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Here's a rewritten headline, definitely not ChatGPT approved: "Salty ex-Googler tries to slow down competition by mounting misinformation campaign in press". W

Here's a rewritten headline, definitely not ChatGPT approved: "Salty ex-Googler tries to slow down competition by mounting misinformation campaign in press". What a ridiculous charade. For years Google reacted to every OpenAI announcement or API launch by doing a blog post stating that they had already done it, their models were much better and they weren't releasing any evidence because their tech wasn't "safe" enough to make available to anyone, except, um, the benignly enlightened employees of Google themselves. And for years, like a fool, I believed them when they said their tech was better. ChatGPT ripped the mask off, letting everyone see this supposed danger they had to be protected from for themselves. And it's laughable. Then Bard launched and we learned that Team Hinton's models weren't really better at all, that whole message was corporate misinformation or maybe self delusion or maybe both. Then it became "PaLM is definitely GPT-4 quality, we just aren't making it available yet". Uh huh. Now we have this even more pathetic sight. Hinton, trying to set himself up as a classic public intellectual by extrapolating a trend into infinity until it reaches an end of the world that might happen "5-20" years from now, citing as evidence Proof By Snoop Dogg. He can go over there in the corner along with the "world hunger through overpopulation" and "New York under water by 2010" people. Having spent a lifetime chasing a goal he clearly never expected nor even wanted to achieve, he's now been lapped by his own former student who was busy actually making the AI revolution happen whilst Googlers were telling each other how virtuous they were. And oh yes, these supposed great dangers. What are they, according to Hinton? Ourselves. Like all left wing purity spirallers, his biggest fear is that people like him lose their power over politics and information. We might believe things written by an AI instead of journalists. These people claim to live in fear of misinformation, but it's not credible. Where were they when US media was waging an industrial-scale misinformation campaign about non-existent Russian AI bots on Twitter? The ones who were supposedly secretly fielding GPT-4 quality bots to make Americans vote for Trump? So many claims, all fallen, and yet these brave anti-disinfo warriors so concerned about elections were nowhere to be found at the time. Every time another round in this anti-progress, "let us smart people control things" salvo from Hinton appears, I breathe a deep sigh of relief that Team Sutskever exists and is doing so well. Left to their own devices Googlers would have happily sat around writing blog posts about how dangerous we all are forever. And I say that, sadly, as an ex Googler.

lisasays 3y ago
Ironically, this line of critique is itself ... a misinformation play of sorts: Where were they when US media was waging an industrial-scale misinformation campaign about non-existent Russian AI bots on Twitter? The ones who were supposedly secretly fielding GPT-4 quality bots to make Americans vote for Trump? In that, simply put - these are straw-man claims that are being attacked here. As to why - it's pretty obvious if one follows the event chronology of the broader story. Simply put: that the troll farms existed is a matter of forensic record, beyond dispute. But the narrative at the time was always in that formulation - "troll farms", i.e. essentially an MTurk operation. And yes, aspects of that narrative (specifically in regards to its actual effect on the election) were at the time speculative, and yeah, apparently lacking substance. However - specific claims about them being "AI bots" didn't come until much later in the hype cycle, and were quite marginal (nowhere near "industrial-scale" as alleged above). And the claim about "secretly fielding GPT-4 quality bots" seems particularly strange, since GPT itself became known to the broader public until long after the election bots mania had arced and passed.
- revelio 3y ago
  Quite marginal? Here is a video compilation of just cases where MSNBC promoted just the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which supposedly tracked "Russian linked" bot and troll activity. It's 11 minutes of clips: https://www.racket.news/p/eleven-minutes-of-media-falsehoods https://www.racket.news/p/eleven-minutes-of-media-falsehoods These people couldn't stop talking about Russian bots. Listen for yourself and you'll see the claim is made regularly. Later it was discovered that these hundreds of accounts were all ordinary westerners, and the Hamilton 68 people admitted that they'd never really had a reason to think they were Russian. That's just one TV channel, referring to one source of misinformation! There are far far more such clips available. This sort of thing was totally normal outside the media too. Look at how many papers have come from academics writing about this supposed widespread problem: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22social+bots%22+OR+%22twitter+bots%22&btnG=&oq=%22social+bots%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22s... Over 14,000 papers on bots that don't really exist! And that's just a tiny fraction of the misinformation pumped into society regularly. Again, if Hinton actually cared about misinformation, he'd have cared about that. He doesn't. Like everyone else claiming to care, he's simply a bitter partisan, hence his comment about Biden at the end of the interview. My point is that these claims all revolved around the idea that the internet was being flooded with bots that spoke and thought just like Americans, so similarly that people couldn't tell they weren't human and would even be highly persuaded by them. Yet the tech to do that didn't exist at the time. People who observed this fact were of course attacked as spreading misinformation themselves, which is why the whole concept is just a joke idea.

lisasays 3y ago

Ironically, this line of critique is itself ... a misinformation play of sorts: Where were they when US media was waging an industrial-scale misinformation campaign about non-existent Russian AI bots on Twitter? The ones who were supposedly secretly fielding GPT-4 quality bots to make Americans vote for Trump? In that, simply put - these are straw-man claims that are being attacked here. As to why - it's pretty obvious if one follows the event chronology of the broader story. Simply put: that the troll farms existed is a matter of forensic record, beyond dispute. But the narrative at the time was always in that formulation - "troll farms", i.e. essentially an MTurk operation. And yes, aspects of that narrative (specifically in regards to its actual effect on the election) were at the time speculative, and yeah, apparently lacking substance. However - specific claims about them being "AI bots" didn't come until much later in the hype cycle, and were quite marginal (nowhere near "industrial-scale" as alleged above). And the claim about "secretly fielding GPT-4 quality bots" seems particularly strange, since GPT itself became known to the broader public until long after the election bots mania had arced and passed.

revelio 3y ago
Quite marginal? Here is a video compilation of just cases where MSNBC promoted just the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which supposedly tracked "Russian linked" bot and troll activity. It's 11 minutes of clips: https://www.racket.news/p/eleven-minutes-of-media-falsehoods https://www.racket.news/p/eleven-minutes-of-media-falsehoods These people couldn't stop talking about Russian bots. Listen for yourself and you'll see the claim is made regularly. Later it was discovered that these hundreds of accounts were all ordinary westerners, and the Hamilton 68 people admitted that they'd never really had a reason to think they were Russian. That's just one TV channel, referring to one source of misinformation! There are far far more such clips available. This sort of thing was totally normal outside the media too. Look at how many papers have come from academics writing about this supposed widespread problem: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22social+bots%22+OR+%22twitter+bots%22&btnG=&oq=%22social+bots%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22s... Over 14,000 papers on bots that don't really exist! And that's just a tiny fraction of the misinformation pumped into society regularly. Again, if Hinton actually cared about misinformation, he'd have cared about that. He doesn't. Like everyone else claiming to care, he's simply a bitter partisan, hence his comment about Biden at the end of the interview. My point is that these claims all revolved around the idea that the internet was being flooded with bots that spoke and thought just like Americans, so similarly that people couldn't tell they weren't human and would even be highly persuaded by them. Yet the tech to do that didn't exist at the time. People who observed this fact were of course attacked as spreading misinformation themselves, which is why the whole concept is just a joke idea.