4 ms·

Plain text is already weaponized without AI. The news media is brainwashing people into some opinion or the other every day. It's very rarely the whole truth.

ReptileMan 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cocacola1 4y ago
This seems to absolve the people of their duty to check their opinions against multiple sources and their own experiences before arriving at an informed opinion.
- licebmi__at__ 4y ago
  I don’t know. Do password managers absolve people of their responsibility of having personalized secure passwords for different identities?, or are they just an acknowledgment and reaction of the reality that humans just are not able to do so?
- fareesh 4y ago
  People could do it, but many don't. Machines can't (yet). Will the people designing machine learning models allow them to choose their own training data though?
d0mine 4y ago
"the whole truth" suggests that the news while inaccurate in detail convey truth overall. It is not my experience: it is more of black is white and up is down. In other words, you are less informed after consuming the news, not just wrong in minute irrelevant details.
- coldtea 4y ago
  I'd say you're informed in minute irrelevant details but less informed and even directly lied or misinformed on the overall picture!
mattigames 4y ago
The media isn't made by aliens, it's just a bunch of people just like their viewers, so maybe such desire to manipulate is intrinsic by humans. But anyway this kind of thinking is just the lazy way out by holding prejudices instead of evaluating each news article by its own merits, like when a woman says "all men are the same" (or a man says the equivalent thing)
- fareesh 4y ago
  I guess the implicit bit was that if you look at the norms that have been established at the current stage of AI, you are looking at models like GPT-3 that are trained on the likes of Wikipedia, CommonCrawl, etc. If you look at Wikipedia for example, one of their criteria for what represents "noteworthiness" is coverage by the mainstream media, and furthermore the individual contents of the article must also be sourced from those same places. The news media typically uses the "Adjective-Profession-Name" technique towards readers like "Controversial Professor Jordan Peterson" or "Austere Religious Scholar Al Baghdadi" or "Beloved Actress Betty White". This system is flawed and so AI inherits these flaws, except it doesn't have the capacity to question at the moment.
ajuc 4y ago
Communication technology breakthroughs in history: - hierarchical networks of popes->bishops->priests->church goers (created medieval states) - printing press (made reformation possible and thus caused 100 years of religious wars in Europe) - radio (made totalitarian states possible and caused WW2) - social media (made illiberal democracies possible and caused ???) As new ways of communicating with the public are created - the states have to adapt, because the older communication channels (which the states controlled) lose importance. The result is almost always violent disruption of the world order and a lot of dead people. BTW this is not my idea, Timothy Snyder said sth similar in one of his speeches (but the details might have been different).
- jart 4y ago
  You can't just point the finger at technology because it existed at the same time these events occurred. Those revolutions wouldn't have happened if there wasn't some kind of underlying problem to begin with. If what you're saying were true, then Occupy Wall Street would have overthrown the government, or the early Christians for instance would have had to have been using some kind of new technology to subvert the established order of Ancient Rome. Or what about the times when new forms of communication came about that didn't result in bloodbaths? For example, carrier pigeons and high-frequency trading.
  - ajuc 4y ago
    There's always problems. Most of the time they are ignored. Very rarely they get solved proactively. Usually they cause one conflict after another until somebody solves it (and creates a new problems in the process). New communication technologies make this feedback loop much quicker which means the usual systems created to ignore these problems can't keep up - and all the hidden problems surface at once and cause "interesting times". Of course not all communication technologies have this power - carrier pigeons are 1-to-1 communication and don't scale. And high-frequency trading is communication only in the most dry technical sense. But once in a while there's a development which disrupts the system. And there are revolutions that happen without technological breakthroughs. It's not a "X if and only if Y", it's "vastly more X if Y". > If what you're saying were true, then Occupy Wall Street would have overthrown the government Why? I'm not saying every revolution needs to be successful. Not every reformation era war was won by the reformers. Totalitarian regimes have about 50% success rate short term and close to 0% long term.
schiffern 4y ago
> Plain text is already weaponized Good point, the headline should read "cheaply" weaponized. When powerful entities can weaponize information via the media, that's just Working As Designed.

ReptileMan 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cocacola1 4y ago

This seems to absolve the people of their duty to check their opinions against multiple sources and their own experiences before arriving at an informed opinion.

licebmi__at__ 4y ago
I don’t know. Do password managers absolve people of their responsibility of having personalized secure passwords for different identities?, or are they just an acknowledgment and reaction of the reality that humans just are not able to do so?
fareesh 4y ago
People could do it, but many don't. Machines can't (yet). Will the people designing machine learning models allow them to choose their own training data though?

d0mine 4y ago

"the whole truth" suggests that the news while inaccurate in detail convey truth overall. It is not my experience: it is more of black is white and up is down. In other words, you are less informed after consuming the news, not just wrong in minute irrelevant details.

coldtea 4y ago
I'd say you're informed in minute irrelevant details but less informed and even directly lied or misinformed on the overall picture!

mattigames 4y ago

The media isn't made by aliens, it's just a bunch of people just like their viewers, so maybe such desire to manipulate is intrinsic by humans. But anyway this kind of thinking is just the lazy way out by holding prejudices instead of evaluating each news article by its own merits, like when a woman says "all men are the same" (or a man says the equivalent thing)

fareesh 4y ago
I guess the implicit bit was that if you look at the norms that have been established at the current stage of AI, you are looking at models like GPT-3 that are trained on the likes of Wikipedia, CommonCrawl, etc. If you look at Wikipedia for example, one of their criteria for what represents "noteworthiness" is coverage by the mainstream media, and furthermore the individual contents of the article must also be sourced from those same places. The news media typically uses the "Adjective-Profession-Name" technique towards readers like "Controversial Professor Jordan Peterson" or "Austere Religious Scholar Al Baghdadi" or "Beloved Actress Betty White". This system is flawed and so AI inherits these flaws, except it doesn't have the capacity to question at the moment.

ajuc 4y ago

Communication technology breakthroughs in history: - hierarchical networks of popes->bishops->priests->church goers (created medieval states) - printing press (made reformation possible and thus caused 100 years of religious wars in Europe) - radio (made totalitarian states possible and caused WW2) - social media (made illiberal democracies possible and caused ???) As new ways of communicating with the public are created - the states have to adapt, because the older communication channels (which the states controlled) lose importance. The result is almost always violent disruption of the world order and a lot of dead people. BTW this is not my idea, Timothy Snyder said sth similar in one of his speeches (but the details might have been different).

jart 4y ago
You can't just point the finger at technology because it existed at the same time these events occurred. Those revolutions wouldn't have happened if there wasn't some kind of underlying problem to begin with. If what you're saying were true, then Occupy Wall Street would have overthrown the government, or the early Christians for instance would have had to have been using some kind of new technology to subvert the established order of Ancient Rome. Or what about the times when new forms of communication came about that didn't result in bloodbaths? For example, carrier pigeons and high-frequency trading.
- ajuc 4y ago
  There's always problems. Most of the time they are ignored. Very rarely they get solved proactively. Usually they cause one conflict after another until somebody solves it (and creates a new problems in the process). New communication technologies make this feedback loop much quicker which means the usual systems created to ignore these problems can't keep up - and all the hidden problems surface at once and cause "interesting times". Of course not all communication technologies have this power - carrier pigeons are 1-to-1 communication and don't scale. And high-frequency trading is communication only in the most dry technical sense. But once in a while there's a development which disrupts the system. And there are revolutions that happen without technological breakthroughs. It's not a "X if and only if Y", it's "vastly more X if Y". > If what you're saying were true, then Occupy Wall Street would have overthrown the government Why? I'm not saying every revolution needs to be successful. Not every reformation era war was won by the reformers. Totalitarian regimes have about 50% success rate short term and close to 0% long term.

schiffern 4y ago

> Plain text is already weaponized Good point, the headline should read "cheaply" weaponized. When powerful entities can weaponize information via the media, that's just Working As Designed.