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>Introducing the National Postal Service - send a letter to anyone for a nominal fee. No need for a personal courier, armed escort, or patrician status. >This

>Introducing the National Postal Service - send a letter to anyone for a nominal fee. No need for a personal courier, armed escort, or patrician status. >This is the kind of thing that should be illegal. Now, any Plebian could essentially write a letter to anyone, impersonating anyone. Forged letters could drag us into a war with Persia - for Jupiter's sake!

whywhywouldyou 4y ago
This is a hilariously bad attempt at discrediting the original argument. There's a vast difference between forging a letter and replicating the unique vocal fingerprint of any human being, on demand. I suppose if we approach the point that we can create robotic clones of anyone, anywhere, that look, sound, and move like anyone on the planet, that will be just like the post office too, right?
- salad-tycoon 4y ago
  What are some of the differences? Besides the glaringly obvious text vs audio. I mean prior to telegraphs if I got a letter from my sweet heart with a lock of hair or something and a request for funds I’d probably believe it, especially if it took days or weeks to communicate back and forth?
  - burkaman 4y ago
    Impersonating a letter is similar to having an impressionist record an impersonation of someone's voice. It's difficult, very imperfect, and not very scalable. The analogy for this technology would be a robot that can perfectly imitate someone's handwriting and vocabulary using one letter as a reference.
burkaman 4y ago
Yes, good point, mail fraud used to be a major problem and we started passing laws to deal with it 150 years ago. https://www.uspis.gov/history-spotlight/history-of-the-mail-fraud-statue https://www.uspis.gov/history-spotlight/history-of-the-mail-... Maybe we'll need a new specialized law enforcement agency like the Postal Inspectors to deal with the inevitable wave of AI-assisted crime.
nkrisc 4y ago
No, it's more like those "stress tester" services that you're definitely-certainly-fingers-crossed supposed to only point at your own servers. Sure, this is marketed as generating your own voice to read scripts for you YouTube channel, but are they actually verifying who's voice you're generating?
palata 4y ago
You completely miss the point: scale. Try to deceive people by learning about their contacts, writing a convincing letter and sending it. How long does it take you to prepare one letter? Now those AIs potentially allow you to just generate millions of those with one click. The problem is the scale: everyone can do it at no cost and at scale.

whywhywouldyou 4y ago

This is a hilariously bad attempt at discrediting the original argument. There's a vast difference between forging a letter and replicating the unique vocal fingerprint of any human being, on demand. I suppose if we approach the point that we can create robotic clones of anyone, anywhere, that look, sound, and move like anyone on the planet, that will be just like the post office too, right?

salad-tycoon 4y ago
What are some of the differences? Besides the glaringly obvious text vs audio. I mean prior to telegraphs if I got a letter from my sweet heart with a lock of hair or something and a request for funds I’d probably believe it, especially if it took days or weeks to communicate back and forth?
- burkaman 4y ago
  Impersonating a letter is similar to having an impressionist record an impersonation of someone's voice. It's difficult, very imperfect, and not very scalable. The analogy for this technology would be a robot that can perfectly imitate someone's handwriting and vocabulary using one letter as a reference.

burkaman 4y ago

Yes, good point, mail fraud used to be a major problem and we started passing laws to deal with it 150 years ago. https://www.uspis.gov/history-spotlight/history-of-the-mail-fraud-statue https://www.uspis.gov/history-spotlight/history-of-the-mail-... Maybe we'll need a new specialized law enforcement agency like the Postal Inspectors to deal with the inevitable wave of AI-assisted crime.

nkrisc 4y ago

No, it's more like those "stress tester" services that you're definitely-certainly-fingers-crossed supposed to only point at your own servers. Sure, this is marketed as generating your own voice to read scripts for you YouTube channel, but are they actually verifying who's voice you're generating?

palata 4y ago

You completely miss the point: scale. Try to deceive people by learning about their contacts, writing a convincing letter and sending it. How long does it take you to prepare one letter? Now those AIs potentially allow you to just generate millions of those with one click. The problem is the scale: everyone can do it at no cost and at scale.