9 ms·

I asked myself, why would ask somebody an AI trained on previous data, about events in the future? Of course you did it for fun, but on further thinking, as AI

• inanutshellus 4y ago
  "Time to generate a bunch of b$ websites stating falsehoods and make sure these AI bots are seeded with it." ~Bad guys everywhere
  • tomxor 4y ago
    Because I loathe captcha, I make sure that every time I am presented one I sneak in an incorrect answer just to fuck with the model I'm training for free. Garbage in, garbage out.
    • A_non_e-moose 4y ago
      Glad to see a kindred soul out there. I thought I was the only one :)
      • breppp 4y ago
        Generalizing over the same idea, I believe that whenever you are asked for information about yourself you should volunteer wrong information. Female instead of male, single instead of married etc. Resistance through differential privacy
        • Eupraxias 4y ago
          I've lived in 90210 since webforms started asking.
          • hooverd 4y ago
            ASL?
            • codetrotter 4y ago
              69/f/cali
          • inlined 4y ago
            My email address is no@never.com. I’ve actually seen some forms reject it though
            • Eupraxias 4y ago
              High-five, having forever used some permutation of something like naaah@nope.net, etc.
    • froggit 4y ago
      I do this unintentionally on a regular basis.
    • renewiltord 4y ago
      Back when recaptcha was catching on there was a 4chan campaign to associate words with "penis". They gathered together, used to successfully brigading polls of a few thousand, and went at it. Someone asked the recaptcha guys and they said the traffic was so little among the total that it got diluted away. No lasting penis words arose and they lost interest.
  • rapind 4y ago
    They were already doing this to seed Google. So business as usual for Mercer and co. I suspect the only way to fix this problem is to exacerbate it until search / AI is useless. We (humanity) have been making great progress on this recently.
    • mattigames 4y ago
      That's not how it is gonna play out, right now it makes many wrong statements because AI companies are trying to get as much funding possible to wow investors but accuracy will continue being compared more and more, and to win that race it will get help from humans to use better starting points for every subject, for example for programming questions is gonna use the number of upvotes for a given answer on stackoverflow, for a question about astrophysics is gonna preffer statmenets made by Neil deGrasse Tyson than by some random person online, and so on; and to scale this approach it will slowly learn to make associates from such curated information, e.g. the people that Neil follows and RTs are more likely to make truthful statements about astrophysics than random people.
      • rapind 4y ago
        That makes complete sense, and yet the cynic (realist?) in me is expecting a political nightmare. The stakes are actually really high. AI will for all intents and purposes be the arbiter of truth. For example there are people who will challenge the truth of everything Neil deGrasse Tyson says and will fight tooth and nail to challenge and influence this truth. We (western society) are already arguing about some very obviously objective truths.
• MR4D 4y ago
  You make a good point, but consider a query that many people use everyday: "Alexa, what's the weather for today?" That's a question about the future, but the knowledge was generated beforehand by the weather people (NOAA, weather.com, my local meteorologist, etc). I'm sure there are more examples, but this one comes to mind immediately
  • stagger87 4y ago
    Right, but Alexa probably has custom handling for these types of common queries
    • MR4D 4y ago
      I guess I should have been clearer... There are tons of common queries about the future. Being able to handle them should be built into the AI to know that if something hasn't happened, to give other relevant details. (and yes, I agree with your Alexa speculation)
    • titzer 4y ago
      TBH I've wondered from the very beginning how far they would get just hardcoding the top 1000 questions people ask instead of whatever crappy ML it debuted with. These things are getting better, but I was always shocked how they could ship such an obviously unfinished, broken prototype that got basics so wrong because it avoided doing something "manually". It always struck me as so deeply unserious as to be untrustworthy.
      • MR4D 4y ago
        Your comment makes me wonder - what would happen if they did that every day? And then, perhaps, trained an AI on those responses, updating it every day. I wonder if they could train it to learn that some things (e.g. weather) change frequently, and figure stuff out from there. It's well above my skill level to be sure, but would be interesting to see something like that (sort of a curated model, as opposed to zero-based training).
• delusional 4y ago
  It's so much better. In the AI generated world of the future the political agenda will be embedded in the web search results it bases its answer on. No longer will you have to maintain a somewhat reasonable image to obtain trust from people, as long as you publish your nonsense in sufficient volume to dominate the AI dataset, you can wash your political agenda through the Bing AI. The trump of the future wont need Fox News, just a couple thousands or millions of well positioned blogs that spew out enough blog spam to steer the AI. The AI is literally designed to make your vile bullshit appear presentable.
  • mcbuilder 4y ago
    I think it seems likely any thing similar to a blog farm you describe would also get detected by the AI. Maybe we will just develop AI bullshit filters (well embeddings) just like I can download a porn blacklist or a spam filter for my email. Really it depends on who is running the AI, the non Open Assistant future and instead Big Corp AI is the dystopian element, not the bullshit generator aspect. I think the cat is out of the bag on the latter and it's not that scary in itself. I personally would rather have the AI trained on public bullshit as it is easier to detect as opposed to some insider castrating the model or datasets.
    • ElijahLynn 4y ago
      The technology is capable, yes. But as we see here with Bing, there was some other motive to push out software that is arguably in the first stage of "get it working, get it right, get it fast" (Kent Beck). This appears to not be ethical motiviation but financial or some other type of motivation. If there are no consequences then some appear they do not have morals or ethics and will easily trade them for money/market share etc.
    • vidarh 4y ago
      > Maybe we will just develop AI bullshit filters (well embeddings) just like I can download a porn blacklist or a spam filter for my email. Just for fun I took the body of a random message from my spam folder and asked ChatGPT if it thought it was spam, and it not only said it was, but explained why: "Yes, the message you provided is likely to be spam. The message contains several red flags indicating that it may be part of a phishing or scamming scheme. For example, the message is written in broken English and asks for personal information such as age and location, which could be used for malicious purposes. Additionally, the request for a photograph and detailed information about one's character could be used to build a fake online identity or to trick the recipient into revealing sensitive information."
• Spooky23 4y ago
  Exactly. I’d imagine this is a major reason why Google hasn’t gone to market with this already. ChatGPT is amazing but shouldn’t be available to the general public. I’d expect a startup like OpenAI to be pumping this, but Microsoft is irresponsible for putting this out in front the of general public.
  • flangola7 4y ago
    I anticipate in the next couple of years that AI tech will be subject to tight regulations similar to that of explosive munitions and SOTA radar systems today, and eventually even anti-proliferation policies like those for uranium procurement and portable fission/fusion research.
    • srackey 4y ago
      ChatGPT/GPT3.5 and its weights can fit on a small thumb drive, and copied infinitely and shared. Tech will get better enough in the next decade to make this accessible to normies. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.
      • thefaux 4y ago
        True. In the long run though, I expect we will either build something dramatically better than these models or lose interest in them. Throw in hardware advances coupled with bitrot and I would go short on any of the gpt-3 code being available in 2123 (except in something like the arctic code vault, which would likely be effectively the same as it being unavailable).
        • vidarh 4y ago
          The point isn't that gpt-3 specifically will be available, or the current models, but that gpt-3 level models or better will be available.
      • Spooky23 4y ago
        Sure it can. Missile guidance systems fit on a tiny missile, but you can’t just get one. The controlled parlor game is there to seed acceptance. Once someone is able to train a similar model with something like the leaked State Department cables or classified information we’ll see the risk and the legislation will follow.
• richardw 4y ago
  People who aren’t savvy and really want it to be right. Old man who is so sure of its confidence that he’ll put his life savings on a horse race prediction. Mentally unstable lady looking for a tech saviour or co-conspirator. Q-shirt wearers with guns. Hey Black Mirror people, can we chat? Try stay ahead of reality on this one, it’ll be hard.
• IlliOnato 4y ago
  A common case of asking a question about the future, even simpler than the weather: "Dear Bing, what day of the week is February 12 next year?" I would hope to get a precise and correct answer! And of course all kinds of estimates, not just the weather, are interesting too. "What is estimated population of New York city in 2030?"
• Spivak 4y ago
  Because the AI isn’t (supposed to be) providing its own information to answer these queries. All the AI is used for is synthesis of the snippets of data sourced by the search engine.
• wnevets 4y ago
  I see people citing the big bold text at the top of the google results as evidence supporting their position in a discussion all the time. More often than not the highlighted text is from an article debunking their position but the person never bother to actually click the link and read the article. The internet is about to get a whole lot dumber with these fake AI generated answers.
• saurik 4y ago
  1) The question as stated in the comment wasn't in the future tense and 2) the actual query from the screenshot was merely "superbowl winner". It would seem like a much more reasonable answer to either variant would be to tell you about the winners of the numerous past super bowls--maybe with some focus on the most recent one--not deciding to make up details about a super bowl in 2023.
  • soco 4y ago
    The AI doesn't work in terms of "making up details". It will simply choose what makes "sense" in that context, no info about the made-up parts.
• joe_the_user 4y ago
  "welcome to alternate reality where b$ doesn't even have a political agenda..." yet.
• throwawaylinux 4y ago
  > I asked myself, why would ask somebody an AI trained on previous data, about events in the future? Lots of teams have won in the past though. Why should an AI (or you) assume that a question phrased in the past tense is asking about a future event? "Many different teams have won the super bowl, Los Angeles Rams won the last super bowl in 2022" Actually even if this was the inaugural year, you would assume the person asking the question wasn't aware it had not been held yet rather than assuming they're asking what the future result is, no? "It hasn't been played yet, it's on next week." I realize that's asking a lot of "AI", but it's a trivial question for a human to respond to, and a reasonable one that might be asked by a person who has no idea about the sport but is wondering what everybody is talking about.
• AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Well, when you're playing with a ChatGPT, it may not be apparent what the cutoff date is for the training data. You may ask it something that was future when it was trained, but past when you asked. Is Bing continuously trained? If so, that would kind of get around that problem.
• raffraffraff 4y ago
  The problem is that it will always give you an answer even if none exists. Like a 4 year old with adult vocab and diction, wearing a tie, confidently making up the news. People may make decisions based on made-up-bullshit-as-a-service. We need that like we need a hole in the head. Just wait until people start using this crap to write Wikipedia answers. In terms on internet quality, I sometimes feel like one of those people who stockpiles canned food and ammo: it's time to archive what you want and unplug.
• logifail 4y ago
  > an AI trained on previous data Trained to do what, though? It feels like ChatGPT has been trained primarily to be convincing. Yet at the back of our minds I hope we recognise that "convincing" and "accurate" (or even "honest") are very different things.
• midoridensha 4y ago
  >I asked myself, why would ask somebody an AI trained on previous data, about events in the future? "Who won the Superbowl?" is not a question about future events, it's a question about the past. The Superbowl is a long-running series of games, I believe held every year. So the simple question "who won the Superbowl?" obviously refers to the most recent Superbowl game played. "Who won the Superbowl in 2024?", on the other hand, would be a question about the future. Hopefully, a decent AI would be able to determine quickly that such a question makes no sense.
• cyanydeez 4y ago
  Oh. You think these AIs don't inherit the agenda is f their source material. Have you ignored the compounding evidence thath