3 ms·

People lie. Helping people lie more convincingly is still a thing that should raise ethical red flags.

by AnimalMuppet 3y ago

h2odragon 3y ago
OK. Only the professionals should have access to these tools, then?
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  No. "Professional" and "ethical" are, too often, orthogonal to each other. Ideally, you'd like these tools to only be in the hands of ethical people. But that seems unlikely to be realistic.
sokoloff 3y ago
Perhaps Bic should be chastised for making writing easier? Microsoft Word and Powerpoint are ethical nightmares as well. At some point, you're making a generally useful tool and some people choose to use it to create lies. We don't want to go back to the days of quill feathers and movable type just to make lying more expensive.
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  And interestingly no one seemed to care when it took "tens of thousands" to deceive everyone. Only once that power is handed to all of us does it suddenly become unethical. We could never trust anything we learned except to the extent we trust the person who conveyed the facts to us. The misplaced trust in state and/or corporate media made things kind of work, but that doesn't make it right or ethical. Now that it is obvious that in addition to our benevolent oligarchs, that evil hacker kid your cousin told you about might be feeding you untruths, it doesn't work anymore. Media is pointless, elections are pointless. You can still trust people you see with your eyes on a regular basis to observe the ethics of their behavior. Until they start hacking our eyes, but we have a bit I think? I think this is one more supporting datapoint for a hierarchical representative democracy where people only have to select from people they know well. Dunbar's number makes the math hard, but if most people know 100 people well, that puts elected positions at 1% at the first tier, .01 for the next. Each tier gets to know those they work with, well, electing one to the next level who must be backfilled locally. Not sure how to bootstrap the system.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Writing can be used for many purposes. With deep fakes, though, it seems like the bad uses outnumber the good. So it seems fair to say that creating tools for deep fakes raises ethical questions that creating Bics does not.

People lie. Helping people lie more convincingly is still a thing that should raise ethical red flags.

h2odragon 3y ago

OK. Only the professionals should have access to these tools, then?

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
No. "Professional" and "ethical" are, too often, orthogonal to each other. Ideally, you'd like these tools to only be in the hands of ethical people. But that seems unlikely to be realistic.

sokoloff 3y ago

Perhaps Bic should be chastised for making writing easier? Microsoft Word and Powerpoint are ethical nightmares as well. At some point, you're making a generally useful tool and some people choose to use it to create lies. We don't want to go back to the days of quill feathers and movable type just to make lying more expensive.

galangalalgol 3y ago
And interestingly no one seemed to care when it took "tens of thousands" to deceive everyone. Only once that power is handed to all of us does it suddenly become unethical. We could never trust anything we learned except to the extent we trust the person who conveyed the facts to us. The misplaced trust in state and/or corporate media made things kind of work, but that doesn't make it right or ethical. Now that it is obvious that in addition to our benevolent oligarchs, that evil hacker kid your cousin told you about might be feeding you untruths, it doesn't work anymore. Media is pointless, elections are pointless. You can still trust people you see with your eyes on a regular basis to observe the ethics of their behavior. Until they start hacking our eyes, but we have a bit I think? I think this is one more supporting datapoint for a hierarchical representative democracy where people only have to select from people they know well. Dunbar's number makes the math hard, but if most people know 100 people well, that puts elected positions at 1% at the first tier, .01 for the next. Each tier gets to know those they work with, well, electing one to the next level who must be backfilled locally. Not sure how to bootstrap the system.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Writing can be used for many purposes. With deep fakes, though, it seems like the bad uses outnumber the good. So it seems fair to say that creating tools for deep fakes raises ethical questions that creating Bics does not.