4 ms·

> 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

> 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. This is like saying, "look, no one would be daft enough to draw a graph, they'd just count all the data points and make a decision." You're missing two critical things: (1) time/effort (2) legal loophole. A targeted simulation LLM (a scenario I've been independently afraid of for several weeks now) would be a brilliant tool for (say) an autocratic regime to explore the motivations and psychology of protesters; how they relate to one another; who they support; what stimuli would demotivate ('pacify') them; etc. In fact, it's such a good opportunity it would be daft not to construct it. Much like the cartesian graph opened up the world of dataviz, simulated people will open up sociology and anthropology to casual understanding. And, until/unless there are good laws in place, it provides a fantastic chess-knight leap over existing privacy legislation. "Oh, no we don't read your emails, no that would be a violation; we simply talk to an LLM that read your emails. Your privacy is intact! You-prime says hi!"

kenjackson 4y ago
> And, until/unless there are good laws in place, it provides a fantastic chess-knight leap over existing privacy legislation. "Oh, no we don't read your emails, no that would be a violation; we simply talk to an LLM that read your emails. Your privacy is intact! You-prime says hi!" That seems as poor as saying, "We didn't read your emails -- we read a copy of your email after removing all vowels!"
- 1attice 4y ago
  Most certainly, yes, it's as poor as saying that. But we live in distressed times, and the law is not as sane and sober as it once was. (Take, for example, the Tiktok congressional hearing; the wildly overbroad RESTRICT act; etc.) If the people making and enforcing the laws are as clueless and as partisan as they by-all-accounts now are, what gives you hope that, somehow, some reasonable judge will set a reasonable precedent? What gives you hope that someone will pass a bill that has enough foresight to stave off non-obvious and emergent uses for AI? This is not the timeline where things continue to make sense.
epups 4y ago
> This is like saying, "look, no one would be daft enough to draw a graph, they'd just count all the data points and make a decision." Not really. Assuming your ethical compass is broken and you suspected your partner of cheating, would you rather have access to their emails or to a LLM trained on them? Also, isn't it much cheaper for Google to simply search for keywords rather than fine tuning a model for this? At least in the EU, a system like this would be made illegal on day one. This whole doomsday scenario seems predicated on a hypothetical future where LLM's would be the least of your worries.
- 1attice 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - astrange 4y ago
    Cambridge Analytica didn't actually work, did it? Generally I think this idea can't work because of Goodhart's Law - people's behavior changes when you try to influence them.
    - 1attice 4y ago
      I'm really not sure where 'didn't work' comes from. Some folks think it was ineffective. Others think it worked great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment_of_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment... For my argument, I only need to point out that it was attempted, as I'm proving motivation; the effectiveness of CA methods has no bearing on the effectivenss of (say) simulated people. Increasingly, when interacting with comments on HN and elsewhere, it feels like I'm from a parallel timeline where things happened, and mattered, and an ever-growing percentage of my interlocutors are, for lack of a better word, dissociated. Perhaps not in the clinical sense, but certainly in the following senses: - Cause and effect are not immediately observed without careful prompting. - Intersubjectively verifiable historical facts that happened recently are remembered hazily, and doubtfully, even by very intelligent people - Positions are expressed that somehow disinclude unfavourable facts. - Data, the gold standard for truth and proof, is not sought, or, if proffered, is not examined. The stances and positions held seem to have a sort of 'immunity' to evidence. - Positions which are not popular in this specific community are downranked without engagement or argument, instead of discussed. I do believe folks are working backward from the emotional position they want to maintain to a set of minimizing beliefs about the looming hazards of this increasingly fraught decade. Let's call this knee-jerk position "un-alarmism", as in "that's just un-alarmism". I'm going to say as much here.

kenjackson 4y ago

> And, until/unless there are good laws in place, it provides a fantastic chess-knight leap over existing privacy legislation. "Oh, no we don't read your emails, no that would be a violation; we simply talk to an LLM that read your emails. Your privacy is intact! You-prime says hi!" That seems as poor as saying, "We didn't read your emails -- we read a copy of your email after removing all vowels!"

1attice 4y ago
Most certainly, yes, it's as poor as saying that. But we live in distressed times, and the law is not as sane and sober as it once was. (Take, for example, the Tiktok congressional hearing; the wildly overbroad RESTRICT act; etc.) If the people making and enforcing the laws are as clueless and as partisan as they by-all-accounts now are, what gives you hope that, somehow, some reasonable judge will set a reasonable precedent? What gives you hope that someone will pass a bill that has enough foresight to stave off non-obvious and emergent uses for AI? This is not the timeline where things continue to make sense.

epups 4y ago

> This is like saying, "look, no one would be daft enough to draw a graph, they'd just count all the data points and make a decision." Not really. Assuming your ethical compass is broken and you suspected your partner of cheating, would you rather have access to their emails or to a LLM trained on them? Also, isn't it much cheaper for Google to simply search for keywords rather than fine tuning a model for this? At least in the EU, a system like this would be made illegal on day one. This whole doomsday scenario seems predicated on a hypothetical future where LLM's would be the least of your worries.

1attice 4y ago
[flagged]
- astrange 4y ago
  Cambridge Analytica didn't actually work, did it? Generally I think this idea can't work because of Goodhart's Law - people's behavior changes when you try to influence them.
  - 1attice 4y ago
    I'm really not sure where 'didn't work' comes from. Some folks think it was ineffective. Others think it worked great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment_of_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment... For my argument, I only need to point out that it was attempted, as I'm proving motivation; the effectiveness of CA methods has no bearing on the effectivenss of (say) simulated people. Increasingly, when interacting with comments on HN and elsewhere, it feels like I'm from a parallel timeline where things happened, and mattered, and an ever-growing percentage of my interlocutors are, for lack of a better word, dissociated. Perhaps not in the clinical sense, but certainly in the following senses: - Cause and effect are not immediately observed without careful prompting. - Intersubjectively verifiable historical facts that happened recently are remembered hazily, and doubtfully, even by very intelligent people - Positions are expressed that somehow disinclude unfavourable facts. - Data, the gold standard for truth and proof, is not sought, or, if proffered, is not examined. The stances and positions held seem to have a sort of 'immunity' to evidence. - Positions which are not popular in this specific community are downranked without engagement or argument, instead of discussed. I do believe folks are working backward from the emotional position they want to maintain to a set of minimizing beliefs about the looming hazards of this increasingly fraught decade. Let's call this knee-jerk position "un-alarmism", as in "that's just un-alarmism". I'm going to say as much here.