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"illegal concepts" Embeddings mean that when we have a thought police they can now be more targeted and effective than before. Any thought you express can be o

"illegal concepts" Embeddings mean that when we have a thought police they can now be more targeted and effective than before. Any thought you express can be objectively measured "using the euclidean distance or cosine similarity" for illegal concepts, and censored, corrected or punished accordingly. I imagine that this will come early for comment sections on the web.

deleted 3y ago
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RockyMcNuts 3y ago
if I invest a lot of money to make a nice forum like HN or a social media site, don't I get to determine the right policies to keep a nice private space? doesn't it infringe my rights if people use my site and my money to harass people or to spread stuff that is against my economic interest, religion, values, etc. or that I just don't like and didn't intend? if people are going to run around using AI to spread deepfake ragebait memes, shouldn't I get to enforce policies using the same technology they use to pollute the space?
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  This feels like a blend of reasonable and bad-faith arguments, like the motte just missing its bailey. Maybe strolling around the latent space would help disentangle mottes and baileys in general discourse. But then I fear it'll only push the conflict to a meta level.
  - RockyMcNuts 3y ago
    that feels like obfuscation fallacy, because I have no idea what you are proposing in practice. deciding when free speech crosses a line into a nexus to criminal activity like fraud, libel, conspiracy, incitement, disturbing the peace is hard. deciding when it crosses a line into simply violating community standards designed to further the goals of the community and forum owners, and violates the right or expectation of others for civil discourse is also hard. it's a bias-variance problem, you can ban the n-word but people find other ways to make people unwelcome, a demagogue can say they are just asking questions when they are pretty plainly trying to start a riot and get people harassed and swatted and feel like they will suffer violence if they disagree. I don't see anything inherently wrong with using AI tools to help make decisions like that. all that AI that controls what shows up in your feed is already implicitly doing that. inherently when one guy thinks he's making a stand for free speech, someone else is going to think he's coddling extremists who are strategically flooding the zone with bullshit, driving out civil discourse and worse.
robrenaud 3y ago
Embeddings aren't objective, their point of view is some kind of complicated aggregate of the training data, which is itself (as of now) mostly human written text. I'd honestly love to see AI fending off the eternal winter on message boards. Is question redundant and basic? Direct user to a specialized AI that can explain the topic well and save the regulars from having to have the same discussion as two days ago. But it is certainly the case that stronger machine text understanding can be used for censorship and oppression. As pretty much all powerful, general tools can be used for nefarious purposes. But it can also be used for a wide range of great purposes as well.
ducttapecrown 3y ago
Gonna frame this comment so I can point to it in the year it happens next decade.

deleted 3y ago

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RockyMcNuts 3y ago

if I invest a lot of money to make a nice forum like HN or a social media site, don't I get to determine the right policies to keep a nice private space? doesn't it infringe my rights if people use my site and my money to harass people or to spread stuff that is against my economic interest, religion, values, etc. or that I just don't like and didn't intend? if people are going to run around using AI to spread deepfake ragebait memes, shouldn't I get to enforce policies using the same technology they use to pollute the space?

TeMPOraL 3y ago
This feels like a blend of reasonable and bad-faith arguments, like the motte just missing its bailey. Maybe strolling around the latent space would help disentangle mottes and baileys in general discourse. But then I fear it'll only push the conflict to a meta level.
- RockyMcNuts 3y ago
  that feels like obfuscation fallacy, because I have no idea what you are proposing in practice. deciding when free speech crosses a line into a nexus to criminal activity like fraud, libel, conspiracy, incitement, disturbing the peace is hard. deciding when it crosses a line into simply violating community standards designed to further the goals of the community and forum owners, and violates the right or expectation of others for civil discourse is also hard. it's a bias-variance problem, you can ban the n-word but people find other ways to make people unwelcome, a demagogue can say they are just asking questions when they are pretty plainly trying to start a riot and get people harassed and swatted and feel like they will suffer violence if they disagree. I don't see anything inherently wrong with using AI tools to help make decisions like that. all that AI that controls what shows up in your feed is already implicitly doing that. inherently when one guy thinks he's making a stand for free speech, someone else is going to think he's coddling extremists who are strategically flooding the zone with bullshit, driving out civil discourse and worse.

robrenaud 3y ago

Embeddings aren't objective, their point of view is some kind of complicated aggregate of the training data, which is itself (as of now) mostly human written text. I'd honestly love to see AI fending off the eternal winter on message boards. Is question redundant and basic? Direct user to a specialized AI that can explain the topic well and save the regulars from having to have the same discussion as two days ago. But it is certainly the case that stronger machine text understanding can be used for censorship and oppression. As pretty much all powerful, general tools can be used for nefarious purposes. But it can also be used for a wide range of great purposes as well.

ducttapecrown 3y ago

Gonna frame this comment so I can point to it in the year it happens next decade.