AI.
- Konohamaru 4y ago> Imagine assigning every single living human being a dedicated 24/7 con artist to follow them around and convince them of something. This sounds like traditional Christian teaching of the role of demons.
- api 4y agoWe invented Satan and his minions to make people click ads.
- mgraczyk 4y ago> It will be intimate con artistry at scale driven by big data, a massive DDOS attack on human cognition and our ability to conduct any form of honest discourse. This is an unfounded fear. For one thing, if the value in doing this is high then it's already cheap enough to be practical. The Chinese govt can pay millions of people to do this to dozens of people each. They basically do this already, for specific topics and issues. LLMs won't significantly move the needle here. Second, are you proposing that attempts to stop Facebook from releasing models will somehow slow down or stop the Chinese, US, or Russian governments? What's the goal, to buy us 6 months? I would much rather the technology be out in the open for everyone to research and understand vs accessible only to state actors or huge tech companies.
- api 4y agoThe difference between this and a troll farm is like the difference between machine guns and lines of soldiers manually loading and firing muskets. Yes both can be used to gun down a lot of people, but machine guns are much faster and cheaper. Mechanized warfare is coming to propaganda and con artistry. I'm not necessarily arguing for intervention to stop this release or something like that. The cat is out of the bag. There's no stopping it. This is going to happen, so get ready for it. Oh, and throw in deepfakes. You'll have automatic con artistry at scale that can incorporate personalized fake audio and video on demand depicting any supporting detail it needs. It'll be like assigning each person a con artist who's also supported by a staff of content producers.
- mgraczyk 4y agoI guess, but on the flip side there are potentially transformative positive applications that we already know about and have yet to discover. Fundamentally some people are more optimistic and risk-loving when it comes to new technology. I believe the "good" will overwhelmingly outweigh the "bad" that you're pointing out. I think it mostly comes down to personality.
- api 4y agoI can think of some positive applications. The thing that makes me cynical here is that all the evil applications seem like they're going to be far more profitable in terms of either money or power. This would be a continuation of what's happened to the Internet in the last 10-15 years. The Internet is amazing and has tons of incredibly positive uses but all the money is in mass surveillance, addictive "engagement maximizing" stuff, and gambling and scams.