9 ms·

The "fun" thing about the tech in the current state is that it's wrong quite a bit, which puts a cap on how much of a productivity boost it can give any organiz

The "fun" thing about the tech in the current state is that it's wrong quite a bit, which puts a cap on how much of a productivity boost it can give any organization that cares about correctness or its reputation; meanwhile, it has nigh-unlimited productivity-boosting promise for organizations that don't care about correctness or reputation. Which kinds of organizations don't care about correctness or reputation? Scammers, spammers, and certain types of propaganda-spewing organization, especially those that puppeteer "grassroots" campaigns. We may give a single-digit multiplier in productivity to some roles in legitimate business, while giving a two or three digit multiplier to similar roles in harmful, parasitic organizations.

smt88 4y ago
I'm much more concerned about dictators than I am about scammers. Some countries have already successfully rewritten the history of less than 30 years ago with surveillance and media control. What will happen when they can also control all digital reality? They can invent an uprising of millions of people that never actually happened, and there will be photo, audio, and video "evidence". AGI is scary, but it's not immediate. I think companies like OpenAI are wrecklessly pushing us toward immediate societal collapse.
- infogulch 4y ago
  I'm also very concerned about where AI will take us, but will bad actors just quit if OpenAI decides to halt? Or will they continue to develop it, but in secret, so we have no clue what its capabilities are or how to control it? I fear the only way out is through.
  - iamdamian 4y ago
    Couldn't you say this about nuclear research or bioweapons as well? Yet those are highly (and, seemingly effectively) regulated.
    - from 4y ago
      Yes but those have higher barrier to entry, MAD dynamics and the fact that you can't clone a nuclear weapon off Github.
      - iamdamian 4y ago
        Can you clone ChatGPT's weights off of GitHub?
    - function_seven 4y ago
      Those can be regulated because they require a level of physical access to materials. Centrifuges and viral samples and whatnot. A given AI, once created, is "just" data. It can be sent around the world and run on commodity hardware. Nothing special needed beyond the expertise that created it in the first place. Think of how relatively easy it is to clamp down on bioweapons, and compare that with our ability to stop malware.
      - Retric 4y ago
        The same is largely true of bio weapons. The difficult but is R&D, but a small group with access to a decent collage lab could recreate some dangerous shit if the people using it knew what to do.
      - yeck 4y ago
        Training new SOTA (state-of-the-art) models does require a large amount of compute resources. So we could at least pause here and not make more powerful models publicly available until we understand the implications of wtf actually just happened over the last 6 months. Certainly the models and weights that have been released publicly are out in the wild and near impossible to retract. That damage is done.
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      No, because if you forbid the dissemination of nuclear research and materials then it's very difficult even for highly-resourced organizations (e.g. government of Iran) to produce nuclear devices, but if you would tomorrow forbid the dissemination of all future "AI research" then there are probably a million of people worldwide who would each be able to recreate the "dangerous capabilities" based on what they already have in their heads and current laptops, as long as someone gives them a few million $ worth of commodity (and thus not restrictable) computing hardware. Nuclear technology is tricky to get working even if you have decent scientists and all the published research about basic principles. For current ML tech, a big point is that the core techniques are really simple, the simple textbook methods work at large scale, you don't necessarily need any special sauce which could be restricted. Yes, there is a lot of engineering work that goes into a full system to scale it efficiently, but all of that can be replicated by any decent bunch of engineers, unlike nuclear weapons. The cat is out of the bag; you can't put the genie back in the bottle, all the "sensitive knowledge" you'd need to restrict AI is already known by at least a few CS undergrads in every single university in the world.
  - ngngngng 4y ago
    What will happen when asking AI its opinion on someone is part of a background check?
    - htrp 4y ago
      probably already there
- amelius 4y ago
  Or when a dictator can just put a camera on every corner of every street, then do fully automated data mining on how and when people are moving around.
  - Micheal_McL 4y ago
    1984
  - mikrotikker 4y ago
    China, UK. Stingray.
- bawolff 4y ago
  > Some countries have already successfully rewritten the history of less than 30 years ago with surveillance and media control. Soviet union was doing it back in the early 1900s Even the ancient world did it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae Yes we can fake more, but there are also more ways to get information so its harder to suppress true info. I think the two cancel each other out.
  - j16sdiz 4y ago
    They don't cancel each other. People get information overload, whatever they learnt first will win.
  - smt88 4y ago
    > Yes we can fake more... "More" is dramatically understating it. The new platforms (GPT4, Midjourney, etc.) are able to automate the propaganda output of literally millions of people. If you wanted someone to Photoshop the pope into multiple new outfits and fool a lot of people, you used to need at least a few hours of an expert's time. Now you can do it almost instantly. It's many orders of magnitude faster to create highly realistic lies than it used to be. > but there are also more ways to get information so its harder to suppress true info. There are the same ways to get information, and they're going to be: A) unverifiable, and B) drowned out by propaganda. Let's say someone wants to take down Joe Biden, and they generate text, audio, video, and photos of him molesting a child. Millions of people would want to believe it and then believe it. How would we prove it's not real? How could we, other than finding the person who did it or exposing a digital trail?
    - mikrotikker 4y ago
      I questioned the Dalai Llama story as a possible CCP deep fake. Considering what they already did with doctored photos of Australian soldiers a year or so back.
  - jwestbury 4y ago
    > Yes we can fake more, but there are also more ways to get information so its harder to suppress true info. I think the two cancel each other out. They don't, unfortunately. The continued influence effect means that information received first will generally take priority.
- titzer 4y ago
  > are wrecklessly pushing us toward immediate societal collapse. I would characterize this as just adding more and more landmines to an already crowded space of potential collapse-inducing events through which have to try to navigate society. Oh, and adding glitzy blinkenlights to attract people towards those landmines. "Let the marketplace decide if landmines are fun to step on."
  - smt88 4y ago
    Your first sentence makes it sound not that bad, and then your second sentence makes it sound like it's certainly going to be society-ending.
    - titzer 4y ago
      The risks keep stacking up. It's not looking super great for avoiding all the landmines. The path is getting narrow and it's one thing or other that'll get us.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    > "Let the marketplace decide if landmines are fun to step on." Very succinct way to explain end stage capitalism.
- tonmoy 4y ago
  Could they already do that using actors and sets? I doubt even the poorest dictator would lack the resources to do that currently. It’s the scammers on the other hand who would benefit with cheap ability to generate fake audio/video
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Well, no, it's not really possible to just do that using actors and sets, it would have been done during the Cold War otherwise. Up until recent advances of digital technology it wasn't really possible to have an actor convincingly fake someone else - e.g. a foreign politician - so that it's not easily detectable; this is a recent new ability (and even now you'd still want to use a good actor with a similar face shape and skill to match the body movement style in order to make a convincing deepfake).
- layer8 4y ago
  Photos, audio, and video are relatively new media, historically. We always had the potential problem of historical records being rewritten. People will learn to be cautious. I wouldn’t worry too much, unless and until a worldwide government becomes a dictatorship.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    > People will learn to be cautious. looks at history of organized religion Um, I'm not so sure about that...
  - smt88 4y ago
    > People will learn to be cautious. It doesn't matter if they're cautious or not. Even for real media, how can you tell it's real? The result will be: - there will be no way for anyone to verify any digital media, including phone calls from loved ones - people will believe what they want to believe We've seen the second thing happening, and it leads to fascism.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Funny how history rymes. The last surge of mass media, radio, conteibuted to the rise of Fascism and Natiobalsocialism. Curious to see what "AI" will bring us, and whether or not we as a species adopt quick enough to prevent the worst.
    - mikrotikker 4y ago
      Then we need to arm ourselves with firearms to fight against the coming facist wave.
      - dang 4y ago
        Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait and also please stop using HN for ideological battle (regardless of which ideology you're battling for or against)? You've unfortunately been doing these things repeatedly, and they're not what the site is for and destroy what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- neganbanks 4y ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
b112 4y ago
The "fun" thing about the tech in the current state is that it's wrong quite a bit, Indeed. And, as every other AI project has shown us, the rough areas are easy, the last few percent are incredibly difficult. Look at self driving cars. It will easily be 2050 before we can even hope to have good, driving AI. Current versions are a joke, and, are being trialed in places like California. Not on snow, dirt roads, while snowing, on rural roads, on unmapped roads, of which there are plenty. 2050 at least. Chatgpt will be vastly improved in maybe 30 years. The last little bit will take decades.
- not2b 4y ago
  SF isn't an easy environment for self driving cars. Steep hills, congested streets, sometimes thick fog. But Waymo is busy causing traffic jams because when the cars get confused they just stop, and block traffic.
- SanderNL 4y ago
  Phoenix, AZ is not small donky town. Driverless cabs come to you and drive around OK. At what point will the skeptics just give in? This shit is already working. It’s a lawyer’s and a businessman’s problem not a technical. You truly think we need 27 years to support “rural roads” because of technical issue?
  - _djo_ 4y ago
    Right now driverless cars only work in places like that with relatively decent weather and which are meticulously mapped with frequent updates, because the tech still does not allow for safe driving using onboard sensors alone. A self-driving car that can safely drive in all the same places and conditions that humans can is not yet possible.
amelius 4y ago
The "fun" thing -> the sad thing
kragen 4y ago
> Which kinds of organizations don't care about correctness or reputation? This describes any "creative" job, where the hard part of the job is not rejecting the bad ideas but coming up with the good ones. Visual art is one famous example. Programming is another: if your code doesn't pass the test suite, you can tell, and then you can fix it. Some software needs higher assurance than test suites can provide, and then you need to get your code to pass Rust's borrow checker, or a more rigorous proof checker like ACL2. Telling a valid proof from an invalid one is a solved problem; constructing a program you can write a valid proof for is very much not. Programmers and visual artists are also famously cavalier about correctness and reputation, being willing to try anything, including notorious bohemian lifestyles.

smt88 4y ago

I'm much more concerned about dictators than I am about scammers. Some countries have already successfully rewritten the history of less than 30 years ago with surveillance and media control. What will happen when they can also control all digital reality? They can invent an uprising of millions of people that never actually happened, and there will be photo, audio, and video "evidence". AGI is scary, but it's not immediate. I think companies like OpenAI are wrecklessly pushing us toward immediate societal collapse.

infogulch 4y ago
I'm also very concerned about where AI will take us, but will bad actors just quit if OpenAI decides to halt? Or will they continue to develop it, but in secret, so we have no clue what its capabilities are or how to control it? I fear the only way out is through.
- iamdamian 4y ago
  Couldn't you say this about nuclear research or bioweapons as well? Yet those are highly (and, seemingly effectively) regulated.
  - from 4y ago
    Yes but those have higher barrier to entry, MAD dynamics and the fact that you can't clone a nuclear weapon off Github.
    - iamdamian 4y ago
      Can you clone ChatGPT's weights off of GitHub?
  - function_seven 4y ago
    Those can be regulated because they require a level of physical access to materials. Centrifuges and viral samples and whatnot. A given AI, once created, is "just" data. It can be sent around the world and run on commodity hardware. Nothing special needed beyond the expertise that created it in the first place. Think of how relatively easy it is to clamp down on bioweapons, and compare that with our ability to stop malware.
    - Retric 4y ago
      The same is largely true of bio weapons. The difficult but is R&D, but a small group with access to a decent collage lab could recreate some dangerous shit if the people using it knew what to do.
    - yeck 4y ago
      Training new SOTA (state-of-the-art) models does require a large amount of compute resources. So we could at least pause here and not make more powerful models publicly available until we understand the implications of wtf actually just happened over the last 6 months. Certainly the models and weights that have been released publicly are out in the wild and near impossible to retract. That damage is done.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    No, because if you forbid the dissemination of nuclear research and materials then it's very difficult even for highly-resourced organizations (e.g. government of Iran) to produce nuclear devices, but if you would tomorrow forbid the dissemination of all future "AI research" then there are probably a million of people worldwide who would each be able to recreate the "dangerous capabilities" based on what they already have in their heads and current laptops, as long as someone gives them a few million $ worth of commodity (and thus not restrictable) computing hardware. Nuclear technology is tricky to get working even if you have decent scientists and all the published research about basic principles. For current ML tech, a big point is that the core techniques are really simple, the simple textbook methods work at large scale, you don't necessarily need any special sauce which could be restricted. Yes, there is a lot of engineering work that goes into a full system to scale it efficiently, but all of that can be replicated by any decent bunch of engineers, unlike nuclear weapons. The cat is out of the bag; you can't put the genie back in the bottle, all the "sensitive knowledge" you'd need to restrict AI is already known by at least a few CS undergrads in every single university in the world.
- ngngngng 4y ago
  What will happen when asking AI its opinion on someone is part of a background check?
  - htrp 4y ago
    probably already there
amelius 4y ago
Or when a dictator can just put a camera on every corner of every street, then do fully automated data mining on how and when people are moving around.
- Micheal_McL 4y ago
  1984
- mikrotikker 4y ago
  China, UK. Stingray.
bawolff 4y ago
> Some countries have already successfully rewritten the history of less than 30 years ago with surveillance and media control. Soviet union was doing it back in the early 1900s Even the ancient world did it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae Yes we can fake more, but there are also more ways to get information so its harder to suppress true info. I think the two cancel each other out.
- j16sdiz 4y ago
  They don't cancel each other. People get information overload, whatever they learnt first will win.
- smt88 4y ago
  > Yes we can fake more... "More" is dramatically understating it. The new platforms (GPT4, Midjourney, etc.) are able to automate the propaganda output of literally millions of people. If you wanted someone to Photoshop the pope into multiple new outfits and fool a lot of people, you used to need at least a few hours of an expert's time. Now you can do it almost instantly. It's many orders of magnitude faster to create highly realistic lies than it used to be. > but there are also more ways to get information so its harder to suppress true info. There are the same ways to get information, and they're going to be: A) unverifiable, and B) drowned out by propaganda. Let's say someone wants to take down Joe Biden, and they generate text, audio, video, and photos of him molesting a child. Millions of people would want to believe it and then believe it. How would we prove it's not real? How could we, other than finding the person who did it or exposing a digital trail?
  - mikrotikker 4y ago
    I questioned the Dalai Llama story as a possible CCP deep fake. Considering what they already did with doctored photos of Australian soldiers a year or so back.
- jwestbury 4y ago
  > Yes we can fake more, but there are also more ways to get information so its harder to suppress true info. I think the two cancel each other out. They don't, unfortunately. The continued influence effect means that information received first will generally take priority.
titzer 4y ago
> are wrecklessly pushing us toward immediate societal collapse. I would characterize this as just adding more and more landmines to an already crowded space of potential collapse-inducing events through which have to try to navigate society. Oh, and adding glitzy blinkenlights to attract people towards those landmines. "Let the marketplace decide if landmines are fun to step on."
- smt88 4y ago
  Your first sentence makes it sound not that bad, and then your second sentence makes it sound like it's certainly going to be society-ending.
  - titzer 4y ago
    The risks keep stacking up. It's not looking super great for avoiding all the landmines. The path is getting narrow and it's one thing or other that'll get us.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > "Let the marketplace decide if landmines are fun to step on." Very succinct way to explain end stage capitalism.
tonmoy 4y ago
Could they already do that using actors and sets? I doubt even the poorest dictator would lack the resources to do that currently. It’s the scammers on the other hand who would benefit with cheap ability to generate fake audio/video
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Well, no, it's not really possible to just do that using actors and sets, it would have been done during the Cold War otherwise. Up until recent advances of digital technology it wasn't really possible to have an actor convincingly fake someone else - e.g. a foreign politician - so that it's not easily detectable; this is a recent new ability (and even now you'd still want to use a good actor with a similar face shape and skill to match the body movement style in order to make a convincing deepfake).
layer8 4y ago
Photos, audio, and video are relatively new media, historically. We always had the potential problem of historical records being rewritten. People will learn to be cautious. I wouldn’t worry too much, unless and until a worldwide government becomes a dictatorship.
- pixl97 4y ago
  > People will learn to be cautious. looks at history of organized religion Um, I'm not so sure about that...
- smt88 4y ago
  > People will learn to be cautious. It doesn't matter if they're cautious or not. Even for real media, how can you tell it's real? The result will be: - there will be no way for anyone to verify any digital media, including phone calls from loved ones - people will believe what they want to believe We've seen the second thing happening, and it leads to fascism.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Funny how history rymes. The last surge of mass media, radio, conteibuted to the rise of Fascism and Natiobalsocialism. Curious to see what "AI" will bring us, and whether or not we as a species adopt quick enough to prevent the worst.
  - mikrotikker 4y ago
    Then we need to arm ourselves with firearms to fight against the coming facist wave.
    - dang 4y ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait and also please stop using HN for ideological battle (regardless of which ideology you're battling for or against)? You've unfortunately been doing these things repeatedly, and they're not what the site is for and destroy what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
neganbanks 4y ago
[flagged]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

b112 4y ago

The "fun" thing about the tech in the current state is that it's wrong quite a bit, Indeed. And, as every other AI project has shown us, the rough areas are easy, the last few percent are incredibly difficult. Look at self driving cars. It will easily be 2050 before we can even hope to have good, driving AI. Current versions are a joke, and, are being trialed in places like California. Not on snow, dirt roads, while snowing, on rural roads, on unmapped roads, of which there are plenty. 2050 at least. Chatgpt will be vastly improved in maybe 30 years. The last little bit will take decades.

not2b 4y ago
SF isn't an easy environment for self driving cars. Steep hills, congested streets, sometimes thick fog. But Waymo is busy causing traffic jams because when the cars get confused they just stop, and block traffic.
SanderNL 4y ago
Phoenix, AZ is not small donky town. Driverless cabs come to you and drive around OK. At what point will the skeptics just give in? This shit is already working. It’s a lawyer’s and a businessman’s problem not a technical. You truly think we need 27 years to support “rural roads” because of technical issue?
- _djo_ 4y ago
  Right now driverless cars only work in places like that with relatively decent weather and which are meticulously mapped with frequent updates, because the tech still does not allow for safe driving using onboard sensors alone. A self-driving car that can safely drive in all the same places and conditions that humans can is not yet possible.

amelius 4y ago

The "fun" thing -> the sad thing

kragen 4y ago

> Which kinds of organizations don't care about correctness or reputation? This describes any "creative" job, where the hard part of the job is not rejecting the bad ideas but coming up with the good ones. Visual art is one famous example. Programming is another: if your code doesn't pass the test suite, you can tell, and then you can fix it. Some software needs higher assurance than test suites can provide, and then you need to get your code to pass Rust's borrow checker, or a more rigorous proof checker like ACL2. Telling a valid proof from an invalid one is a solved problem; constructing a program you can write a valid proof for is very much not. Programmers and visual artists are also famously cavalier about correctness and reputation, being willing to try anything, including notorious bohemian lifestyles.