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At a certain point you have to acknowledge that if a technology enables harmful action on a scale previously unimaginable you have to start being very, very car

At a certain point you have to acknowledge that if a technology enables harmful action on a scale previously unimaginable you have to start being very, very careful. Machinists and gun makers are well aware how easy it is to make a machine gun or other illegal firearm, but they don't because that knowledge is locked behind experience, norms and expensive machines. This is why it was potentially a big deal when people started printing guns, not because it wasn't possible before to make dangerous or illegal firearms, but now it was an order of magnitude easier. We have always had conmen, but running a good con was hard and you were limited to one at a time. Now with voice cloning and LLMs it is an order of magnitude easier, and infinitely more replicable. I'm not sure the world is ready for the golden era of grifting, but I'm also not sure how you could ever stop it.

apantel 3y ago
Just to add one thing: LLM’s as a force multiplier are much more than an order of magnitude (which is 10x). How long does it take a human to write a 1000-word article? Let’s say an hour, which is being generous. It won’t be a high-quality, well-researched article, but a human could probably get to that word count in an hour. How long does it take an LLM to write a 1000-word article? Not 6 minutes —- that would be an order of magnitude faster. It would take ChatGPT maybe 10-20 seconds to spit out a 1000-word article. That’s 2 orders of magnitude faster.