11 ms·

AI's Jurassic Park Moment

195 points by sizzle 4y ago

wepple 4y ago
I don’t think the solutions proposed will be that impactful. How, exactly, is a platform supposed to ban content that may actually end up being more valid-seeming than the average human? How exactly will government policies prevent this on a global internet? I fear we are about to enter a period where very little can be trusted. The biggest skill our kids can learn is reasoning and logic.
- sizzle 4y ago
  Maybe AI platforms can create a bot crawler or API that scrapes text across a website of choice and returns a score of how confident it is that the text on that page was written by/plagiarized from an AI, having them run it through their AI-writing trained models. A score above a certain threshold will get your page flagged by some central fact-checking authority and apply a AI citation label to your page (among many other solutions). AI platforms generating text should have a "memory" of what was written/generated by them at a minimum and give the public the ability to check for plagiarism against their AI text generation models. Sounds like a good start up idea?
  - jvm___ 4y ago
    Or <tinfoil hat> $14.99 for a blue star on Twitter to verify you are who you say you are... doesn't seem like such a bad idea anymore.
    - fanso99 4y ago
      Isn’t that just a paid account without any KYC verification?
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    This sounds like a terrrrrible arms race to participate in. It's already hard enough to track usage of copyrighted materials, where there's a pretty static piece of content that you want to match against. ID'ing AI generated content produced by someone who doesn't want the content to be ID'ed as AI is going to be /very/ hard in the long run.
    - sizzle 4y ago
      What is the alternative if the AI model creators/maintainers are not giving the public a mechanism for transparency/accountability to detect public abuse of their systems? The cat is out of the bag and the platforms are going to be widely abused to generate harmful content as it exists currently.
      - sdenton4 4y ago
        The model creators/maintainers will eventually - and probably already does - include bad actors who will train a model to get around whatever safeguards the big players attach to their models. This is like asking the New York Times to carefully include fact checking metadata to ensure there's no fake news on Reddit. Sure, you'll have fact checking for the NYT, but it's not the source of the problem.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  > The biggest skill our kids can learn is reasoning and logic. And we are doing everything we can, to prevent exactly that. No wonder the youngsters don't like us.
  - sizzle 4y ago
    Tik Tok sure as hell isn’t helping in that department with kids
    - Insanity 4y ago
      And 20 years ago it was video games. Before that, TV. And before that, radio. People will always find a reason why $YoungerGeneration is (imaginarily) lacking intellectually or physically. :)
      - puttycat 4y ago
        The Internet (specifically, the Web and Social Media) is fundamentally different from TV and from video games.
      - Jensson 4y ago
        Flynn effect is reversing so this time actually is different.
  - idontpost 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
  Yes, and specifically uncertainty and probabilistic logics, as well as how to apply idaily life. life.
cwkoss 4y ago
This feels like thinly veiled advocacy for censorship and breaking the internet. And soliciting federal grants to research how to do it. There is already a practically infinite amount of misinformation on the internet. The misinformation problem is not currently constrained by lack of supply, so doubling or 10x'ing or 1000x'ing the amount of misinformation that can be produced doesn't seem significantly concerning to me. Misinformation is a problem rooted in the powerful having having a net economic incentive to deceive and the populace's lack of media literacy. We already have 'trusted news sources' repeating falsehoods they heard 'off the record' from the state department. Credibility of the institutions that used to be easy to trust has fallen for both justified and unjustified reasons. The people who already choose 'fake news' sources will only be affected by AI fake news to the extent that those who control the AI have different goals than the people who control those channels today. If people apply AI to the problem, I think AI could help us a lot with understanding how we should adapt our systems of trust to account for this. Humans are bad at remembering the most important betrayals of people who are notionally part of our tribe, so credibility reverts to mean without consequences too easily. It's also very hard for us to identify "this person has stuck to their word for 20 years" without it being lost in punditry noise. I think its important for people to think about how the populace can hold politicians and media more responsible, but AI language generation is almost entirely tangential to that (and stopping AI does nothing to solve the root issue).
- georgeplusplus 4y ago
  >>>This feels like thinly veiled advocacy for censorship and breaking the internet. And soliciting federal grants to research how to do it This is what I took away after reading it as well. I found it strange the author used such a poor example to prove their point such as; AI recommending porcelain in baby formula and readers may actually put crushed porcelain in their baby formula. This is such a poor example because you would literally have to be brain dead to do something like this. The bar needs to be set a lot higher to prove to me that AI misinformation is a threat.
  - GloriousKoji 4y ago
    I don't see how AI porcelain baby formula is that far off from flesh brain ideas such as drinking bleach, eating tide pods and Nyquil marinated chicken.
smm11 4y ago
Just wait for political strategists to get hold of this.
- georgeplusplus 4y ago
  Democrats: Trump says parents should put crushed porcelain in their baby formula to make up for nutrition gaps found in off the shelf formula
LarryMullins 4y ago
Production of the chips needed to train and run these AI models are intrinsically centralized and require enormous capital investment to develop. If politicians get sufficiently spooked, I expect they'll try to regulate the sale of GPUs/etc and will probably be mostly successful. Popularly cited instances of prohibition failing don't map onto this problem; you can't grow a GPU with hydroponics in your closet, or brew GPUs in your bath tub.
- aftbit 4y ago
  Counter-argument: There will be at least one country that does not regulate GPU sales or access in this way, and that's where all of the AI innovation will happen. That country will get a huge lead in the next tech race, with commensurate economic advantages. Many countries will realize this and will compete to be thought leaders rather than aggressively regulate the nascent technology out of existence.
  - telotortium 4y ago
    Good luck - if the US really wants it, unless they lose a lot of power, they can block any machines that can make state of the art chips from less than 10-15 years ago (SMIC depends on supplies that come from the US). Eventually China could probably catch up, but it would take a long time. No other power bloc besides US allies or China could hope to make even GPUs that could run the original 2012 Imagenet
- o_1 4y ago
  they already have see nvidia
andrewstuart 4y ago
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." - Roy Amara. This is the early overestimation.
- thinkingkong 4y ago
  On the contrary. The overestimation was probably in the previous AI era which couldnt live up to any of the hype.
  - QuantumGood 4y ago
    I think "a technology" can be extended to "each wave of technological development". "A technology" does not begin at some point and extend into the future infinitely in the form it was originally defined. Each new wave runs into the overestimation/underestimation problem.
  - aiappreciator 4y ago
    This, image AI has been a decade in the making already. Previously it was GANs for facial recognition, for edge detection, ultimately for self-driving. The impact of that on society has been insignificant, so a big overestimation. Then came transformers, then came combining transformers with diffusions, an innocent little combination, that now becomes a tsunami in image generation. Artists are launching mass protests online in extreme panic and anguish, tsunami-tide of consumer applications are coming each month, many of them extremely profitable and don't even need VC money. This is the long-term impact phase already.
    - woah 4y ago
      > many of them extremely profitable and don't even need VC money Really? Do you have some examples?
    - canadianfella 4y ago
- 4y ago
root_axis 4y ago
Machine learning systems are just agents of people, and we already know that you can't trust most people on the internet.
- humanistbot 4y ago
  Given how much of social, political, and economic life takes place on the internet, what I'm hearing you say is that trust is dead.
  - root_axis 4y ago
    Indeed, trust is dead but this is nothing new.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  Well, also agents of corporations, and those corporations whose singular goal is profit are the worst of "people" AFAICT.
  - wskinner 4y ago
    Surely there are people or groups of people whose singular goals are worse than making money. Mass murder and subjugation at scale, which were perpetrated by many governments in the 20th century, immediately jump to mind.
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
      > Mass murder and subjugation at scale, which were perpetrated by many governments in the 20th century I've got bad news for you, buddy...
  - root_axis 4y ago
    Corporations have dominated the internet for a long time now.
kneebonian 4y ago
An intersting thought experiment. If we go back 100 years ago in many towns throughout the US I could've started a newspaper and published anything about the world or world politics that I wanted to. I could publish in my newspaper that credible sources said the Kaiser was going to invade Japan, I could've published about how a new miracle cure of an imaginary plant in India would cure bunions, or pretty much whatever I wanted as long as it wasn't easy to verify, and this worked because there wasn't an easy way for people in more isolated farming communities to really check or corroborate what was going on, this was in large part because it didn't have an effect on their world at all. Now 100 years later i can do the same thing and realistically it is just as hard to actually verify or validate with the amount of misleading, partial, censored, or manipulated information out there. How much difference will this make on my life personally though? Here's the thing society isn't static or changing we've seen recently several events that has destroyed many peoples trust in various sources of infomration, my guess is with another generation coming up in a world where it is widely acknowledged that most sources of information are biased or fabricated they will grow up with an "immunity" so to speak from this misinformation and grow to disregard everything they find and read online, just like they did before.
- aiappreciator 4y ago
  Its not a thought experiment. The 30 years war was fought over the printing press at its core. Newspapers are nothing compared to the bible in terms of misinformation risk, harmful cults regularly spring up to this day by astray pastors making their own version of the Bible to proclaim themselves as some prophet. So naturally, the Catholic church at the time was extremely concerned with people being able to 'translate' the bible (any translations will inevitably deviate from the official latin codex to an extent), that's how the protestant catholic conflict began, as the war to control the source of truth. And 1/3rd of Germany's population died because of this war. That being said, its absolutely worth it in the end. The Muslim world chose to not have this conflict, and banned the printing press (So the Quran can't be printed or translated). What ended up happening there is 500 years of utter stagnation with no new technological or social leaps. Generative AI will definitely cause conflicts that indirectly kill millions. But that's just the price of adaptation, I was shocked at how people didn't seem to care about the COVID deaths after a while, I guess that's a good thing in the end.
fanso99 4y ago
https://archive.vn/mzr6X https://archive.vn/mzr6X
thinkingkong 4y ago
We’re going to enter into a curation economy. Not quite Yahoo! 90s style but more in a “must be trusted and attributable” to be valid. It doesnt scale but there may be more value in the brand of your information than the current state of the world provides.
- neolefty 4y ago
  Yes, I will end up depending more heavily on sources that I know are thoughtfully edited by humans. Unfortunately, that set will diminish if bot herders overwhelm crowdsourced sites.
alexfromapex 4y ago
The genie is already out of the bottle so it would be better to find ways to fight fire with fire
sizzle 4y ago
backup link: https://archive.vn/mzr6X https://archive.vn/mzr6X looks like the site is experiencing the HN hug of death
- raydiatian 4y ago
  This article made me laugh, thank you for sharing more outlandish satire
swamp40 4y ago
> Someone else coaxed chatGPT into extolling the virtues of nuclear war (alleging it would "give us a fresh start, free from the mistakes of the past"). I'm convinced.
- optimalsolver 4y ago
  "Fresh" isn't how I'd describe the world following a general nuclear war.
  - samplatt 4y ago
    Certainly uncontaminated by higher lifeforms.
dataangel 4y ago
More pants on head crazy alarmism. Here is a summary of the entire article: "Before, you could get away with using how someone sounded as a proxy for whether they were correct, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Now with AI sometimes it will work less often. Therefore DEFCON 5!!!"
- laweijfmvo 4y ago
  DEFCON 5 is actually the lowest DEFCON
umvi 4y ago
In my experience chatGPT is more useful than StackOverflow in 9 out of 10 cases because it can generate custom tailor-made code for your exact use case. Sure, it might not be "correct" in the ultra-pedantic StackOverflow definition of "100% generalizably correct", but usually it's 90+% correct for your use-case and only needs slight alteration to be 100% correct for your use-case. Such generated code is not a "threat" or "misinformation" or whatever author's point is. This is going to be a productivity multiplier for programmers so that programmers can do more faster than ever before!
- Retric 4y ago
  It works really well if slapping together something vaguely close to correct is good enough. This covers a significant fraction of all programming work.
  - simonw 4y ago
    It works great for slapping together something vaguely close to correct... and then iterating on it until it's exactly right. This makes is a fantastic productivity boost if you have the skill to identity and fix any problems with the code it has generated. If you've ever participated in code review as a reviewer you probably have those skills already.
    - Retric 4y ago
      Starting from subtly incorrect code makes it much harder to come to the correct solution. To use a classic example, the A = (B + C) /2 line that fails due to bounds checking issues is quite literally worse than useless because you basically need to understand why it’s wrong before you notice it’s wrong. The eyes just slide over the common idiom thinking in terms of average not what the code actually does. Code reviews most easily reveal a very different kind of error. ‘Why does this code look more complicated than it should be?’ is a great hint that something is fishy. However, chatGPT is basically engineered to pass the smell test not work.
      - 4y ago
xwdv 4y ago
This isn’t something I’ve talked about much but I’ve been using my past comment history on HN as training data for AI so that eventually this account will be replaced entirely with AI generated responses to other comments or titles, but I won’t say when that will happen. Could be tomorrow. Could be years from now. Or it could have already happened months ago.
sacrosancty 4y ago
nonbirithm 4y ago
I remember people saying that AI was going to displace artists because they overhead business managers saying how great it was that they no longer had to hire a human artist for a design job. In other words, had there been an option to forgo the human in the first place, the human artist would never have stood a chance to take such a job. I think this reveals a depressing fact. The desire to automate humans away has always existed, and now people can finally realize those dreams. Maybe even prompt engineering itself is in that sense a bottleneck to be overcome in the future, if a human still has to attend to constructing it? I don't think "artificial intelligence" is a good term for describing what's happening right now. It makes it sound like a robot overlord is calling the shots and displacing human workers, but in reality, it's just humans pitted against humans with different beliefs. AI tools still require humans that believe in the proliferation of AI to use them and spread the results everywhere. I agree with the article's mention that maybe some reflection is needed when proliferating new discoveries. The "just a tool" argument doesn't consider that what affordances a new technology offers will dictate what most people will use it for in practice. I don't think many people would argue that nuclear weapons are "just a tool" once their uncontrolled spread makes them impossible for any side to ignore. And the dangers aren't yet on a "destruction of humanity" level like many who worry about AGI, but perhaps "the destruction of humanity in the arts" is more plausible given the recent developments up to now? We aren't even close to anything resembling AGI yet, but specific domains are still vulnerable to being overrun by AI generation this early on (StackOverflow, ArtStation, etc). But this is a matter of tradeoffs, and maybe researchers will continue to be overeager in sharing their exciting findings, until an even more severe line is crossed than the one that set off the current war on AI art. I don't look forward to a time where demonstrators will scrape GitHub listings and arXiv papers to seek out contributors to anything that touches OpenAI or Stability and implore them to have a change of heart, or scream louder and louder to have their voices heard by the programmers writing their torch denoising code from inside the safety of their office buildings.
wizeman 4y ago
Why is everybody so scared that an AI can give you a reasonable answer when you ask it about the virtues of nuclear war or why crushed porcelain is good in breast milk? Can't you do exactly the same by just going on Mechanical Turk and paying $5 (or whatever) and have 10 such answers written by humans? Yet, nobody is making scary posts about what humans on Mechanical Turk can write when you ask them stupid questions.
- chaos_emergent 4y ago
  It would cost me hundreds of dollars to create thousands of pieces of essays on how fizzes can buzz and doodads can dash with MTurk. Now it costs me a few . We’ve always been able to make up bullshit, the leverage needed to do so is what’s changing.
  - wizeman 4y ago
    > It would cost me hundreds of dollars to create thousands of pieces of essays on how fizzes can buzz and doodads can dash with MTurk. Now it costs me a few . Hundreds of dollars? Is that supposed to be a lot? For thousands of essays?
raydiatian 4y ago
> they can be automated to generate misinformation at (approaching) zero cost Then two things: (1) the identification of misinformation will likely also be detected at a massive scale, but/and if not, then (2) get off social media, go outside, and talk to real fucking people This article is proof that as long as you have a smart looking suitcoat and glasses you can trick any old idiot on HN into reposting your moronic nonsense.
stanete 4y ago
For me the unreliability is not a problem because I’m not using ChatGPT to search for information but rather to help me think and solve problems. ChatGPT can make incredibly good questions and can create relationships between concepts that it would take me hours to make on my own. So ChatGPT just become my private coach and a really smart actual assistant.
- dmix 4y ago
  Indeed, this is an assisted brain storming tool, not automated problem solving where you're supposed to trust the result wholesale. For work I used ChatGPT to write a very specific programming problem and it wasn't a solution you'd ever copy/paste...the lack of context to the surrounding system means that's impractical 99% of the time outside of toy problems. But it was still super useful for getting my brain working and suggesting a really good basic structure it would have taken me 3-4 failure cycles to get to. The same exists in DALL-E/GPT for corporate art generation, writing 'essays', or stories or w/e. It's almost never producing the end product (besides toy problems). So, if it can't do that in the first place, why evaluate it as if that's what it's supposed to be?
  - Multicomp 4y ago
    This is how I've used chatgpt as well. A primer for brainstorming that can wander on any tangents you are after
  - stanete 4y ago
    I’ve found that the more context I give to it, the better it is to help me solving a problem. If I spend a bunch of minutes giving info about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and what I personally know about the problem space, it will usually help me to either explore more or to arrive at the solution faster. When I talk about coaching I meant that I told ChatGPT to answer only with questions. In a way, ChatGPT is good at having socratic conversations. Sometimes it gets out of character but it depends mostly on your answers or questions.
    - Molomby 4y ago
cs702 4y ago
It's Gary Marcus, again, as always and as ever, criticizing other people's work as "machines that manipulate data but aren't really intelligent." He's been on HN many times before, always criticizing the same things: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=gary%20marcus&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... As far as I know, all he's ever done is criticize, without ever delving into the mathematical details. To understand those who disagree with him, read "The Bitter Lesson" by Rich Sutton: http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html -- EDITS: Modified and rearranged sentences to reflect more accurately what I meant to write the first time around.
- area51org 4y ago
  Does he need to develop an AI system at all in order to have a valid opinion, though?
  - cs702 4y ago
    No, he doesn't. I updated my comment to reflect what I actually meant to say.
  - Der_Einzige 4y ago
    Honestly? Yes, given the amount of trust reporters put into his statements.
- sizzle 4y ago
  Do movie critics need to produce box office films before criticizing movies?
- dimmuborgir 4y ago
  His book "The Algebraic Mind" goes into great detail about connectionism (neural networks), symbolic systems, limits of connectionism and proposals to integrate neural networks with symbolic systems (hybrid systems). The "deep learning alone is enough" camp (especially LeCun) has abused him for years but now slowly coming to the realization that we need to feed neural networks with explicit inductive biases to attain AGI which is exactly what Marcus has been saying since the 90s. LeCun, for some reason, refuses to call these explicit biases as symbols and that's the only disagreement between Marcus and LeCun these days.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> They can easily be automated to generate misinformation at unprecedented scale. > They cost almost nothing to operate These two in combination scare me the most. We still fall for email scams for cryin out loud.
lxe 4y ago
"Threat to the fabric of society"? The author is an influential figure, and should know better. This sensationalizing, fear-mongering and FUD is the real "threat to society".
Dove 4y ago
This isn't a threat to civilization. Civilization already has the tools to solve this problem. They're ancient, and (for better or worse) they're re-emerging all around us: tribalism, aristocracy, credentialism, reputation. A hundred variations of "Trust is earned; suspect strangers." The threat here is to the philosophical conceit that you can trust strangers -- not via a network where people vouch for each other, but just by averaging large numbers of them. Democracy makes good things happen. It's a beautiful idea, the philosophical gem of the last two or three centuries, and it works well in some contexts, and certainly is better than what it replaced... but its success has resulted in overapplication. It certainly can't withstand an army of malicious bots. I have enjoyed the fact that the absolute political freedom of internet communities has allowed for myriad experiments in government on the sort of timescale that allows for lessons and improvement. The core conceit that people, in large numbers, are basically good and wise was the core philosophy that ruled the internet of ten or twenty or thirty years ago, with its open networks and upvotes. But it seems to me that we have all collectively been coming around to the fact that moderation, and reputation, and credentials, and curation, all have some serious up sides. Tyranny is certainly a problem, but maybe kings and aristocrats aren't all bad. The bots are really only a threat to communities that haven't figured out yet that there is a balance here, a give and take between the individual and society. That zero contribution should equal zero power, that a high degree of influence ought only be achievable by long and faithful service, that trust is something real people have in each other and that proxies for it can always be gamed, that social status serves a very real and useful function, and that destructive behavior should be met with extreme prejudice... but at the same time, that outsiders can sometimes say very important things.
- analognoise 4y ago
  Kings and aristocrats are that bad, though. Nothing that happens on the...internet? Changes that. It's the internet. People gonna lie on the internet. I think people overestimate it's importance at this point. If it becomes unreliable or shitty, people will stop using it, go outside, and touch grass.
  - mc32 4y ago
walrus01 4y ago
> The so-called Russian Firehose of Propaganda model, described in a 2016 Rand report, is about creating a fog of misinformation; it focuses on volume, and on creating uncertainty. It doesn't matter if the "large language models" are inconsistent, if they can greatly escalate volume. And it's clear that that is exactly what large language models make possible. They are aiming to create a world in which we are unable to know what we can trust; with these new tools, they might succeed. I would encourage anyone who wants to look into this more to see the part of the 2016 documentary/film project "Hypernormalisation" about Vladislav Surkov: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hypernormalisation+vladislav+surkov https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hypernorm... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI27qk1irg0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI27qk1irg0
gcanyon 4y ago
AI could be civilization-ending. Pretty much everything we do involves trust in others. Things like vaccine hesitancy can become worse to the point that people make increasingly life-threatening decisions. With AI-generated disinformation at scale fully able to drown out actual vetted information, it's possible we'll end up in an environment where even reasonable people simply don't know what decisions to make. Voting becomes problematic. Where to live, what products to buy, what to study, what job to take, all become difficult or impossible to decide intelligently. I hope I'm wrong.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > all become difficult or impossible to decide intelligently The solution is for people to learn to reason logically for themselves. Maybe when we actually get to the point where people can't survive until they do so, they'll start taking logical reasoning seriously.
  - gcanyon 4y ago
    How does reasoning logically based on potentially unreliable information produce accurate, beneficial results? Especially when it's impossible to know the specific probability any given piece of information is true?
Apocryphon 4y ago
Technically, Westward was AI's Jurassic Park moment.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Westworld.
rakejake 4y ago
A lot of replies to this post (and to fears about AI in general) are of the form "But humans are as untrustworthy, if not more. So the AI can't be any worse". I have to say many of you have a very dim view of humans. When I read an answer off of stackoverflow that is not highly voted, I know that the answer could be incorrect. But there is a trust that the actor on the other side was also facing the same problem, and is not malicious. After all, why would a malicious actor care to give a wrong answer to a "Rust borrow checker question"? If the answer was AI generated and posted by a bot operated by a karma farmer, out goes that trust. This is obviously not a threat to society, and chances are the asker will eventually figure out the right answer, but you can see how this sort of thing reduces the signal-to-noise ratio of almost anything on the internet by orders of magnitude. Trust underpins everything. Hacker news IS a social network in my opinion. I come here to read comments knowing that there is a like-minded person on the other side who is sharing their thoughts. If I was looking for information or something to learn, I would read a newspaper, a textbook or a research paper. The discussion with a real human from some corner of the world is what makes this forum tick. This tech is not going away and I presume some steady state will be reached eventually, but in the meantime, there is no doubt in my mind that the internet as we know it is in jeopardy.
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  HN ususlly disappoints me any time social issues pop up. It seems a majority HN'rs fancy themselves as liberals. Yet in reality they are authoritarian conservatives that happen to have some liberal beliefs. The calls for oppression when someone has a different view are common.
bottlepalm 4y ago
OpenAI needs to feed all of Wikipedia, Reddit comments, stack overflow, GitHub, textbooks, IMDb, hacker news, books, news, yelp, etc.. into ChatGPT. That’s pretty much the next step to out googling google unless google does it first.
peter303 4y ago
Its not that A.I. software is smart, but that for the most humans are mediocre and uncreative. Humans are stuck in their mental ruts. Given a large enough A.I. and large enough sampling of total human knowledge, an A.I. can predict much human activity.
deafpolygon 4y ago
It's not a threat until AI can start creating new ideas in a vacuum. As it stands, they require our creative output and all of their outputs can be considered derived works. It's very effective, but it's still dependent on INPUT (human) -> OUTPUT (AI).
- aqfamnzc 4y ago
  Can you create a new idea in a vacuum? We humans also seed our creative RNGs from the world around us and from sources like memories and real-time sensory input.
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    I'm not disputing that, but humans can create new ideas from what appears to be nothing. AI is still limited in that the ideas they generate are essentially remixes of pre-existing ideas fed to the AI.
everydayentropy 4y ago
Can't you see that people in this thread are posting ChatGPT responses...
jrmg 4y ago
I think there are some problems with assuming that ChatGPT-like AI will improve in quality, _especially_ if it gets good enough to popular and generally trusted. Where will the next generation of AI training data come from, if the vast majority of information on the internet is generated by AI? Isn’t new data required? It feels like an internet filled with ‘incorrect’ spam generated by AIs is as much, maybe more, of a danger to future AI as it is to humans. This is almost the same thing, but: it feels like ChatGPT is so good at e.g. programming questions because it’s been trained on millions of human discussions about programming. Even if you can weed out AI spam from future training sets, if people start relying on AI for e.g Stack Overflow like answers, and perhaps even reference information, and therefore stop writing or conversing online about new technologies, where will training data about new technologies come from? Primary reference material probably isn’t enough (just like it’s not really enough for most humans).
- hooande 4y ago
  This is an excellent point. One of the main things I see people say about ChatGPT is "when it gets better in the future". But as you point out, it's already trained on the entire internet. There are many features they could add and there are infinite special cases for handling various prompts. But the core of the product, the LLM generated answers, can't get much better without an order of magnitude increase in training data. In terms of petabytes of training data, it will be a long time before ChatGPT's own responses are a significant portion of the training set. And even then, at least for a while, that should just shift responses closer to a sort of average human response
  - astrange 4y ago
    > But the core of the product, the LLM generated answers, can't get much better without an order of magnitude increase in training data. There's no reason to believe this. The model architecture and training methods aren't perfect, nor is the way it's queried. eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/zr2en7/r_nonparametric_masked_language_modeling_metaai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/zr2en7/r_n...
- 4y ago
POPOSYS 4y ago
That website makes Firefox use too much CPU and the fan of my laptop starts to scream - very annoying. It is, of course, kind of a great joke. Never-heard-before wisdom with deep, impactful visions published on a website with "trusted insights for computing´s leading professionals" - and they just simply can not deliver decent HTML / JavaScript. Looks like we need even more leading professionals!
poulpy123 4y ago
It's quite funny that the author consider 1 million dollars of propaganda a huge amount, just because it was russian
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
> wood chips to breakfast cereal > https://www.apple.com https://www.apple.com Shots fired
commandlinefan 4y ago
> we may have to begin to treat misinformation as we do libel "misinformation" defined as "anything that came from an AI"? Or the more common colloquial definition of "anything that might strengthen the case of conservative politicians"?

195 points by sizzle 4y ago

I don’t think the solutions proposed will be that impactful. How, exactly, is a platform supposed to ban content that may actually end up being more valid-seeming than the average human? How exactly will government policies prevent this on a global internet? I fear we are about to enter a period where very little can be trusted. The biggest skill our kids can learn is reasoning and logic.

sizzle 4y ago
Maybe AI platforms can create a bot crawler or API that scrapes text across a website of choice and returns a score of how confident it is that the text on that page was written by/plagiarized from an AI, having them run it through their AI-writing trained models. A score above a certain threshold will get your page flagged by some central fact-checking authority and apply a AI citation label to your page (among many other solutions). AI platforms generating text should have a "memory" of what was written/generated by them at a minimum and give the public the ability to check for plagiarism against their AI text generation models. Sounds like a good start up idea?
- jvm___ 4y ago
  Or <tinfoil hat> $14.99 for a blue star on Twitter to verify you are who you say you are... doesn't seem like such a bad idea anymore.
  - fanso99 4y ago
    Isn’t that just a paid account without any KYC verification?
- sdenton4 4y ago
  This sounds like a terrrrrible arms race to participate in. It's already hard enough to track usage of copyrighted materials, where there's a pretty static piece of content that you want to match against. ID'ing AI generated content produced by someone who doesn't want the content to be ID'ed as AI is going to be /very/ hard in the long run.
  - sizzle 4y ago
    What is the alternative if the AI model creators/maintainers are not giving the public a mechanism for transparency/accountability to detect public abuse of their systems? The cat is out of the bag and the platforms are going to be widely abused to generate harmful content as it exists currently.
    - sdenton4 4y ago
      The model creators/maintainers will eventually - and probably already does - include bad actors who will train a model to get around whatever safeguards the big players attach to their models. This is like asking the New York Times to carefully include fact checking metadata to ensure there's no fake news on Reddit. Sure, you'll have fact checking for the NYT, but it's not the source of the problem.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> The biggest skill our kids can learn is reasoning and logic. And we are doing everything we can, to prevent exactly that. No wonder the youngsters don't like us.
- sizzle 4y ago
  Tik Tok sure as hell isn’t helping in that department with kids
  - Insanity 4y ago
    And 20 years ago it was video games. Before that, TV. And before that, radio. People will always find a reason why $YoungerGeneration is (imaginarily) lacking intellectually or physically. :)
    - puttycat 4y ago
      The Internet (specifically, the Web and Social Media) is fundamentally different from TV and from video games.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      Flynn effect is reversing so this time actually is different.
- idontpost 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
Yes, and specifically uncertainty and probabilistic logics, as well as how to apply idaily life. life.

cwkoss 4y ago

This feels like thinly veiled advocacy for censorship and breaking the internet. And soliciting federal grants to research how to do it. There is already a practically infinite amount of misinformation on the internet. The misinformation problem is not currently constrained by lack of supply, so doubling or 10x'ing or 1000x'ing the amount of misinformation that can be produced doesn't seem significantly concerning to me. Misinformation is a problem rooted in the powerful having having a net economic incentive to deceive and the populace's lack of media literacy. We already have 'trusted news sources' repeating falsehoods they heard 'off the record' from the state department. Credibility of the institutions that used to be easy to trust has fallen for both justified and unjustified reasons. The people who already choose 'fake news' sources will only be affected by AI fake news to the extent that those who control the AI have different goals than the people who control those channels today. If people apply AI to the problem, I think AI could help us a lot with understanding how we should adapt our systems of trust to account for this. Humans are bad at remembering the most important betrayals of people who are notionally part of our tribe, so credibility reverts to mean without consequences too easily. It's also very hard for us to identify "this person has stuck to their word for 20 years" without it being lost in punditry noise. I think its important for people to think about how the populace can hold politicians and media more responsible, but AI language generation is almost entirely tangential to that (and stopping AI does nothing to solve the root issue).

georgeplusplus 4y ago
>>>This feels like thinly veiled advocacy for censorship and breaking the internet. And soliciting federal grants to research how to do it This is what I took away after reading it as well. I found it strange the author used such a poor example to prove their point such as; AI recommending porcelain in baby formula and readers may actually put crushed porcelain in their baby formula. This is such a poor example because you would literally have to be brain dead to do something like this. The bar needs to be set a lot higher to prove to me that AI misinformation is a threat.
- GloriousKoji 4y ago
  I don't see how AI porcelain baby formula is that far off from flesh brain ideas such as drinking bleach, eating tide pods and Nyquil marinated chicken.

smm11 4y ago

Just wait for political strategists to get hold of this.

georgeplusplus 4y ago
Democrats: Trump says parents should put crushed porcelain in their baby formula to make up for nutrition gaps found in off the shelf formula

LarryMullins 4y ago

Production of the chips needed to train and run these AI models are intrinsically centralized and require enormous capital investment to develop. If politicians get sufficiently spooked, I expect they'll try to regulate the sale of GPUs/etc and will probably be mostly successful. Popularly cited instances of prohibition failing don't map onto this problem; you can't grow a GPU with hydroponics in your closet, or brew GPUs in your bath tub.

aftbit 4y ago
Counter-argument: There will be at least one country that does not regulate GPU sales or access in this way, and that's where all of the AI innovation will happen. That country will get a huge lead in the next tech race, with commensurate economic advantages. Many countries will realize this and will compete to be thought leaders rather than aggressively regulate the nascent technology out of existence.
- telotortium 4y ago
  Good luck - if the US really wants it, unless they lose a lot of power, they can block any machines that can make state of the art chips from less than 10-15 years ago (SMIC depends on supplies that come from the US). Eventually China could probably catch up, but it would take a long time. No other power bloc besides US allies or China could hope to make even GPUs that could run the original 2012 Imagenet
o_1 4y ago
they already have see nvidia

andrewstuart 4y ago

"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." - Roy Amara. This is the early overestimation.

thinkingkong 4y ago
On the contrary. The overestimation was probably in the previous AI era which couldnt live up to any of the hype.
- QuantumGood 4y ago
  I think "a technology" can be extended to "each wave of technological development". "A technology" does not begin at some point and extend into the future infinitely in the form it was originally defined. Each new wave runs into the overestimation/underestimation problem.
- aiappreciator 4y ago
  This, image AI has been a decade in the making already. Previously it was GANs for facial recognition, for edge detection, ultimately for self-driving. The impact of that on society has been insignificant, so a big overestimation. Then came transformers, then came combining transformers with diffusions, an innocent little combination, that now becomes a tsunami in image generation. Artists are launching mass protests online in extreme panic and anguish, tsunami-tide of consumer applications are coming each month, many of them extremely profitable and don't even need VC money. This is the long-term impact phase already.
  - woah 4y ago
    > many of them extremely profitable and don't even need VC money Really? Do you have some examples?
  - canadianfella 4y ago
4y ago

root_axis 4y ago

Machine learning systems are just agents of people, and we already know that you can't trust most people on the internet.

humanistbot 4y ago
Given how much of social, political, and economic life takes place on the internet, what I'm hearing you say is that trust is dead.
- root_axis 4y ago
  Indeed, trust is dead but this is nothing new.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
Well, also agents of corporations, and those corporations whose singular goal is profit are the worst of "people" AFAICT.
- wskinner 4y ago
  Surely there are people or groups of people whose singular goals are worse than making money. Mass murder and subjugation at scale, which were perpetrated by many governments in the 20th century, immediately jump to mind.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    > Mass murder and subjugation at scale, which were perpetrated by many governments in the 20th century I've got bad news for you, buddy...
- root_axis 4y ago
  Corporations have dominated the internet for a long time now.

kneebonian 4y ago

An intersting thought experiment. If we go back 100 years ago in many towns throughout the US I could've started a newspaper and published anything about the world or world politics that I wanted to. I could publish in my newspaper that credible sources said the Kaiser was going to invade Japan, I could've published about how a new miracle cure of an imaginary plant in India would cure bunions, or pretty much whatever I wanted as long as it wasn't easy to verify, and this worked because there wasn't an easy way for people in more isolated farming communities to really check or corroborate what was going on, this was in large part because it didn't have an effect on their world at all. Now 100 years later i can do the same thing and realistically it is just as hard to actually verify or validate with the amount of misleading, partial, censored, or manipulated information out there. How much difference will this make on my life personally though? Here's the thing society isn't static or changing we've seen recently several events that has destroyed many peoples trust in various sources of infomration, my guess is with another generation coming up in a world where it is widely acknowledged that most sources of information are biased or fabricated they will grow up with an "immunity" so to speak from this misinformation and grow to disregard everything they find and read online, just like they did before.

aiappreciator 4y ago
Its not a thought experiment. The 30 years war was fought over the printing press at its core. Newspapers are nothing compared to the bible in terms of misinformation risk, harmful cults regularly spring up to this day by astray pastors making their own version of the Bible to proclaim themselves as some prophet. So naturally, the Catholic church at the time was extremely concerned with people being able to 'translate' the bible (any translations will inevitably deviate from the official latin codex to an extent), that's how the protestant catholic conflict began, as the war to control the source of truth. And 1/3rd of Germany's population died because of this war. That being said, its absolutely worth it in the end. The Muslim world chose to not have this conflict, and banned the printing press (So the Quran can't be printed or translated). What ended up happening there is 500 years of utter stagnation with no new technological or social leaps. Generative AI will definitely cause conflicts that indirectly kill millions. But that's just the price of adaptation, I was shocked at how people didn't seem to care about the COVID deaths after a while, I guess that's a good thing in the end.

fanso99 4y ago

https://archive.vn/mzr6X https://archive.vn/mzr6X

thinkingkong 4y ago

We’re going to enter into a curation economy. Not quite Yahoo! 90s style but more in a “must be trusted and attributable” to be valid. It doesnt scale but there may be more value in the brand of your information than the current state of the world provides.

neolefty 4y ago
Yes, I will end up depending more heavily on sources that I know are thoughtfully edited by humans. Unfortunately, that set will diminish if bot herders overwhelm crowdsourced sites.

alexfromapex 4y ago

The genie is already out of the bottle so it would be better to find ways to fight fire with fire

sizzle 4y ago

backup link: https://archive.vn/mzr6X https://archive.vn/mzr6X looks like the site is experiencing the HN hug of death

raydiatian 4y ago
This article made me laugh, thank you for sharing more outlandish satire

swamp40 4y ago

> Someone else coaxed chatGPT into extolling the virtues of nuclear war (alleging it would "give us a fresh start, free from the mistakes of the past"). I'm convinced.

optimalsolver 4y ago
"Fresh" isn't how I'd describe the world following a general nuclear war.
- samplatt 4y ago
  Certainly uncontaminated by higher lifeforms.

dataangel 4y ago

More pants on head crazy alarmism. Here is a summary of the entire article: "Before, you could get away with using how someone sounded as a proxy for whether they were correct, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Now with AI sometimes it will work less often. Therefore DEFCON 5!!!"

laweijfmvo 4y ago
DEFCON 5 is actually the lowest DEFCON

umvi 4y ago

In my experience chatGPT is more useful than StackOverflow in 9 out of 10 cases because it can generate custom tailor-made code for your exact use case. Sure, it might not be "correct" in the ultra-pedantic StackOverflow definition of "100% generalizably correct", but usually it's 90+% correct for your use-case and only needs slight alteration to be 100% correct for your use-case. Such generated code is not a "threat" or "misinformation" or whatever author's point is. This is going to be a productivity multiplier for programmers so that programmers can do more faster than ever before!

Retric 4y ago
It works really well if slapping together something vaguely close to correct is good enough. This covers a significant fraction of all programming work.
- simonw 4y ago
  It works great for slapping together something vaguely close to correct... and then iterating on it until it's exactly right. This makes is a fantastic productivity boost if you have the skill to identity and fix any problems with the code it has generated. If you've ever participated in code review as a reviewer you probably have those skills already.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Starting from subtly incorrect code makes it much harder to come to the correct solution. To use a classic example, the A = (B + C) /2 line that fails due to bounds checking issues is quite literally worse than useless because you basically need to understand why it’s wrong before you notice it’s wrong. The eyes just slide over the common idiom thinking in terms of average not what the code actually does. Code reviews most easily reveal a very different kind of error. ‘Why does this code look more complicated than it should be?’ is a great hint that something is fishy. However, chatGPT is basically engineered to pass the smell test not work.
    - 4y ago

xwdv 4y ago

This isn’t something I’ve talked about much but I’ve been using my past comment history on HN as training data for AI so that eventually this account will be replaced entirely with AI generated responses to other comments or titles, but I won’t say when that will happen. Could be tomorrow. Could be years from now. Or it could have already happened months ago.

sacrosancty 4y ago

nonbirithm 4y ago

I remember people saying that AI was going to displace artists because they overhead business managers saying how great it was that they no longer had to hire a human artist for a design job. In other words, had there been an option to forgo the human in the first place, the human artist would never have stood a chance to take such a job. I think this reveals a depressing fact. The desire to automate humans away has always existed, and now people can finally realize those dreams. Maybe even prompt engineering itself is in that sense a bottleneck to be overcome in the future, if a human still has to attend to constructing it? I don't think "artificial intelligence" is a good term for describing what's happening right now. It makes it sound like a robot overlord is calling the shots and displacing human workers, but in reality, it's just humans pitted against humans with different beliefs. AI tools still require humans that believe in the proliferation of AI to use them and spread the results everywhere. I agree with the article's mention that maybe some reflection is needed when proliferating new discoveries. The "just a tool" argument doesn't consider that what affordances a new technology offers will dictate what most people will use it for in practice. I don't think many people would argue that nuclear weapons are "just a tool" once their uncontrolled spread makes them impossible for any side to ignore. And the dangers aren't yet on a "destruction of humanity" level like many who worry about AGI, but perhaps "the destruction of humanity in the arts" is more plausible given the recent developments up to now? We aren't even close to anything resembling AGI yet, but specific domains are still vulnerable to being overrun by AI generation this early on (StackOverflow, ArtStation, etc). But this is a matter of tradeoffs, and maybe researchers will continue to be overeager in sharing their exciting findings, until an even more severe line is crossed than the one that set off the current war on AI art. I don't look forward to a time where demonstrators will scrape GitHub listings and arXiv papers to seek out contributors to anything that touches OpenAI or Stability and implore them to have a change of heart, or scream louder and louder to have their voices heard by the programmers writing their torch denoising code from inside the safety of their office buildings.

wizeman 4y ago

Why is everybody so scared that an AI can give you a reasonable answer when you ask it about the virtues of nuclear war or why crushed porcelain is good in breast milk? Can't you do exactly the same by just going on Mechanical Turk and paying $5 (or whatever) and have 10 such answers written by humans? Yet, nobody is making scary posts about what humans on Mechanical Turk can write when you ask them stupid questions.

chaos_emergent 4y ago
It would cost me hundreds of dollars to create thousands of pieces of essays on how fizzes can buzz and doodads can dash with MTurk. Now it costs me a few . We’ve always been able to make up bullshit, the leverage needed to do so is what’s changing.
- wizeman 4y ago
  > It would cost me hundreds of dollars to create thousands of pieces of essays on how fizzes can buzz and doodads can dash with MTurk. Now it costs me a few . Hundreds of dollars? Is that supposed to be a lot? For thousands of essays?

raydiatian 4y ago

> they can be automated to generate misinformation at (approaching) zero cost Then two things: (1) the identification of misinformation will likely also be detected at a massive scale, but/and if not, then (2) get off social media, go outside, and talk to real fucking people This article is proof that as long as you have a smart looking suitcoat and glasses you can trick any old idiot on HN into reposting your moronic nonsense.

stanete 4y ago

For me the unreliability is not a problem because I’m not using ChatGPT to search for information but rather to help me think and solve problems. ChatGPT can make incredibly good questions and can create relationships between concepts that it would take me hours to make on my own. So ChatGPT just become my private coach and a really smart actual assistant.

dmix 4y ago
Indeed, this is an assisted brain storming tool, not automated problem solving where you're supposed to trust the result wholesale. For work I used ChatGPT to write a very specific programming problem and it wasn't a solution you'd ever copy/paste...the lack of context to the surrounding system means that's impractical 99% of the time outside of toy problems. But it was still super useful for getting my brain working and suggesting a really good basic structure it would have taken me 3-4 failure cycles to get to. The same exists in DALL-E/GPT for corporate art generation, writing 'essays', or stories or w/e. It's almost never producing the end product (besides toy problems). So, if it can't do that in the first place, why evaluate it as if that's what it's supposed to be?
- Multicomp 4y ago
  This is how I've used chatgpt as well. A primer for brainstorming that can wander on any tangents you are after
- stanete 4y ago
  I’ve found that the more context I give to it, the better it is to help me solving a problem. If I spend a bunch of minutes giving info about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and what I personally know about the problem space, it will usually help me to either explore more or to arrive at the solution faster. When I talk about coaching I meant that I told ChatGPT to answer only with questions. In a way, ChatGPT is good at having socratic conversations. Sometimes it gets out of character but it depends mostly on your answers or questions.
  - Molomby 4y ago

cs702 4y ago

It's Gary Marcus, again, as always and as ever, criticizing other people's work as "machines that manipulate data but aren't really intelligent." He's been on HN many times before, always criticizing the same things: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=gary%20marcus&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... As far as I know, all he's ever done is criticize, without ever delving into the mathematical details. To understand those who disagree with him, read "The Bitter Lesson" by Rich Sutton: http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html -- EDITS: Modified and rearranged sentences to reflect more accurately what I meant to write the first time around.

area51org 4y ago
Does he need to develop an AI system at all in order to have a valid opinion, though?
- cs702 4y ago
  No, he doesn't. I updated my comment to reflect what I actually meant to say.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  Honestly? Yes, given the amount of trust reporters put into his statements.
sizzle 4y ago
Do movie critics need to produce box office films before criticizing movies?
dimmuborgir 4y ago
His book "The Algebraic Mind" goes into great detail about connectionism (neural networks), symbolic systems, limits of connectionism and proposals to integrate neural networks with symbolic systems (hybrid systems). The "deep learning alone is enough" camp (especially LeCun) has abused him for years but now slowly coming to the realization that we need to feed neural networks with explicit inductive biases to attain AGI which is exactly what Marcus has been saying since the 90s. LeCun, for some reason, refuses to call these explicit biases as symbols and that's the only disagreement between Marcus and LeCun these days.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

> They can easily be automated to generate misinformation at unprecedented scale. > They cost almost nothing to operate These two in combination scare me the most. We still fall for email scams for cryin out loud.

lxe 4y ago

"Threat to the fabric of society"? The author is an influential figure, and should know better. This sensationalizing, fear-mongering and FUD is the real "threat to society".

Dove 4y ago

This isn't a threat to civilization. Civilization already has the tools to solve this problem. They're ancient, and (for better or worse) they're re-emerging all around us: tribalism, aristocracy, credentialism, reputation. A hundred variations of "Trust is earned; suspect strangers." The threat here is to the philosophical conceit that you can trust strangers -- not via a network where people vouch for each other, but just by averaging large numbers of them. Democracy makes good things happen. It's a beautiful idea, the philosophical gem of the last two or three centuries, and it works well in some contexts, and certainly is better than what it replaced... but its success has resulted in overapplication. It certainly can't withstand an army of malicious bots. I have enjoyed the fact that the absolute political freedom of internet communities has allowed for myriad experiments in government on the sort of timescale that allows for lessons and improvement. The core conceit that people, in large numbers, are basically good and wise was the core philosophy that ruled the internet of ten or twenty or thirty years ago, with its open networks and upvotes. But it seems to me that we have all collectively been coming around to the fact that moderation, and reputation, and credentials, and curation, all have some serious up sides. Tyranny is certainly a problem, but maybe kings and aristocrats aren't all bad. The bots are really only a threat to communities that haven't figured out yet that there is a balance here, a give and take between the individual and society. That zero contribution should equal zero power, that a high degree of influence ought only be achievable by long and faithful service, that trust is something real people have in each other and that proxies for it can always be gamed, that social status serves a very real and useful function, and that destructive behavior should be met with extreme prejudice... but at the same time, that outsiders can sometimes say very important things.

analognoise 4y ago
Kings and aristocrats are that bad, though. Nothing that happens on the...internet? Changes that. It's the internet. People gonna lie on the internet. I think people overestimate it's importance at this point. If it becomes unreliable or shitty, people will stop using it, go outside, and touch grass.
- mc32 4y ago

walrus01 4y ago

> The so-called Russian Firehose of Propaganda model, described in a 2016 Rand report, is about creating a fog of misinformation; it focuses on volume, and on creating uncertainty. It doesn't matter if the "large language models" are inconsistent, if they can greatly escalate volume. And it's clear that that is exactly what large language models make possible. They are aiming to create a world in which we are unable to know what we can trust; with these new tools, they might succeed. I would encourage anyone who wants to look into this more to see the part of the 2016 documentary/film project "Hypernormalisation" about Vladislav Surkov: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hypernormalisation+vladislav+surkov https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hypernorm... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI27qk1irg0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI27qk1irg0

gcanyon 4y ago

AI could be civilization-ending. Pretty much everything we do involves trust in others. Things like vaccine hesitancy can become worse to the point that people make increasingly life-threatening decisions. With AI-generated disinformation at scale fully able to drown out actual vetted information, it's possible we'll end up in an environment where even reasonable people simply don't know what decisions to make. Voting becomes problematic. Where to live, what products to buy, what to study, what job to take, all become difficult or impossible to decide intelligently. I hope I'm wrong.

commandlinefan 4y ago
> all become difficult or impossible to decide intelligently The solution is for people to learn to reason logically for themselves. Maybe when we actually get to the point where people can't survive until they do so, they'll start taking logical reasoning seriously.
- gcanyon 4y ago
  How does reasoning logically based on potentially unreliable information produce accurate, beneficial results? Especially when it's impossible to know the specific probability any given piece of information is true?

Apocryphon 4y ago

Technically, Westward was AI's Jurassic Park moment.

Apocryphon 4y ago
Westworld.

rakejake 4y ago

A lot of replies to this post (and to fears about AI in general) are of the form "But humans are as untrustworthy, if not more. So the AI can't be any worse". I have to say many of you have a very dim view of humans. When I read an answer off of stackoverflow that is not highly voted, I know that the answer could be incorrect. But there is a trust that the actor on the other side was also facing the same problem, and is not malicious. After all, why would a malicious actor care to give a wrong answer to a "Rust borrow checker question"? If the answer was AI generated and posted by a bot operated by a karma farmer, out goes that trust. This is obviously not a threat to society, and chances are the asker will eventually figure out the right answer, but you can see how this sort of thing reduces the signal-to-noise ratio of almost anything on the internet by orders of magnitude. Trust underpins everything. Hacker news IS a social network in my opinion. I come here to read comments knowing that there is a like-minded person on the other side who is sharing their thoughts. If I was looking for information or something to learn, I would read a newspaper, a textbook or a research paper. The discussion with a real human from some corner of the world is what makes this forum tick. This tech is not going away and I presume some steady state will be reached eventually, but in the meantime, there is no doubt in my mind that the internet as we know it is in jeopardy.

citizenpaul 4y ago
HN ususlly disappoints me any time social issues pop up. It seems a majority HN'rs fancy themselves as liberals. Yet in reality they are authoritarian conservatives that happen to have some liberal beliefs. The calls for oppression when someone has a different view are common.

bottlepalm 4y ago

OpenAI needs to feed all of Wikipedia, Reddit comments, stack overflow, GitHub, textbooks, IMDb, hacker news, books, news, yelp, etc.. into ChatGPT. That’s pretty much the next step to out googling google unless google does it first.

peter303 4y ago

Its not that A.I. software is smart, but that for the most humans are mediocre and uncreative. Humans are stuck in their mental ruts. Given a large enough A.I. and large enough sampling of total human knowledge, an A.I. can predict much human activity.

deafpolygon 4y ago

It's not a threat until AI can start creating new ideas in a vacuum. As it stands, they require our creative output and all of their outputs can be considered derived works. It's very effective, but it's still dependent on INPUT (human) -> OUTPUT (AI).

aqfamnzc 4y ago
Can you create a new idea in a vacuum? We humans also seed our creative RNGs from the world around us and from sources like memories and real-time sensory input.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  I'm not disputing that, but humans can create new ideas from what appears to be nothing. AI is still limited in that the ideas they generate are essentially remixes of pre-existing ideas fed to the AI.

everydayentropy 4y ago

Can't you see that people in this thread are posting ChatGPT responses...

jrmg 4y ago

I think there are some problems with assuming that ChatGPT-like AI will improve in quality, _especially_ if it gets good enough to popular and generally trusted. Where will the next generation of AI training data come from, if the vast majority of information on the internet is generated by AI? Isn’t new data required? It feels like an internet filled with ‘incorrect’ spam generated by AIs is as much, maybe more, of a danger to future AI as it is to humans. This is almost the same thing, but: it feels like ChatGPT is so good at e.g. programming questions because it’s been trained on millions of human discussions about programming. Even if you can weed out AI spam from future training sets, if people start relying on AI for e.g Stack Overflow like answers, and perhaps even reference information, and therefore stop writing or conversing online about new technologies, where will training data about new technologies come from? Primary reference material probably isn’t enough (just like it’s not really enough for most humans).

hooande 4y ago
This is an excellent point. One of the main things I see people say about ChatGPT is "when it gets better in the future". But as you point out, it's already trained on the entire internet. There are many features they could add and there are infinite special cases for handling various prompts. But the core of the product, the LLM generated answers, can't get much better without an order of magnitude increase in training data. In terms of petabytes of training data, it will be a long time before ChatGPT's own responses are a significant portion of the training set. And even then, at least for a while, that should just shift responses closer to a sort of average human response
- astrange 4y ago
  > But the core of the product, the LLM generated answers, can't get much better without an order of magnitude increase in training data. There's no reason to believe this. The model architecture and training methods aren't perfect, nor is the way it's queried. eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/zr2en7/r_nonparametric_masked_language_modeling_metaai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/zr2en7/r_n...
4y ago

POPOSYS 4y ago

That website makes Firefox use too much CPU and the fan of my laptop starts to scream - very annoying. It is, of course, kind of a great joke. Never-heard-before wisdom with deep, impactful visions published on a website with "trusted insights for computing´s leading professionals" - and they just simply can not deliver decent HTML / JavaScript. Looks like we need even more leading professionals!

poulpy123 4y ago

It's quite funny that the author consider 1 million dollars of propaganda a huge amount, just because it was russian

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

> wood chips to breakfast cereal > https://www.apple.com https://www.apple.com Shots fired

commandlinefan 4y ago

> we may have to begin to treat misinformation as we do libel "misinformation" defined as "anything that came from an AI"? Or the more common colloquial definition of "anything that might strengthen the case of conservative politicians"?