23 ms·

While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker tu

by mabbo 4y ago

While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did. How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." Could the police subpoena all of that data and make an AI model of you that wants to help them prove you committed a crime and guess all your passwords? This stuff is moving terrifyingly fast, and laws will take ages to catch up. Get ready for a wild couple of years my friends.

gs17 4y ago
Reminds me a little of (fiction, for now) Google People: https://qntm.org/person https://qntm.org/person
- mabbo 4y ago
  qntm is a wonderfully weird and terrifying author and I highly recommend all of their writing.
- startupsfail 4y ago
  Reminds me of Harry Potter magic. Seems like a perfect technology to implement these talking photographs, paintings and pictures from there.
mmmmmbop 4y ago
> And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? No, they definitely can't. Parts of HN love to hate on GDPR, but laws like that prevent companies from doing the things you proposed.
- josefx 4y ago
  They are supposed to, but usually it takes several dozen times of them getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar and fined before they are even capable of acknowledging these laws even exist.
  - mmmmmbop 4y ago
    You know, that's not the sentiment I've been experiencing in the industry. There's certainly some uncertainty and risk-taking on the margins, e.g. what exactly constitutes "fair use", how do design user consent flows, and so on. But it's broadly accepted that you can't do anything with personal data without user consent, and I've found companies to be very careful in that regard. Recently, Meta was fined $400MM for forcing users to consent to targeted advertising [0]. Note how Meta was careful to get consent (even if the way they did it was illegitimate). Sure, $400MM may not be a lot for a company that size, but I genuinely believe that the fines would be an order of magnitude higher if a company intentionally decided to do something with personal data without consent. GDPR fines may reach up to 4% of worldwide revenue, plus likely any proceeds from the illegitimate venture. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/04/meta-fined-more-than-400-million-in-ireland-over-eu-privacy-breaches.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/04/meta-fined-more-than-400-mil...
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    I did a lot of GDPR work at several <insert FAANG here> companies. It was absolutely taken seriously and lawyers were involved all the time. The reason for all these fines is 2-fold: 1. A lot of the fines come from edge cases that are literally unclear in the law. Eg Facebook‘s opt out for advertising fines. You can disagree with fb’s decision but teams of lawyers couldn’t answer this question except in court. I think American and European jurisprudence aware also pretty different so someone sitting in California making business decisions might not understand the ramifications in Europe. 2. A lot of the thorny privacy bits can be bypassed if you update the TOS to mention it (or so they think). I’ve seen that happen a few times during my tenure. That doesn’t excuse the choice of these companies to make these choices, but my point was to say that companies take it seriously but lawyers don’t always agree on how laws work except in court.
beezlewax 4y ago
There is an episode of Black Mirror about this called "Be Right Back". Well worth a watch.
- barathr 4y ago
  And another called "Hang the DJ"
  - lapetitejort 4y ago
    And yet another in the 2014 Special, where the police make AI "clones" of a suspect, then interrogate them in a simulation.
    - chasd00 4y ago
      i was thinking of this exact scenario here. Training an LLM on all the information available about a suspect and then questioning the AI. If you had a mountain of information it would be very easy to miss details and connect the dots manually but if you could prompt an AI that has been trained on the data you could get answers much faster.
13years 4y ago
For all the fears of AGI, these are the more concrete nefarious uses we can actually reason about. It is a point I often make that we don't need AGI for AI to already become very disturbing in its potential use. The other point, is that technically this AI is not "unaligned". It is doing exactly what is requested of the operator. The implications are that humanity suffers in either scenario, either by our own agency in control of power we are not prepared to manage or we will be managed by power that we can not control.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > It is a point I often make that we don't need AGI for AI to already become very disturbing in its potential use. But we don't need AI or LLMs at all for the above scenario. Companies don't currently pry into your e-mails to make hiring decisions, but they could (ignoring laws) do it if they wanted. No LLM or AI necessary. So why would the existence of AIs or LLMs change that? If they wanted to use the content of your e-mails against you, they don't need an LLM to do it.
  - dangond 4y ago
    Because it's now cheaper and more cost-effective, and if they can get away with it, saves them tons of money. Note: I don't think companies are likely to do this, but being able to do this without AI is not sufficient reason to dismiss the possibility. It's the same reason people who wouldn't steal DVDs from a store would pirate movies online. Much harder to get caught and easier to do, so this new way of watching movies for free became popular while the previous method was not.
    - nonbirithm 4y ago
      I feel like the backlash against Stable Diffusion had the opposite change in visibility. It revealed that thousands of people wanted a way to produce unique art in the styles of living artists, where some of those people might have gone to either their Patreon or a piracy site that scraped Patreon instead. Either way they're not as visible if they're only consuming the result. To some artists, AI generated images from their styles would amount to "productive piracy." Unlike torrenting the act is often out in the open since users tend to share the results online. I'm not sure if this phenomenon has happened before; with teenagers pirating Photoshop it's impossible to tell from a glance if the output is from a pirated version.
dorkwood 4y ago
> Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." To fix this, you can train your personal LLM on the “FAANG Appropriate Banter” dataset, and then have it send messages to your friends daily for several months in the lead up to your interview.
- startupsfail 4y ago
  Don’t worry. They’ll take you, you’d just be sorted to Gryffindor or what not :)
galacticaactual 4y ago
And yet, every time these fears are brought up with AI people, they are dismissed as Luddite hyperbole. “We’re saving the world” they say. With zero regard for second order effects, or with arrogant dismissal of those effects as worth it for the first order gains. Disgusting to watch unfold.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
wokwokwok 4y ago
> input_dir /path/to/downloaded/llama/weights --model_size 7B Most absolutely not with the 7B llama model as described here. …but, potentially, with a much larger fine tuned foundational model, if you have a lot of open source code on GitHub and lots of public samples. The question is why you would bother? very large models would most likely not be meaningfully improved by fine tuning on a specific individual. The only reason to do this would be to coax a much smaller model into having characteristics of a much larger one by fine tuning… but, realistically, right now, it seem pretty skeptical anyone would bother. Why not just invest in a much larger more capable model?
- akiselev 4y ago
  ChatGPT’s “voice” changes dramatically in diction and prose when you ask it to generate text in the style of a popular author like Hunter S Thompson, Charles Bukowski, or Terry Pratchett. You can even ask it to generate text in the style of a specific HN user if they’re prolific enough in the training data set. Fine tuning would allow you to achieve that for people who aren’t notable enough to be all over the training data
isaacremuant 4y ago
I know what you mean but "laws" don't matter in a world where the government can decide There's a "dangerous emergency" and basically supress all rights and between the bought for media and tech they will supress any pushback against it. I know it's not popular to try and remove the blindfold of propaganda but the 2020 to 2022 and covid authoritarian, anti human rights, policies were an awesome example. But if you are quick to dismiss those there's always terrorism, the children, drugs, and every other typical gov excuse. It's not a tech problem. It's a problem of the people who have decided they will go along with autority at every step, If they get pushed.
- Fauntleroy 4y ago
  Compare the response of the Chinese government and the US government, then return here and tell us all about the "blindfold" we Americans are wearing wrt the government's COVID response.
  - davidjones332 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - isaacremuant 4y ago
    I didn't even talk specifically about the US but that is just pathetic as a defense. Comparing with the bottom of the barrel to make yourself look good? That's like a country using the US healthcare situation to claim their own healthcare is good. It's a poor car salesman trick.
    - Fauntleroy 4y ago
      And you're out here making blanket statements suggesting "we" did not pay attention to our own country's piecemeal, half-assed, state-by-state COVID response, instead painting it as a brutal federal crackdown. Lord.
      - isaacremuant 4y ago
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." If a company is going to snoop in your personal data to get insights about you, they'd just do it directly. Hiring managers would scroll through your e-mails and make judgment calls based on their content. Training an LLM on your e-mails and then feeding it questions is just a lower accuracy, more abstracted version of the above, but it's the same concept. So the answer is: In theory, any company could do the above if they wanted to flout all laws and ignore the consequences of having these practices leak (which they inevitably would). LLMs don't change that. They could have done it all along. However, legally companies like Google cannot, and will not, pry into your private data without your consent to make hiring decisions. Adding an LLM abstraction layer doesn't make the existing laws (or social/moral pressure) go away.
- nindalf 4y ago
  I think flouted works better than flaunted when talking about laws.
- softfalcon 4y ago
  > Adding an LLM abstraction layer doesn't make the existing laws (or social/moral pressure) go away. Isn't the "abstraction" of "the model" exactly the reason we have open court filings against stable diffusion and other models for possibly stealing artist's work in the open source domain and claiming it's legal while also being financially backed by major corporations who are then using said models for profit? Whose to say that "training a model on your data isn't actually stealing your data" it's just "training a model" as long as you delete the original data after you finish training? What if instead of Google snooping, they hire a 3rd party to snoop it, then another 3rd party to transfer it, then another 3rd party to build the model, then another 3rd party to re-sell the model. Then create legal loopholes around which ones are doing it for "research" and which ones are doing it for profit/hiring. All of the sudden, it gets really murky who is and isn't allowed to have a model of you. I feel one could argue that the abstraction is exactly the kind of smoke screen that many will use to avoid the social/moral pressures legally, allowing them to do bad things but get away with it.
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
Going one step further: what if you right now are a replay running in some datacenter, déjà vécu [1] feelings appear when they scale down the VM due to costs. Basically, the simulation hypothesis, but the simulators are not mysterious, just boringly distopian: some suits trying to raise KPIs. [1] already lived, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu#D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_v%C3%A9cu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu#D%C3%A9j%C3%...
fragsworth 4y ago
I don't think Google would want the PR hit for doing such things. I suspect that they even have hang-ups about training their general-purpose AIs on your private data, because they might accidentally leak some of it. A lot of their business exists because people trust them to keep your data safe (even from their internal teams), and they would lose a lot of business if anyone discovered otherwise. I think it will be a wild couple of years but there are lots of things that are off-limits.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Instead Google would just by a "person score" much like we already buy credit scores from third party companies with questionable data use policies. Google gets to wash its hands of the data responsibility, but all the same negative issues for the user is still there.
maxilevi 4y ago
We ended feudalism only to get back to a stronger version of it powered by tech
29athrowaway 4y ago
Wait until you head about mind uploading and transhumanism.
- chasd00 4y ago
  heh take the turing test one step further. If you can't tell the difference between the real person and the LLM of that real person then which one is real?
svilen_dobrev 4y ago
some 10y+(?) ago, i had an idea of building a model/graph of one's own notions (what is "red"?) and how do they relate to one another, and to others' such graphs - from your perspective... Back then abandoned it because looked like impossibly-huge to build, semantical-web was only leftovers-and-promises.. But a year later, this same thing you are talking about, occured to me and then i abandoned it completely. Crossed it out. Yeah, That thing would be extremely useful but even more dangerous as it will know more about you than you. btw. There's a new book by Kazuo Ishiguro - named Klara and the sun. Along the same vein - Have a look. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klara_and_the_Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klara_and_the_Sun ciao p.s. see also Lena by Charles Stross. or this: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/01/make-up-a-guy.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/01/make-up...
- mattbee 4y ago
  Lena is by qntm, but was featured on Charles' blog. It's very good.
burglekutt 4y ago
There’s a (good) short story in a (great) sci-fi book called “Valuable Humans in Transit” about something like this. If I remember correctly, Google learns to perfectly simulate people and then the real people disappear.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Owl Turd has a short story wrapped in web comic form exploring this exact situation (group chat × Theseus' ship): https://shencomix.tumblr.com/post/696189256410005504 https://shencomix.tumblr.com/post/696189256410005504
mym1990 4y ago
The first instance of this would most likely alienate a lot of users. What is more likely to happen is the development of new products that basically cater to social needs through mimicking real world interactions. Subscribe for 15$ a month to feel like you have an unending flow of conversations with interesting bots that mimic your friends! I am sure there is a market for this. This product could be advertised as a way for people who are not that socially inclined to practice their social skills. Or learn other languages through fake immersion. The use cases to make this seem like a benefit are pretty limitless.
- nirav72 4y ago
  Maybe some people can pretend they're interacting with a real person. But for me, knowing that I'm interacting with a bot would break the experience for me.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    This is a similar take I have on one player video games, I just reaaally have a lot more fun in multi-player or MMOs. But a ton of people love the solo run throughs and what not, power to them. I think it comes down to having a novel experience and one where there are some unexpected twists and turns.
lantry 4y ago
relevant krazam: https://youtu.be/BrQyMrmRBsk https://youtu.be/BrQyMrmRBsk
tiagod 4y ago
They could train a LMM to reply to emails like I would. Probably very useless, I don't really use email for personal stuff.
koolba 4y ago
> Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? Some of us have been planning for this situation for years by having our recorded digital footprint have no relation to our in person personality. At best they could simulate what they think we are like in person. A side benefit of all this is that it gives otherwise nice people an excuse to be a complete jerk online.
nostrademons 4y ago
"Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." They kinda did - that's what GMail/Chat/Docs autosuggest does. You've got canned replies to e-mail, editors that complete your sentences, etc. It works okay for simple stuff - completing a single sentence or responding "OK, sounds good" to an e-mail that you already agree with. It doesn't work all that well for long-form writing, unless that long-form writing is basically just bullshit that covers up "OK, sounds good". (There's a joke within Google now that the future of e-mail is "OK, sounds good" -> AI bullshit generator -> "Most esteemed colleagues, we have organized a committee to conduct a study on the merits of XYZ and have developed the following conclusions [2 pages follow]" -> AI bullshit summarizer -> "OK, sounds good".) This is a pretty good summary of the state of LLMs right now. They're very good at generating a lot of verbiage in areas where the information content of the message is low but social conventions demand a lot of verbiage (I've heard of them used to good effect for recommendation letters, for example). They're pretty bad at collecting & synthesizing large amount of highly-precise factual information, because they hallucinate facts that aren't there and often misunderstand the context of facts.
- softfalcon 4y ago
  I completely agree with you about them failing to be accurate for the various reasons you've explained (hallucinating, limited social conventions, etc). Unfortunately, I've heard enough people believe the hype that this is actually "synthesizing sentience into the machine" or some other buzz speak. I have met researchers of AI at credible universities who believe this kind of thing, completely oblivious to how ChatGPT or other models actually work. All it takes is one of them talking out of their butt to the right person in government or law enforcement and you've got people at some level believing the output of AI. Hell, even my father, who is a trained engineer with a master's degree, can compute complex math and studies particle physics for "fun" had to be thoroughly convinced that ChatGPT isn't "intelligent". He "believed" for several days and was sharing it wildly with everyone until I painfully walked him through the algorithm. There is a serious lack of diligence happening for many folks and the marketing people are more than happy to use that to drive hype and subtly lie about the real capabilities to make a sale. I am often more concerned about the people using AI than the algorithm itself.
ravi-delia 4y ago
I mean probably not, at least not for a while. Perhaps some charmingly straightforward people have precisely the same persona online and off, no matter the situation, but I suspect most do some amount of code switching. An LLM would be best served in its goal by approximating the persona, which wouldn't translate well. I could be wrong (maybe we "leak" enough that a convincing rendition of the persona would necessarily take into account some amount of interior state) but it seems to me that personality is a convenience adopted for communication.
raphar 4y ago
I think that Facebook has a better data set than Google for all this. The interactions stored in their servers are way more spontaneous than emails. (FB, IG & WhatsApp!!) No one is better positioned to make "artificial persons" than they are.
melvinmelih 4y ago
There’s a way bigger market and more profitable way of doing this (and I’m sure it’s already being done): train a model based on your data and behavior to pre-determine your reaction to certain ads and then start serving those ads that trigger the most engagement from your model.
deleted 4y ago
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Zetice 4y ago
> And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? What? No haha, they aren't able to read your emails or use them as training data for an LLM.
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  >they aren't able to read your emails or use them as training data for an LLM. I'd love to see the policy or law that prevents Google from doing either.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US
    - wintermutestwin 4y ago
      I don't see anything that prevents them from feeding your emails into an LLM. I do see: "We use data to build better services" "We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors, and agents who need that information in order to process it."
      - Zetice 4y ago
        Let's reverse the question; do you see anything that explicitly grants them permission to feed emails into an LLM?
deleted 4y ago
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kayge 4y ago
Honestly that interview scenario might work out in my favor -- my emails tend to be pretty meticulous and well thought out, especially in comparison to my nerve-rattled in person interview state. But your point stands, I'm sure there is at least one (okay maybe two) indecent joke in my "private" communication history that would not serve me well.
atentaten 4y ago
Digital twin: https://research.aimultiple.com/digital-twins/ https://research.aimultiple.com/digital-twins/
JohnFen 4y ago
> How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? Very few, fortunately! I don't use Google services for these things, nor do the vast majority of my friends and family.
tenacious_tuna 4y ago
There's a scifi book I was reading a couple years ago that had this as a presence--models of people's personalities a la LLMs were a commodity, but they varied wildly in how accurate they were. Alphas were supposed to be 1-to-1 with the originating personality (to the point that they had legal protections? I can't remember), whereas gammas were used to menial things, like serving as a phone-menu style gatekeeper to the real person. I can't for the life of me remember the name of the novel though... I'll have to go digging through my bookshelves later. (Maybe Revelation Space, by Alistair Reynolds...?)
- rolisz 4y ago
  Yes, Revelation Space had alphas (which were illegal if I remember correctly) and betas (which were less capable but legal)
- EarthLaunch 4y ago
  'Permutation City' by Greg Egan had this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
- famouswaffles 4y ago
  GPT-4 thinks it's "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi or "Glasshouse" by Charles Stross. Correct ?
  - tenacious_tuna 4y ago
    Nope, I confirmed it's Revelation Space :) I haven't read either of those, though I have liked other works of Stross's! (I never considered using GPT-4 as a book recommendation engine... Curious how well that'd work.)
- int_19h 4y ago
  The idea of "recreating" historical personas in sci-fi is very old, and the issue with accuracy has also been raised early. One that comes to my mind in particular is this one from 1950s, although the artificial personality is technically not an AI (it's hosted in a human brain): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Work_of_Art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Work_of_Art
KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
> Could the police subpoena all of that data and make an AI model of you The three letter agencies will probably do that in the name of national security and counter terrorism, think of the children! Mark my words.
beefield 4y ago
> Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." Well, on the other hand, in the successful case, why bother hiring if the digital copy already answers all questions like you (except likely faster)?
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
Well, my maxim with AIs is that all they express is a lie unless proven true. Nothing good can come out of taking too seriously the output of algebra parrots.
- flangola7 4y ago
  It's a parrot that a growing number of people have said made them unemployed.
  - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
    Oh that part is very real indeed.
bratao 4y ago
That is the plot of Westworld
codetrotter 4y ago
> guess all your passwords? Don’t use your mind to create passwords. Use a password generator or passphrase generator. For example, I made a passphrase generator that uses EFF wordlists. I’ve been using this generator myself for quite a while. It runs locally on your machine. https://github.com/ctsrc/Pgen https://github.com/ctsrc/Pgen
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Go further - your employers have so much data about you, from your emails and Slack messages to all the actions you’ve performed and the code you’ve written and the designs - live and drafts - you’ve created. Entirely possible that they can use this data to create a digital “you” and keep you as an “employee” forever, even after you leave. A general purpose LLM might not be able to replace you, but a LLM trained on all your work knowledge might.
marvin 4y ago
At least if you're in the EU, you are one GDPR deletion request away from removing the legal grounds of such a simulacrum of you. Not that I'm in favor of the way the GDPR has played out in general, but, you know, at least in this instance it delivers on its promise.
roughly 4y ago
> How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? > Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? I mean, this is almost exactly their business model - they sell advertising, and they use the model they built of you based on the ludicrous amount of data they've gathered on you to predict whether that advertising will matter to you.
joshxyz 4y ago
what, they gonna create a digital copy of me who spends my waking life googling how to do this and that in a certain programming language? lol that police subpoena is quite possible though. part of me thinks it already exists.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
> Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." This will happen
basch 4y ago
My favorite article to post. The below is about 1% of the topics it covers, the premise being that algorithmic prediction traps us frozen in the past instead of ever allowing society to change. https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58t https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7... >But the oddest is STATIC-99. It's a way of predicting whether sex offenders are likely to commit crimes again after they have been released. In America this is being used to decide whether to keep them in jail even after they have served their full sentence. >STATIC-99 works by scoring individuals on criteria such as age, number of sex-crimes and sex of the victim. These are then fed into a database that shows recidivism rates of groups of sex-offenders in the past with similar characteristics. The judge is then told how likely it is - in percentage terms - that the offender will do it again. >The problem is that it is not true. What the judge is really being told is the likely percentage of people in the group who will re-offend. There is no way the system can predict what an individual will do. A recent very critical report of such systems said that the margin of error for individuals could be as great as between 5% and 95% >In other words completely useless. Yet people are being kept in prison on the basis that such a system predicts they might do something bad in the future.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  in other words, those people don't have competent legal representation.
- chrnola 4y ago
  Link appears to be dead now.
  - basch 4y ago
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58 https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7... Looks like I accidentally added a T to the end of it, and you were the first person to say anything.
leroy-is-here 4y ago
Of course Google et. al can build a chat bot that chats like you. But _is_ you? No, how can Google build something that knows unless you’ve stated it?
birdyrooster 4y ago
It's called libel? I am really surprised this took much consternation for such an obvious answer. They would have to prove their statements were true which is impossible with a language model since it's basically unknowable -- the burden of proof is on Google. Not a good place to be.
luckman212 4y ago
> Get ready for a wild couple of years I hope it's just a couple, and not the beginning of a century of human decline and suffering puctuated by a mass extinction.
copymoro 4y ago
[dead]
vit05 4y ago
I "know" people who work on projects that provide data to train these models. When using photos and data, like google photos, you need to give a series of permissions. The pay is very low, anywhere from 3 dollars to 6 dollars per hour to answer some questions. What I mean by that is that legally these companies get that date without having to run the risk of using data acquired from those who didn't authorize it. Google cannot do as it pleases with your data. And they don't even need to. It's cheap to get permission from other people.
hyperthesis 4y ago
Thank you for your interest. We narrowed it down to two very strong candidates but went with your digital copy.
peterleiser 4y ago
You might like season 3 of Westworld. Buckle up, humans.
jesterson 4y ago
> How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? Nearly zero. Hate to be the guy who says "told ya", but when everyone was mesmerised by gmail "oh how cool it is!", it was already clear why they are doing it. Never used their services and would advise anyone the same. Not just google but any other "bells and whistles" services from large corporations.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
How do I know you're one of my friends and not just a replicant?
luxcem 4y ago
Straight up black mirror dystopia.
therealjpg 3y ago
Even if Google's privacy policy permitted such a tectonic shift in data use, integrating Gmail data into Bard would involve opt-in consent from you AND your email correspondents (an infinitely difficult task). Peoples' expectations of privacy in email are very, very high. So even though you have a copy of everything your friends email you, they would need to all be involved in your agreement for this change of data use.

by mabbo 4y ago

gs17 4y ago

Reminds me a little of (fiction, for now) Google People: https://qntm.org/person https://qntm.org/person

mabbo 4y ago
qntm is a wonderfully weird and terrifying author and I highly recommend all of their writing.
startupsfail 4y ago
Reminds me of Harry Potter magic. Seems like a perfect technology to implement these talking photographs, paintings and pictures from there.

mmmmmbop 4y ago

> And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? No, they definitely can't. Parts of HN love to hate on GDPR, but laws like that prevent companies from doing the things you proposed.

josefx 4y ago
They are supposed to, but usually it takes several dozen times of them getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar and fined before they are even capable of acknowledging these laws even exist.
- mmmmmbop 4y ago
  You know, that's not the sentiment I've been experiencing in the industry. There's certainly some uncertainty and risk-taking on the margins, e.g. what exactly constitutes "fair use", how do design user consent flows, and so on. But it's broadly accepted that you can't do anything with personal data without user consent, and I've found companies to be very careful in that regard. Recently, Meta was fined $400MM for forcing users to consent to targeted advertising [0]. Note how Meta was careful to get consent (even if the way they did it was illegitimate). Sure, $400MM may not be a lot for a company that size, but I genuinely believe that the fines would be an order of magnitude higher if a company intentionally decided to do something with personal data without consent. GDPR fines may reach up to 4% of worldwide revenue, plus likely any proceeds from the illegitimate venture. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/04/meta-fined-more-than-400-million-in-ireland-over-eu-privacy-breaches.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/04/meta-fined-more-than-400-mil...
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  I did a lot of GDPR work at several <insert FAANG here> companies. It was absolutely taken seriously and lawyers were involved all the time. The reason for all these fines is 2-fold: 1. A lot of the fines come from edge cases that are literally unclear in the law. Eg Facebook‘s opt out for advertising fines. You can disagree with fb’s decision but teams of lawyers couldn’t answer this question except in court. I think American and European jurisprudence aware also pretty different so someone sitting in California making business decisions might not understand the ramifications in Europe. 2. A lot of the thorny privacy bits can be bypassed if you update the TOS to mention it (or so they think). I’ve seen that happen a few times during my tenure. That doesn’t excuse the choice of these companies to make these choices, but my point was to say that companies take it seriously but lawyers don’t always agree on how laws work except in court.

beezlewax 4y ago

There is an episode of Black Mirror about this called "Be Right Back". Well worth a watch.

barathr 4y ago
And another called "Hang the DJ"
- lapetitejort 4y ago
  And yet another in the 2014 Special, where the police make AI "clones" of a suspect, then interrogate them in a simulation.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    i was thinking of this exact scenario here. Training an LLM on all the information available about a suspect and then questioning the AI. If you had a mountain of information it would be very easy to miss details and connect the dots manually but if you could prompt an AI that has been trained on the data you could get answers much faster.

13years 4y ago

For all the fears of AGI, these are the more concrete nefarious uses we can actually reason about. It is a point I often make that we don't need AGI for AI to already become very disturbing in its potential use. The other point, is that technically this AI is not "unaligned". It is doing exactly what is requested of the operator. The implications are that humanity suffers in either scenario, either by our own agency in control of power we are not prepared to manage or we will be managed by power that we can not control.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> It is a point I often make that we don't need AGI for AI to already become very disturbing in its potential use. But we don't need AI or LLMs at all for the above scenario. Companies don't currently pry into your e-mails to make hiring decisions, but they could (ignoring laws) do it if they wanted. No LLM or AI necessary. So why would the existence of AIs or LLMs change that? If they wanted to use the content of your e-mails against you, they don't need an LLM to do it.
- dangond 4y ago
  Because it's now cheaper and more cost-effective, and if they can get away with it, saves them tons of money. Note: I don't think companies are likely to do this, but being able to do this without AI is not sufficient reason to dismiss the possibility. It's the same reason people who wouldn't steal DVDs from a store would pirate movies online. Much harder to get caught and easier to do, so this new way of watching movies for free became popular while the previous method was not.
  - nonbirithm 4y ago
    I feel like the backlash against Stable Diffusion had the opposite change in visibility. It revealed that thousands of people wanted a way to produce unique art in the styles of living artists, where some of those people might have gone to either their Patreon or a piracy site that scraped Patreon instead. Either way they're not as visible if they're only consuming the result. To some artists, AI generated images from their styles would amount to "productive piracy." Unlike torrenting the act is often out in the open since users tend to share the results online. I'm not sure if this phenomenon has happened before; with teenagers pirating Photoshop it's impossible to tell from a glance if the output is from a pirated version.

dorkwood 4y ago

startupsfail 4y ago
Don’t worry. They’ll take you, you’d just be sorted to Gryffindor or what not :)

galacticaactual 4y ago

And yet, every time these fears are brought up with AI people, they are dismissed as Luddite hyperbole. “We’re saving the world” they say. With zero regard for second order effects, or with arrogant dismissal of those effects as worth it for the first order gains. Disgusting to watch unfold.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

wokwokwok 4y ago

> input_dir /path/to/downloaded/llama/weights --model_size 7B Most absolutely not with the 7B llama model as described here. …but, potentially, with a much larger fine tuned foundational model, if you have a lot of open source code on GitHub and lots of public samples. The question is why you would bother? very large models would most likely not be meaningfully improved by fine tuning on a specific individual. The only reason to do this would be to coax a much smaller model into having characteristics of a much larger one by fine tuning… but, realistically, right now, it seem pretty skeptical anyone would bother. Why not just invest in a much larger more capable model?

akiselev 4y ago
ChatGPT’s “voice” changes dramatically in diction and prose when you ask it to generate text in the style of a popular author like Hunter S Thompson, Charles Bukowski, or Terry Pratchett. You can even ask it to generate text in the style of a specific HN user if they’re prolific enough in the training data set. Fine tuning would allow you to achieve that for people who aren’t notable enough to be all over the training data

isaacremuant 4y ago

I know what you mean but "laws" don't matter in a world where the government can decide There's a "dangerous emergency" and basically supress all rights and between the bought for media and tech they will supress any pushback against it. I know it's not popular to try and remove the blindfold of propaganda but the 2020 to 2022 and covid authoritarian, anti human rights, policies were an awesome example. But if you are quick to dismiss those there's always terrorism, the children, drugs, and every other typical gov excuse. It's not a tech problem. It's a problem of the people who have decided they will go along with autority at every step, If they get pushed.

Fauntleroy 4y ago
Compare the response of the Chinese government and the US government, then return here and tell us all about the "blindfold" we Americans are wearing wrt the government's COVID response.
- davidjones332 4y ago
  [flagged]
- isaacremuant 4y ago
  I didn't even talk specifically about the US but that is just pathetic as a defense. Comparing with the bottom of the barrel to make yourself look good? That's like a country using the US healthcare situation to claim their own healthcare is good. It's a poor car salesman trick.
  - Fauntleroy 4y ago
    And you're out here making blanket statements suggesting "we" did not pay attention to our own country's piecemeal, half-assed, state-by-state COVID response, instead painting it as a brutal federal crackdown. Lord.
    - isaacremuant 4y ago

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." If a company is going to snoop in your personal data to get insights about you, they'd just do it directly. Hiring managers would scroll through your e-mails and make judgment calls based on their content. Training an LLM on your e-mails and then feeding it questions is just a lower accuracy, more abstracted version of the above, but it's the same concept. So the answer is: In theory, any company could do the above if they wanted to flout all laws and ignore the consequences of having these practices leak (which they inevitably would). LLMs don't change that. They could have done it all along. However, legally companies like Google cannot, and will not, pry into your private data without your consent to make hiring decisions. Adding an LLM abstraction layer doesn't make the existing laws (or social/moral pressure) go away.

nindalf 4y ago
I think flouted works better than flaunted when talking about laws.
softfalcon 4y ago
> Adding an LLM abstraction layer doesn't make the existing laws (or social/moral pressure) go away. Isn't the "abstraction" of "the model" exactly the reason we have open court filings against stable diffusion and other models for possibly stealing artist's work in the open source domain and claiming it's legal while also being financially backed by major corporations who are then using said models for profit? Whose to say that "training a model on your data isn't actually stealing your data" it's just "training a model" as long as you delete the original data after you finish training? What if instead of Google snooping, they hire a 3rd party to snoop it, then another 3rd party to transfer it, then another 3rd party to build the model, then another 3rd party to re-sell the model. Then create legal loopholes around which ones are doing it for "research" and which ones are doing it for profit/hiring. All of the sudden, it gets really murky who is and isn't allowed to have a model of you. I feel one could argue that the abstraction is exactly the kind of smoke screen that many will use to avoid the social/moral pressures legally, allowing them to do bad things but get away with it.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

Going one step further: what if you right now are a replay running in some datacenter, déjà vécu [1] feelings appear when they scale down the VM due to costs. Basically, the simulation hypothesis, but the simulators are not mysterious, just boringly distopian: some suits trying to raise KPIs. [1] already lived, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu#D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_v%C3%A9cu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu#D%C3%A9j%C3%...

fragsworth 4y ago

I don't think Google would want the PR hit for doing such things. I suspect that they even have hang-ups about training their general-purpose AIs on your private data, because they might accidentally leak some of it. A lot of their business exists because people trust them to keep your data safe (even from their internal teams), and they would lose a lot of business if anyone discovered otherwise. I think it will be a wild couple of years but there are lots of things that are off-limits.

pixl97 4y ago
Instead Google would just by a "person score" much like we already buy credit scores from third party companies with questionable data use policies. Google gets to wash its hands of the data responsibility, but all the same negative issues for the user is still there.

maxilevi 4y ago

We ended feudalism only to get back to a stronger version of it powered by tech

29athrowaway 4y ago

Wait until you head about mind uploading and transhumanism.

chasd00 4y ago
heh take the turing test one step further. If you can't tell the difference between the real person and the LLM of that real person then which one is real?

svilen_dobrev 4y ago

some 10y+(?) ago, i had an idea of building a model/graph of one's own notions (what is "red"?) and how do they relate to one another, and to others' such graphs - from your perspective... Back then abandoned it because looked like impossibly-huge to build, semantical-web was only leftovers-and-promises.. But a year later, this same thing you are talking about, occured to me and then i abandoned it completely. Crossed it out. Yeah, That thing would be extremely useful but even more dangerous as it will know more about you than you. btw. There's a new book by Kazuo Ishiguro - named Klara and the sun. Along the same vein - Have a look. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klara_and_the_Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klara_and_the_Sun ciao p.s. see also Lena by Charles Stross. or this: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/01/make-up-a-guy.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/01/make-up...

mattbee 4y ago
Lena is by qntm, but was featured on Charles' blog. It's very good.

burglekutt 4y ago

There’s a (good) short story in a (great) sci-fi book called “Valuable Humans in Transit” about something like this. If I remember correctly, Google learns to perfectly simulate people and then the real people disappear.

rzzzt 4y ago
Owl Turd has a short story wrapped in web comic form exploring this exact situation (group chat × Theseus' ship): https://shencomix.tumblr.com/post/696189256410005504 https://shencomix.tumblr.com/post/696189256410005504

mym1990 4y ago

The first instance of this would most likely alienate a lot of users. What is more likely to happen is the development of new products that basically cater to social needs through mimicking real world interactions. Subscribe for 15$ a month to feel like you have an unending flow of conversations with interesting bots that mimic your friends! I am sure there is a market for this. This product could be advertised as a way for people who are not that socially inclined to practice their social skills. Or learn other languages through fake immersion. The use cases to make this seem like a benefit are pretty limitless.

nirav72 4y ago
Maybe some people can pretend they're interacting with a real person. But for me, knowing that I'm interacting with a bot would break the experience for me.
- mym1990 4y ago
  This is a similar take I have on one player video games, I just reaaally have a lot more fun in multi-player or MMOs. But a ton of people love the solo run throughs and what not, power to them. I think it comes down to having a novel experience and one where there are some unexpected twists and turns.

lantry 4y ago

relevant krazam: https://youtu.be/BrQyMrmRBsk https://youtu.be/BrQyMrmRBsk

tiagod 4y ago

They could train a LMM to reply to emails like I would. Probably very useless, I don't really use email for personal stuff.

koolba 4y ago

> Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? Some of us have been planning for this situation for years by having our recorded digital footprint have no relation to our in person personality. At best they could simulate what they think we are like in person. A side benefit of all this is that it gives otherwise nice people an excuse to be a complete jerk online.

nostrademons 4y ago

"Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." They kinda did - that's what GMail/Chat/Docs autosuggest does. You've got canned replies to e-mail, editors that complete your sentences, etc. It works okay for simple stuff - completing a single sentence or responding "OK, sounds good" to an e-mail that you already agree with. It doesn't work all that well for long-form writing, unless that long-form writing is basically just bullshit that covers up "OK, sounds good". (There's a joke within Google now that the future of e-mail is "OK, sounds good" -> AI bullshit generator -> "Most esteemed colleagues, we have organized a committee to conduct a study on the merits of XYZ and have developed the following conclusions [2 pages follow]" -> AI bullshit summarizer -> "OK, sounds good".) This is a pretty good summary of the state of LLMs right now. They're very good at generating a lot of verbiage in areas where the information content of the message is low but social conventions demand a lot of verbiage (I've heard of them used to good effect for recommendation letters, for example). They're pretty bad at collecting & synthesizing large amount of highly-precise factual information, because they hallucinate facts that aren't there and often misunderstand the context of facts.

softfalcon 4y ago
I completely agree with you about them failing to be accurate for the various reasons you've explained (hallucinating, limited social conventions, etc). Unfortunately, I've heard enough people believe the hype that this is actually "synthesizing sentience into the machine" or some other buzz speak. I have met researchers of AI at credible universities who believe this kind of thing, completely oblivious to how ChatGPT or other models actually work. All it takes is one of them talking out of their butt to the right person in government or law enforcement and you've got people at some level believing the output of AI. Hell, even my father, who is a trained engineer with a master's degree, can compute complex math and studies particle physics for "fun" had to be thoroughly convinced that ChatGPT isn't "intelligent". He "believed" for several days and was sharing it wildly with everyone until I painfully walked him through the algorithm. There is a serious lack of diligence happening for many folks and the marketing people are more than happy to use that to drive hype and subtly lie about the real capabilities to make a sale. I am often more concerned about the people using AI than the algorithm itself.

ravi-delia 4y ago

I mean probably not, at least not for a while. Perhaps some charmingly straightforward people have precisely the same persona online and off, no matter the situation, but I suspect most do some amount of code switching. An LLM would be best served in its goal by approximating the persona, which wouldn't translate well. I could be wrong (maybe we "leak" enough that a convincing rendition of the persona would necessarily take into account some amount of interior state) but it seems to me that personality is a convenience adopted for communication.

raphar 4y ago

I think that Facebook has a better data set than Google for all this. The interactions stored in their servers are way more spontaneous than emails. (FB, IG & WhatsApp!!) No one is better positioned to make "artificial persons" than they are.

melvinmelih 4y ago

There’s a way bigger market and more profitable way of doing this (and I’m sure it’s already being done): train a model based on your data and behavior to pre-determine your reaction to certain ads and then start serving those ads that trigger the most engagement from your model.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Zetice 4y ago

> And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? What? No haha, they aren't able to read your emails or use them as training data for an LLM.

wintermutestwin 4y ago
>they aren't able to read your emails or use them as training data for an LLM. I'd love to see the policy or law that prevents Google from doing either.
- Zetice 4y ago
  https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US
  - wintermutestwin 4y ago
    I don't see anything that prevents them from feeding your emails into an LLM. I do see: "We use data to build better services" "We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors, and agents who need that information in order to process it."
    - Zetice 4y ago
      Let's reverse the question; do you see anything that explicitly grants them permission to feed emails into an LLM?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kayge 4y ago

Honestly that interview scenario might work out in my favor -- my emails tend to be pretty meticulous and well thought out, especially in comparison to my nerve-rattled in person interview state. But your point stands, I'm sure there is at least one (okay maybe two) indecent joke in my "private" communication history that would not serve me well.

atentaten 4y ago

Digital twin: https://research.aimultiple.com/digital-twins/ https://research.aimultiple.com/digital-twins/

JohnFen 4y ago

> How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? Very few, fortunately! I don't use Google services for these things, nor do the vast majority of my friends and family.

tenacious_tuna 4y ago

There's a scifi book I was reading a couple years ago that had this as a presence--models of people's personalities a la LLMs were a commodity, but they varied wildly in how accurate they were. Alphas were supposed to be 1-to-1 with the originating personality (to the point that they had legal protections? I can't remember), whereas gammas were used to menial things, like serving as a phone-menu style gatekeeper to the real person. I can't for the life of me remember the name of the novel though... I'll have to go digging through my bookshelves later. (Maybe Revelation Space, by Alistair Reynolds...?)

rolisz 4y ago
Yes, Revelation Space had alphas (which were illegal if I remember correctly) and betas (which were less capable but legal)
EarthLaunch 4y ago
'Permutation City' by Greg Egan had this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
famouswaffles 4y ago
GPT-4 thinks it's "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi or "Glasshouse" by Charles Stross. Correct ?
- tenacious_tuna 4y ago
  Nope, I confirmed it's Revelation Space :) I haven't read either of those, though I have liked other works of Stross's! (I never considered using GPT-4 as a book recommendation engine... Curious how well that'd work.)
int_19h 4y ago
The idea of "recreating" historical personas in sci-fi is very old, and the issue with accuracy has also been raised early. One that comes to my mind in particular is this one from 1950s, although the artificial personality is technically not an AI (it's hosted in a human brain): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Work_of_Art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Work_of_Art

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago

> Could the police subpoena all of that data and make an AI model of you The three letter agencies will probably do that in the name of national security and counter terrorism, think of the children! Mark my words.

beefield 4y ago

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

Well, my maxim with AIs is that all they express is a lie unless proven true. Nothing good can come out of taking too seriously the output of algebra parrots.

flangola7 4y ago
It's a parrot that a growing number of people have said made them unemployed.
- sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  Oh that part is very real indeed.

bratao 4y ago

That is the plot of Westworld

codetrotter 4y ago

> guess all your passwords? Don’t use your mind to create passwords. Use a password generator or passphrase generator. For example, I made a passphrase generator that uses EFF wordlists. I’ve been using this generator myself for quite a while. It runs locally on your machine. https://github.com/ctsrc/Pgen https://github.com/ctsrc/Pgen

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Go further - your employers have so much data about you, from your emails and Slack messages to all the actions you’ve performed and the code you’ve written and the designs - live and drafts - you’ve created. Entirely possible that they can use this data to create a digital “you” and keep you as an “employee” forever, even after you leave. A general purpose LLM might not be able to replace you, but a LLM trained on all your work knowledge might.

marvin 4y ago

At least if you're in the EU, you are one GDPR deletion request away from removing the legal grounds of such a simulacrum of you. Not that I'm in favor of the way the GDPR has played out in general, but, you know, at least in this instance it delivers on its promise.

roughly 4y ago

> How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? > Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? I mean, this is almost exactly their business model - they sell advertising, and they use the model they built of you based on the ludicrous amount of data they've gathered on you to predict whether that advertising will matter to you.

joshxyz 4y ago

what, they gonna create a digital copy of me who spends my waking life googling how to do this and that in a certain programming language? lol that police subpoena is quite possible though. part of me thinks it already exists.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

basch 4y ago

My favorite article to post. The below is about 1% of the topics it covers, the premise being that algorithmic prediction traps us frozen in the past instead of ever allowing society to change. https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58t https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7... >But the oddest is STATIC-99. It's a way of predicting whether sex offenders are likely to commit crimes again after they have been released. In America this is being used to decide whether to keep them in jail even after they have served their full sentence. >STATIC-99 works by scoring individuals on criteria such as age, number of sex-crimes and sex of the victim. These are then fed into a database that shows recidivism rates of groups of sex-offenders in the past with similar characteristics. The judge is then told how likely it is - in percentage terms - that the offender will do it again. >The problem is that it is not true. What the judge is really being told is the likely percentage of people in the group who will re-offend. There is no way the system can predict what an individual will do. A recent very critical report of such systems said that the margin of error for individuals could be as great as between 5% and 95% >In other words completely useless. Yet people are being kept in prison on the basis that such a system predicts they might do something bad in the future.

readthenotes1 4y ago
in other words, those people don't have competent legal representation.
chrnola 4y ago
Link appears to be dead now.
- basch 4y ago
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58 https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7... Looks like I accidentally added a T to the end of it, and you were the first person to say anything.

leroy-is-here 4y ago

Of course Google et. al can build a chat bot that chats like you. But _is_ you? No, how can Google build something that knows unless you’ve stated it?

birdyrooster 4y ago

It's called libel? I am really surprised this took much consternation for such an obvious answer. They would have to prove their statements were true which is impossible with a language model since it's basically unknowable -- the burden of proof is on Google. Not a good place to be.

luckman212 4y ago

> Get ready for a wild couple of years I hope it's just a couple, and not the beginning of a century of human decline and suffering puctuated by a mass extinction.

copymoro 4y ago

[dead]

vit05 4y ago

I "know" people who work on projects that provide data to train these models. When using photos and data, like google photos, you need to give a series of permissions. The pay is very low, anywhere from 3 dollars to 6 dollars per hour to answer some questions. What I mean by that is that legally these companies get that date without having to run the risk of using data acquired from those who didn't authorize it. Google cannot do as it pleases with your data. And they don't even need to. It's cheap to get permission from other people.

hyperthesis 4y ago

Thank you for your interest. We narrowed it down to two very strong candidates but went with your digital copy.

peterleiser 4y ago

You might like season 3 of Westworld. Buckle up, humans.

jesterson 4y ago

> How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? Nearly zero. Hate to be the guy who says "told ya", but when everyone was mesmerised by gmail "oh how cool it is!", it was already clear why they are doing it. Never used their services and would advise anyone the same. Not just google but any other "bells and whistles" services from large corporations.

hammyhavoc 4y ago

How do I know you're one of my friends and not just a replicant?

luxcem 4y ago

Straight up black mirror dystopia.

therealjpg 3y ago

Even if Google's privacy policy permitted such a tectonic shift in data use, integrating Gmail data into Bard would involve opt-in consent from you AND your email correspondents (an infinitely difficult task). Peoples' expectations of privacy in email are very, very high. So even though you have a copy of everything your friends email you, they would need to all be involved in your agreement for this change of data use.