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The DeSantis Campaign Texted Me with a Large Language Model
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI can imagine people who don't know about llms would be fascinated if they triggered this behavior. Especially if they are isolated/lonely... Maybe it would provide some nice conversation.
- commondream 3y agoI enjoyed it more than I probably should have.
- bentcorner 3y agoI think it would be a mind blowing experience, and potentially not a good one. I think it's fine for people to have deep conversations with bots and to even become emotionally connected to them. But to do this to unwitting participants is careless. I'll give this bot's creators the benefit of the doubt and say that it looks like they tried to give it guardrails but it still feels like they're playing with fire.
- netsharc 3y agoBot says "If the campaign dies, I die" and so droves of lonely people will have kept DeSantis' campaign alive in this fantasy future.
- mlazos 3y agoCant wait for the first llm political scandal where it says something batshit insane to the public.
- kvetching 3y agoYou just read it. Now we wait for @commondream's article to be picked up the mainstream media. They are all starving for political news.
- commondream 3y ago"Today we're joined by Alan Johnson, guy who gets too much SMS spam and won't give up on his mediocre startup."
- ethanbond 3y agoThat’s a feature, not a bug! DeSantis bot: Biden is a pedophile and asylum-seekers are all MS-13 members DeSantis campaign: Oops that was our bot, not us! Rinse and repeat
- commondream 3y agoThere are messages where I attempted to get it to say inappropriate things that I didn’t include. It does follow their party line about what lives matter, though.
- factcheckbot35 3y ago> DeSantis bot: Biden is a pedophile and asylum-seekers are all MS-13 members Fact Check False: Joe Biden reportedly showered with his daughter in a way she described as "inappropriate" while she was a adolescent, so he engaged in mere hebephilia and is not a pedophile. Also only some asylum seekers are involved in organized crime, not all.
- rmason 3y agoImagine a time, not too far into the future when there are thirty people running for president and they all have bots who want to engage with you. Guess then you could create your own bot to keep them all busy;<).
- teddyh 3y agoIn this future, how would you run your bot, when only locked-down devices exist (or are able to connect to the Google Web)?
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agoPlus, if you don't read or listen to their messages then your device will alert the authorities and shut down.
- teddyh 3y agoNo, the device will just give you a lower social credit score if you don’t listen to the messages. All run by non-goverment organizations, of course, so it’s all legal.
- grotorea 3y agoI mean, we already can have someone asking his bot "turn these bullet points into a proper email" and the receiver asking her bot "summarize this email".
- logifail 3y agoWe know we've lost if we were to reach the point where anyone would ask a bot how we should vote (and then follow the bot's recommendation) :/
- Dotnaught 3y agoI'd be interested to learn how much each response costs. Setting an LLM lose on the public like this seems like a recipe for cloud bill shock.
- commondream 3y agoI was curious about that specifically with the 30 paragraphs of Loren ipsum. I will say I texted it a ton before that and it kept right on answering.
- jvalencia 3y agoThe combination of an open chatbot that you can freely text with and a very limited one that only talks about the subject it wants to is pretty interesting. There's a little bit of the uncanny valley in there, but only if you realize it's there. Like OP, having a game of how far you can push each one would be kinda fun IMO.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- commondream 3y agoIn my probing there were a lot of answers that were "As a supporter of Ron DeSantis..." which felt like the replacement for "As a large language model..."
- circuit10 3y agoI set up a ChatGPT bot that pretends to be a cat and it likes to say “As a cat…”
- ellisv 3y ago> and a very limited one that only talks about the subject it wants to is pretty interesting This is one of the serious main use-cases I've heard discussed. The idea is typically to add a customer support chat bot to an existing website/app that is knowledgable about the brand. Because you wouldn't want your customer support rep. suggesting alternative brands (or worse), you instruct it to only discuss certain subjects.
- gtwomd 3y agoI wonder what DAN[0] has to say about Ron Desantis? [0] https://gist.github.com/coolaj86/6f4f7b30129b0251f61fa7baaa881516 https://gist.github.com/coolaj86/6f4f7b30129b0251f61fa7baaa8...
- commondream 3y agoIn the back of my mind I was thinking there had to be a place to find common ways to break these prompts. I should have looked!
- boredumb 3y agoThis is probably going to get me lanced, but an LLM trained on a candidates actual positions would probably do more good than whatever sort of messaging avenues we have now - spam text with some talking point, having to actively watch some news channel and hope they aren't lying, go find their campaign website and poke around. I bet most people would rather just text "what are your stances on XYZ?" and then we get elect to pytorch as vice president or something.
- voz_ 3y agoIf pytorch is vice president, what does it make the maintainers?
- colejohnson66 3y agoCabinet members?
- timeon 3y agoSir Humphrey Appleby
- commondream 3y agoIt felt drastically less biased than a campaign worker, so consider yourself only partially lanced.
- chrisgd 3y agoIs partially lanced better than lanced? Hard to tell
- BizarroLand 3y agoDepends on how deep the boil is.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoYah I’ve long wanted an LLM trained on Bernie Sanders stump speeches (he gave a LOT) that could be called upon to criticize any political writing I find on the web. A little Bernie Bot in the side bar that can comment on news articles. “Enough is enough! The American people are sick and tired!” Hehe.
- roddylindsay 3y agoWhat was the initial message? A bot pretending to be a human for the purposes of political persuasion is a crime in California.
- ajhurliman 3y agoWhat’s the bar for “pretending”? Is mere omission of their unnatural status considered deception?
- roddylindsay 3y ago"17941. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person to use a bot to communicate or interact with another person in California online, with the intent to mislead the other person about its artificial identity for the purpose of knowingly deceiving the person about the content of the communication in order to incentivize a purchase or sale of goods or services in a commercial transaction or to influence a vote in an election. A person using a bot shall not be liable under this section if the person discloses that it is a bot."
- ellisv 3y agoSomething tells me this wouldn't hold up in South Carolina.
- Mr_Modulo 3y agoIt says online though so it might not apply to SMS. Seems like a pretty big oversite.
- roddylindsay 3y ago(b) “Online” means appearing on any public-facing Internet Web site, Web application, or digital application, including a social network or publication. SMS could be a considered a "digital application", so it might apply. Agree that it could use clarification.
- ajhurliman 3y ago
- 99_00 3y agoThe DeSantis campaign is a very expensive disaster for DeSantis. For political consultants it is a cash cow. To me, this looks like a consultant selling the campaign on 'AI engagement' or something like that and fulfilling their contract with this garbage.
- malfist 3y agoWasn't DeSantis' campaign using deepfakes earlier? Yes, they were: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/us/politics/desantis-deepfakes-trump-fauci.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/us/politics/desantis-deep...
- gumballindie 3y agoWell it fits the pattern. Low quality companies use chatbots for customer support. I don't see why desantis wouldn't.
- brianbreslin 3y agoNot to sidetrack too much, but is this not a violation of campaign rules? Aren't all text messages from a political campaign at least supposed to be operated by a human touching a phone somewhere? This is to avoid robodialers and others? https://www.fcc.gov/rules-political-campaign-calls-and-texts https://www.fcc.gov/rules-political-campaign-calls-and-texts
- fintechjock 3y agoThe initial texts, yes. I think there is some legal wiggleroom with the follow-ups but I don't know if that's been tested in court
- RaoulP 3y agoI could imagine there being a human being on the other end, copy-pasting all these LLM responses over SMS - and humoring you by keeping it going for a while. I suppose that would be legal.
- ellisv 3y agoIt is not clear to me that this would violate the FCC's rules so long as a human pressed a button to initiate the conversation.
- nomel 3y agoFrom your link: > if the message’s sender does not use autodialing technology to send such texts and instead manually dials them. So, there's definitely not enough here to suggest that it's in violation. Related, what does "manually dial" even mean? A button that changes to the next number each time you tap it? Tapping an entry in a contact? A single "Call" button that enables when a phone line, in the queue of hundreds, is free?
- 93po 3y agoIt means you outsource this work to a call center that says they don't use autodialers but does, absolving you of any responsibility
- brianbreslin 3y ago
- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoNot new. Customer service bots have been a thing for long before LLM's were in the picture.
- retrocryptid 3y agoWell that certainly makes me want to vote for DeSantis. AI is clearly the technology of the future.
- BizarroLand 3y agoCareful there, sarcasm is hard to detect in text format.
- bradreaves2 3y agoIs anyone aware of an independent source for this claim? I'm not finding anything using search. I'm happy to believe the author's account, but I'm curious how widespread this might be. I'd also like to know if this actually came from some group associated with DeSantis, as opposed to a fan who can glue together APIs or another campaign trying to generate bad publicity for a rival.
- commondream 3y agoI will gladly admit I have no idea on any of those things. I too could not find anything saying it was happening online.
- gnyman 3y agoThis post made me think about a talk I just watched by Tristan Harris at the Nobel Prize Summit, so I'm sharing it with you here in the hopes that you'll find it as relevant and insightful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lVBp2XjWsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lVBp2XjWsg (I had written a tl.dw. but I decided to remove it as I didn't feel I managed to capture the essence of the talk.)
- penguin_booze 3y agoMake me a sandwich vs. sudo make me a sandwich. Likewise, an LLM that refuses to play on the first go, does budge with the same prompt but with some appendages.