4 ms·

Signing everything is not terrible advice. But here the problem Fred is trying to solve is very simple. He is an investor in mirror.xyz and needs to make his mo

Signing everything is not terrible advice. But here the problem Fred is trying to solve is very simple. He is an investor in mirror.xyz and needs to make his money back. This is the only reason someone interested in signing something would also ask you to go through the hassle of using a blockchain.

infotogivenm 4y ago
To add to this a bit - I do think an embedded steganographic-type “signature” of chatgpt output could be enormously valuable - without it we can wave goodbye to the efficacy of things like school assignments. Such a signature is very different than a typical cryptographic one we have today however. But I expect instead of embedding such a signature they will just save hashes of generated content and sell a billion dollar “checking” service to schools.
- dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
  https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823 (search for watermark) OpenAI did hire somebody who is investigating watermarking the output of models like GPT-3, so it's definitely possible.
  - infotogivenm 4y ago
    Ah that makes sense “watermark” is the word I was fumbling for here (I kept coming up with “fingerprint”)
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  School assignments should be what the student does to prepare for face to face evaluation; that is, they are a means not an end in themselves. We need to stop trying to get education on the cheap and put enough real, motivated, and properly trained humans in place to do it properly.
- acdha 4y ago
  I agree that it would be useful but also considering it adversarially I don’t think it’s practical because the people we most want to stop will strip it and in most cases they can submit samples until they pass just as spammers have been doing forever. There might be a few cases where e.g. maybe OpenAI would be willing to ping turnitin.com but it seems like that approach wouldn’t work in general and would inevitably result in false-positives with potentially serious consequences. I think we’ll end up seeing two changes: restricting things like school or hiring to favor in person, dynamic interactions - which is better in many ways but costs more and has downsides for people with social anxiety - and more pressure to make the internet less anonymous, especially if that’s linked to physical devices similar to what Cloudflare and Apple have been doing to prevent the bulk attacks (it wouldn’t help much with a cheating student). Depressingly, all of that seems expensive and likely to have substantial collateral damage.
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  How good is perceptual hashing for text? It seems trivial for a student with any modicum of intellect to delete a sentence and re-word a few others, same as you would do now after bullying a human nerd into writing your essay for you.
radicalbyte 4y ago
There is absolutely 0 need to use a blockchain to sign something :facepalm:
- legutierr 4y ago
  Sure, you don't need a blockchain to sign something, but using a blockchain means that the signature is timestamped in an incontestable way, massively replicated and made globally retrievable. It also helps mitigate the possibility that the content will be deleted or suppressed.
  - infotogivenm 4y ago
    No blockchain in the world could store the hash of every post ever in a “retrievable way”. Even Elon understands this. The valid ideas that apply here are global labeling and account subkey ordering. I have never seen a solution for either that is end-to-end without a client syncing gigs of data, so various intermediaries are always trusted. In practice a federated (“permissioned” I suppose) audit log is better, cheaper, and doesn’t require your users spend tokens if you want to go down this path. Then of course there is the UX question of the validity of using the same keys you use to make irreversible financial transactions to sign your tweets.
    - legutierr 4y ago
      > No blockchain in the world could store the hash of every post ever in a “retrievable way”. Ethereum processes about 1MM transactions per day right now; other blockchains have higher throughput. It currently manages about 100MM accounts. Sure, I suppose that might not be enough to hash and sign all blog posts ever (has anyone ever counted?) but you could timestamp a lot of them. > In practice a federated (“permissioned” I suppose) audit log is better, cheaper, and doesn’t require your users spend tokens if you want to go down this path. Someone has to pay for the servers, etc., right? What's wrong with paying for that using a token? Blockchains may be expensive, but you get orders of magnitude more redundancy, and you don't need to worry about ever losing access. You get what you pay for.
lancesells 4y ago
How about all ChatGPT output gets signed instead so humanity doesn't take on the burden? But no, let's use Web3 and add something else to our workload because someone scraped humanity and turned it into a business.
matthewmcg 4y ago
Reminds me of the world’s greatest reply to a cease and desist letter[1]: “I feel you should be aware some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters.” [1]: https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/very-truly-yours https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/very-truly-yours

infotogivenm 4y ago

To add to this a bit - I do think an embedded steganographic-type “signature” of chatgpt output could be enormously valuable - without it we can wave goodbye to the efficacy of things like school assignments. Such a signature is very different than a typical cryptographic one we have today however. But I expect instead of embedding such a signature they will just save hashes of generated content and sell a billion dollar “checking” service to schools.

dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823 (search for watermark) OpenAI did hire somebody who is investigating watermarking the output of models like GPT-3, so it's definitely possible.
- infotogivenm 4y ago
  Ah that makes sense “watermark” is the word I was fumbling for here (I kept coming up with “fingerprint”)
kwhitefoot 4y ago
School assignments should be what the student does to prepare for face to face evaluation; that is, they are a means not an end in themselves. We need to stop trying to get education on the cheap and put enough real, motivated, and properly trained humans in place to do it properly.
acdha 4y ago
I agree that it would be useful but also considering it adversarially I don’t think it’s practical because the people we most want to stop will strip it and in most cases they can submit samples until they pass just as spammers have been doing forever. There might be a few cases where e.g. maybe OpenAI would be willing to ping turnitin.com but it seems like that approach wouldn’t work in general and would inevitably result in false-positives with potentially serious consequences. I think we’ll end up seeing two changes: restricting things like school or hiring to favor in person, dynamic interactions - which is better in many ways but costs more and has downsides for people with social anxiety - and more pressure to make the internet less anonymous, especially if that’s linked to physical devices similar to what Cloudflare and Apple have been doing to prevent the bulk attacks (it wouldn’t help much with a cheating student). Depressingly, all of that seems expensive and likely to have substantial collateral damage.
nonameiguess 4y ago
How good is perceptual hashing for text? It seems trivial for a student with any modicum of intellect to delete a sentence and re-word a few others, same as you would do now after bullying a human nerd into writing your essay for you.

radicalbyte 4y ago

There is absolutely 0 need to use a blockchain to sign something :facepalm:

legutierr 4y ago
Sure, you don't need a blockchain to sign something, but using a blockchain means that the signature is timestamped in an incontestable way, massively replicated and made globally retrievable. It also helps mitigate the possibility that the content will be deleted or suppressed.
- infotogivenm 4y ago
  No blockchain in the world could store the hash of every post ever in a “retrievable way”. Even Elon understands this. The valid ideas that apply here are global labeling and account subkey ordering. I have never seen a solution for either that is end-to-end without a client syncing gigs of data, so various intermediaries are always trusted. In practice a federated (“permissioned” I suppose) audit log is better, cheaper, and doesn’t require your users spend tokens if you want to go down this path. Then of course there is the UX question of the validity of using the same keys you use to make irreversible financial transactions to sign your tweets.
  - legutierr 4y ago
    > No blockchain in the world could store the hash of every post ever in a “retrievable way”. Ethereum processes about 1MM transactions per day right now; other blockchains have higher throughput. It currently manages about 100MM accounts. Sure, I suppose that might not be enough to hash and sign all blog posts ever (has anyone ever counted?) but you could timestamp a lot of them. > In practice a federated (“permissioned” I suppose) audit log is better, cheaper, and doesn’t require your users spend tokens if you want to go down this path. Someone has to pay for the servers, etc., right? What's wrong with paying for that using a token? Blockchains may be expensive, but you get orders of magnitude more redundancy, and you don't need to worry about ever losing access. You get what you pay for.

lancesells 4y ago

How about all ChatGPT output gets signed instead so humanity doesn't take on the burden? But no, let's use Web3 and add something else to our workload because someone scraped humanity and turned it into a business.

matthewmcg 4y ago

Reminds me of the world’s greatest reply to a cease and desist letter[1]: “I feel you should be aware some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters.” [1]: https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/very-truly-yours https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/very-truly-yours