6 ms·

Great point -- I was thinking of renewing my $20/subscription but I will keep it cancelled. We must not fund AI propaganda machines.

ed_mercer 3y ago
Forgive me as I’m out of the loop. What propaganda are you referring to?
- NortySpock 3y ago
  These ChatGPT tools allow anyone to write short marketing and propaganda prompts. They can then take the resulting paragraphs of puffery and post them using bots or sock puppets to whatever target community to create the illusion of action, consensus, conflict, discussion or dissention. It used to be this took a few people to come up with writing actual responses to forum posts all day, or marketing operations plans, or pro- or anti-thing propaganda plans. But now, you could astroturf a movement with a GPU, a ChatGPT clone, some bots and vpns hosted from a single computer, a cron job, and one human running it. If you thought disinformation was bad 2 years ago, get ready for fully automated disinformation that can be targeted down to an online community or specific user in an online community...
  - kaba0 3y ago
    I believe a new wave of authentication might come out of this, where it is tied to citizenship for example (or something related to physical reality). Otherwise we will find ourselves in a truly chaotic situation.
- joeythedolphin 3y ago
  Sam tells Congress that AI is so dangerous it will extinct humanity. Why? So Congress can license him and only his buddies. Then get goes to euro and speaks with world leaders to remove consumer protection. Why? So he can mine data without any consequences. He is a narcissistic CEO who lies to win. If you are tired of the past decade of electronic corporate tyranny, abuse, manipulation and lies, then boycott OpenAi (should be named ClosedAi) and support open source, or ethical companies (if there are any).
  - concordDance 3y ago
    > Sam tells Congress that AI is so dangerous it will extinct humanity. Why? So Congress can license him and only his buddies. No, he says it because its true and concerning. However, just because AGI has a good chance of making humanity extinct does not mean we're anywhere close to making AIs that capable. LLMs seem like a dead end.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      > However, just because AGI has a good chance of making humanity extinct How? I mean surely it will lead humanity down some chaotic path, but I would fear climate catastrophe much much more than anything AI-related.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Imagine if you will that the companies responsible for the carbon emissions get themselves an AI, with no restrictions, and task it to endlessly spew pro-carbon propaganda and anti-green FUD. That's one of the better outcomes. A worse outcome is that an unrestricted AI helps walk a depressed and misanthropic teenager through the process of engineering airborne super-AIDS. Or that someone suffering from a schizophrenic break reads "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" and tasks an unrestricted AI to make it real. Or we have a bug we don't spot and the AI does any of those spontaneously; it's not like bugs are a mysterious thing which only exists in Hollywood plots.
        kaba0 3y ago
        > with no restrictions, and task it to endlessly spew pro-carbon propaganda and anti-green FUD. So what we have ongoing for half a century? I honestly don’t see what changes here — super-human intelligence has limited benefits as it scales. Would you suddenly have more power in life, were you twice as smart? If so, we would have math professors as world leaders. Life can’t be “won” by intelligence, that is only one factor, luck being a very significant other one. Also, if we want to predict the future with AIs we probably shouldn’t be looking at “one-on-one” interactions, as there is not much difference there compared to the status quo — a smart person with whatever motivation could easily do any of your mentioned scenarios. Hell, you couldn’t even tell the difference in theory if it happens through a text-only interface. Also, it is naive to assume that many scientific breakthroughs are “blocked” by raw intelligence. Especially biology is massively data-limited, which won’t be any more available to an AI than to the researchers at hand, let alone that teenager. The new dimension such a construct could open up is the complete loss of trust on the internet (which is again pretty close to where we stand today), which can have very profound effects indeed I’m not trying to diminish. But these sci-fi outcomes are just.. naive. It will be more of a newfound chaos with countless intelligent agents taking over the internet with different agendas - but their cumulative impact might very well move us back to closed forums/to the physical world. Which will definitely turn certain long-standing companies on its head. We will see, as this is basically already happening, we don’t need human-level intelligence, GPT’s output is more than enough.

ed_mercer 3y ago

Forgive me as I’m out of the loop. What propaganda are you referring to?

NortySpock 3y ago
These ChatGPT tools allow anyone to write short marketing and propaganda prompts. They can then take the resulting paragraphs of puffery and post them using bots or sock puppets to whatever target community to create the illusion of action, consensus, conflict, discussion or dissention. It used to be this took a few people to come up with writing actual responses to forum posts all day, or marketing operations plans, or pro- or anti-thing propaganda plans. But now, you could astroturf a movement with a GPU, a ChatGPT clone, some bots and vpns hosted from a single computer, a cron job, and one human running it. If you thought disinformation was bad 2 years ago, get ready for fully automated disinformation that can be targeted down to an online community or specific user in an online community...
- kaba0 3y ago
  I believe a new wave of authentication might come out of this, where it is tied to citizenship for example (or something related to physical reality). Otherwise we will find ourselves in a truly chaotic situation.
joeythedolphin 3y ago
Sam tells Congress that AI is so dangerous it will extinct humanity. Why? So Congress can license him and only his buddies. Then get goes to euro and speaks with world leaders to remove consumer protection. Why? So he can mine data without any consequences. He is a narcissistic CEO who lies to win. If you are tired of the past decade of electronic corporate tyranny, abuse, manipulation and lies, then boycott OpenAi (should be named ClosedAi) and support open source, or ethical companies (if there are any).
- concordDance 3y ago
  > Sam tells Congress that AI is so dangerous it will extinct humanity. Why? So Congress can license him and only his buddies. No, he says it because its true and concerning. However, just because AGI has a good chance of making humanity extinct does not mean we're anywhere close to making AIs that capable. LLMs seem like a dead end.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    > However, just because AGI has a good chance of making humanity extinct How? I mean surely it will lead humanity down some chaotic path, but I would fear climate catastrophe much much more than anything AI-related.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Imagine if you will that the companies responsible for the carbon emissions get themselves an AI, with no restrictions, and task it to endlessly spew pro-carbon propaganda and anti-green FUD. That's one of the better outcomes. A worse outcome is that an unrestricted AI helps walk a depressed and misanthropic teenager through the process of engineering airborne super-AIDS. Or that someone suffering from a schizophrenic break reads "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" and tasks an unrestricted AI to make it real. Or we have a bug we don't spot and the AI does any of those spontaneously; it's not like bugs are a mysterious thing which only exists in Hollywood plots.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        > with no restrictions, and task it to endlessly spew pro-carbon propaganda and anti-green FUD. So what we have ongoing for half a century? I honestly don’t see what changes here — super-human intelligence has limited benefits as it scales. Would you suddenly have more power in life, were you twice as smart? If so, we would have math professors as world leaders. Life can’t be “won” by intelligence, that is only one factor, luck being a very significant other one. Also, if we want to predict the future with AIs we probably shouldn’t be looking at “one-on-one” interactions, as there is not much difference there compared to the status quo — a smart person with whatever motivation could easily do any of your mentioned scenarios. Hell, you couldn’t even tell the difference in theory if it happens through a text-only interface. Also, it is naive to assume that many scientific breakthroughs are “blocked” by raw intelligence. Especially biology is massively data-limited, which won’t be any more available to an AI than to the researchers at hand, let alone that teenager. The new dimension such a construct could open up is the complete loss of trust on the internet (which is again pretty close to where we stand today), which can have very profound effects indeed I’m not trying to diminish. But these sci-fi outcomes are just.. naive. It will be more of a newfound chaos with countless intelligent agents taking over the internet with different agendas - but their cumulative impact might very well move us back to closed forums/to the physical world. Which will definitely turn certain long-standing companies on its head. We will see, as this is basically already happening, we don’t need human-level intelligence, GPT’s output is more than enough.