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Fake revenge porn, nearly undetectable bot creation on social media with realistic profiles (I've already seen this on HN), generated artwork passed off as orig

Fake revenge porn, nearly undetectable bot creation on social media with realistic profiles (I've already seen this on HN), generated artwork passed off as originals, chatbots that replace real-time human customer service but have none of the agency... I can keep going. All of these are things that have already happened. These all were previously possible of course but now they are trivially scalable.

ben_w 3y ago
Most of those examples make sense, but what's this doing on your list? > chatbots that replace real-time human customer service but have none of the agency That seems good for society, even though it's bad for people employed in that specific job.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  the issue is "none of the agency". Humans generally have enough leeway to fold to a persistant customer because it's financially unviable to have them on the phone for hours on end. a chatbot can waste all the time in the world, with all the customers, and may not even have the ability to process a refund or whatnot.
- Nursie 3y ago
  > That seems good for society, even though it's bad for people employed in that specific job. Why? It inserts yet another layer of crap you have to fight through before you can actually get anything done with a company. The avoidance of genuine customer service has become an artform by many companies and corporations, its demise surely should be lamented. A chatbot is just another in the arsenal of weapons designed to confuse, put-off and delay the cost of having to actually provide a decent service to you customers, which should be a basic responsibility of any public-facing company.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Two things I disagree with: 1. It's not "an extra layer", at most it's a replacement for the existing thing you're lamenting, in the businesses you're already objecting to. 2. The businesses which use this tool at its best, can glue the LLM to their documentation[0], and once that's done, each extra user gets "really good even though it's not perfect" customer support at negligible marginal cost to the company, rather than the current affordable option of "ask your fellow users on our subreddit or discord channel, or read our FAQ". [0] a variety of ways — RAG is a popular meme now, but I assume it's going to be like MapReduce a decade ago, where everyone copies the tech giants without understanding the giant's reasons or scale
    - Nursie 3y ago
      It's an extra layer of "Have you looked at our website/read our documentation/clicked the button" that I've already done, before I will (if I'm lucky) be passed onto a human that will proceed to do the same thing before I can actually get support for my issue. If I'm unlucky it'll just be another stage in the mobius-support-strip that directs me from support web page to chatbot to FAQ and back to the webpage. The businesses which use this tool best will be the ones that manage to lay off the most support staff and cut the most cost. Sad as that is for the staff, that's not my gripe. My gripe is that it's just going to get even harder to reach a real actual person who is able to take a real actual action, because providing support is secondary to controlling costs for most companies these days. Take for example the pension company I called recently to change an address - their support page says to talk to their bot, which then says to call a number, which picks up, says please go to your online account page to complete this action and then hangs up... an action which the account page explicitly says cannot be completed online because I'm overseas, so please talk to the bot, or you can call the number. In the end I had to call an office number I found through google and be transferred between departments. An LLM is not going to help with that, it's just going to make the process longer and more frustrating, because the aim is not to resolve problems, it's to stop people taking the time of a human even when they need to, because that costs money.
- boredtofears 3y ago
  I've been running into chatbots that are confined to doling out information from their knowledgebase with no ability to help edge case/niche scenarios, and yet they've replaced all the mechanisms to receive customer support. Essentially businesses have (knowingly or otherwise) dropped their ability to provide meaningful customer support.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    That's the previous status quo; you'd also find this in call centres where customer support had to follow scripts, essentially as if they were computers themselves. Even quite a lot of new chatbots are still in that paradigm, and… well, given the recent news about chatbot output being legally binding, it's precisely the extra agency of LLMs over both normal bots and humans following scripts that makes them both interestingly useful and potentially dangerous: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb...
    - boredtofears 3y ago
      I don't think so. In my experience having an actual human on the other line gives you a lot more options for receiving customer support.
chankstein38 3y ago
Why is everyone's first example of things you can do with LLMs "revenge porn"? They're text generation algorithms not even image generators. They need external capabilities to create images.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Do you also object to people saying that web browsers "display" a website even though that needs them to be plugged into a monitor? If you chat to an LLM and you get a picture back, which some support, the image generator and the language model might as well be the same thing to all users, even if there's an important technical difference for developers. It's a distinction that does not matter, as the question still has to be answered for the other modality. Do guns kill people, or do bad guys use guns to kill people? Does a fall kill you, or is it the sudden deceleration at the end? Lab leak or wet market? There's a technical difference, some people care, but the actionable is identical and doesn't matter unless it's your job to implement a specific part of the solution.

ben_w 3y ago

Most of those examples make sense, but what's this doing on your list? > chatbots that replace real-time human customer service but have none of the agency That seems good for society, even though it's bad for people employed in that specific job.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
the issue is "none of the agency". Humans generally have enough leeway to fold to a persistant customer because it's financially unviable to have them on the phone for hours on end. a chatbot can waste all the time in the world, with all the customers, and may not even have the ability to process a refund or whatnot.
Nursie 3y ago
> That seems good for society, even though it's bad for people employed in that specific job. Why? It inserts yet another layer of crap you have to fight through before you can actually get anything done with a company. The avoidance of genuine customer service has become an artform by many companies and corporations, its demise surely should be lamented. A chatbot is just another in the arsenal of weapons designed to confuse, put-off and delay the cost of having to actually provide a decent service to you customers, which should be a basic responsibility of any public-facing company.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Two things I disagree with: 1. It's not "an extra layer", at most it's a replacement for the existing thing you're lamenting, in the businesses you're already objecting to. 2. The businesses which use this tool at its best, can glue the LLM to their documentation[0], and once that's done, each extra user gets "really good even though it's not perfect" customer support at negligible marginal cost to the company, rather than the current affordable option of "ask your fellow users on our subreddit or discord channel, or read our FAQ". [0] a variety of ways — RAG is a popular meme now, but I assume it's going to be like MapReduce a decade ago, where everyone copies the tech giants without understanding the giant's reasons or scale
  - Nursie 3y ago
    It's an extra layer of "Have you looked at our website/read our documentation/clicked the button" that I've already done, before I will (if I'm lucky) be passed onto a human that will proceed to do the same thing before I can actually get support for my issue. If I'm unlucky it'll just be another stage in the mobius-support-strip that directs me from support web page to chatbot to FAQ and back to the webpage. The businesses which use this tool best will be the ones that manage to lay off the most support staff and cut the most cost. Sad as that is for the staff, that's not my gripe. My gripe is that it's just going to get even harder to reach a real actual person who is able to take a real actual action, because providing support is secondary to controlling costs for most companies these days. Take for example the pension company I called recently to change an address - their support page says to talk to their bot, which then says to call a number, which picks up, says please go to your online account page to complete this action and then hangs up... an action which the account page explicitly says cannot be completed online because I'm overseas, so please talk to the bot, or you can call the number. In the end I had to call an office number I found through google and be transferred between departments. An LLM is not going to help with that, it's just going to make the process longer and more frustrating, because the aim is not to resolve problems, it's to stop people taking the time of a human even when they need to, because that costs money.
boredtofears 3y ago
I've been running into chatbots that are confined to doling out information from their knowledgebase with no ability to help edge case/niche scenarios, and yet they've replaced all the mechanisms to receive customer support. Essentially businesses have (knowingly or otherwise) dropped their ability to provide meaningful customer support.
- ben_w 3y ago
  That's the previous status quo; you'd also find this in call centres where customer support had to follow scripts, essentially as if they were computers themselves. Even quite a lot of new chatbots are still in that paradigm, and… well, given the recent news about chatbot output being legally binding, it's precisely the extra agency of LLMs over both normal bots and humans following scripts that makes them both interestingly useful and potentially dangerous: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb...
  - boredtofears 3y ago
    I don't think so. In my experience having an actual human on the other line gives you a lot more options for receiving customer support.

chankstein38 3y ago

Why is everyone's first example of things you can do with LLMs "revenge porn"? They're text generation algorithms not even image generators. They need external capabilities to create images.

ben_w 3y ago
Do you also object to people saying that web browsers "display" a website even though that needs them to be plugged into a monitor? If you chat to an LLM and you get a picture back, which some support, the image generator and the language model might as well be the same thing to all users, even if there's an important technical difference for developers. It's a distinction that does not matter, as the question still has to be answered for the other modality. Do guns kill people, or do bad guys use guns to kill people? Does a fall kill you, or is it the sudden deceleration at the end? Lab leak or wet market? There's a technical difference, some people care, but the actionable is identical and doesn't matter unless it's your job to implement a specific part of the solution.