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AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time

602 points by mustaphah 1y ago

iambateman 1y ago
If the author sees this…could you go one step further, what policy specifically do you recommend? It seems like having LLM providers not train on user data is a big part of it. But is using traditional ML models to do keyword analysis considered “AI” or “surveillance”? The author…and this community in general…are much more prepared to make full recommendations about what AI surveillance policy should be. We should be super clear to try to enact good regulation without killing innovation in the process.
- slt2021 1y ago
  the law could be as simple as requiring to blur faces and body silhouettes of all people inside each camera, prior to any further processing in the cloud, ensuring privacy of the CCTV footage.
- beepbooptheory 1y ago
  From the TFA: > That’s why we (at DuckDuckGo) started offering Duck.ai for protected chatbot conversations and optional, anonymous AI-assisted answers in our private search engine. In doing so, we’re demonstrating that privacy-respecting AI services are feasible. I don't know if its a great idea, or just I wonder what does make it feasible, but there is a kind of implied recommendation here. By "killing innovation" do you just mean: "we need to allow these companies to make money in possibly a predatory way, so they have the money to do... something else"? Or what is the precise concern here? What facet needs to be innovated upon?
  - iambateman 1y ago
    The country who most effectively deploys AI models has a big advantage over countries who bury their head in the sand. I believe that LLM’s will have the capability to fill in for human workers in many important ways. It’s like getting an economic infusion without the associated population growth required. But we aren’t there yet, so innovation looks like continuing to build out how to efficiently use AI tools. Not necessarily better models, but longer memory, more critical reasoning, etc. At the same time…there are winner-take-all dynamics and possibility to weaponize that are not good for society in the long-term. So we need to both encourage innovation while making sure we don’t kill each other in the process.
- yegg 1y ago
  Thanks (author here). I am working on a follow-up post (and likely posts) with specific recommendations.
  - FollowingTheDao 1y ago
    While I agree with your take on the harms or AI surveillance, I will never agree that AI is beneficial, and there is a net negative outcome using AI. For example electricity prices, carbon release, hallucinations, cognitive decay...they all outweigh what benefit AI brings, which still is not clear. Like nuclear fission, AI should never have been developed.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      As well as crypto.
- martin-t 1y ago
  LLM providers should only be allowed to train on data in public domain or their models and outputs should interior the license of the training data. And people should own all data about themselves, all rights reserved. It's ironic copyright is the law that protects against this kind of abuse. And this is of course why big "AI" companies are trying to weaken it by arguing models training is not derivative work. Or by claiming that writing a prompt in 2 minutes is enough creative work to own copyright of the output despite the model being based on 10^12 hours of human work, give or take a few orders of magnitude.
  - j45 1y ago
    Makes sense, have to deal with the cat being out of the bag though. The groups that didn't train on public domain content would have an advantage if it's implemented as a rule moving forward at least for some time. New models following this could create a gap. I'm sure competition as has been seen from open-source models will be able to
    - martin-t 1y ago
      It's simple, the current models and their usage is copyright infringement. Just because everyone is doing it doesn't meant it's right or legal. Only that a lot of very rich companies deserve to get punished and pay the creators.
      - j45 1y ago
        I was referring to the issue of the new models having to train different than the original ones. Not arguing, debating about the legality of what the models have done. Anthropic just paid a settlement. But they also bought a ton of book and scanned them, which might be more than other models. Maybe it's a sign of things to come.
        martin-t 1y ago
        $3000 per book is laughable given they can then use the book as much as they want and if they build a good enough model, it'll completely obviate the need for the book. Copyright designed at a time when reproducing work in way which was not verbatim and not obviously modified to avoid detection (like synonym replacement) would require a lot of human work and be too costly to be done. Now it's automated. It fundamentally changes everything. Human work is what's to be rewarded, according to the amount of quality.
zvmaz 1y ago
The problem is, we have to take the word of companies for our privacy.
tantalor 1y ago
This is an argument against chatbots in general, not just surveillance.
- beepbooptheory 1y ago
  Doesn't seem the case because they do end up advertising the duckduckgo chatbot as a safe alternative.
  - gdulli 1y ago
    Puffery isn't evidence for or against anything.
  - quectophoton 1y ago
    They mention that they're "demonstrating that privacy-respecting AI services are feasible", knowing their duck.ai is sending the prompts to other AI services, and then in the same paragraph they mention leaks and hacks. To their credit, their privacy policy says they have agreements on how the upstream services can use that info[1]: > As noted above, we call model providers on your behalf so your personal information (for example, IP address) is not exposed to them. In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests, including not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models, as well as deleting all information received once it is no longer necessary to provide Outputs (at most within 30 days, with limited exceptions for safety and legal compliance). But even assuming the upstream services actually respect the agreement, their own privacy policy implies that your prompts and the responses could still be leaked because they could technically be stored for up to 30 days, or for an unspecified amount of time in the case of the exceptions mentioned. I mean, it's reasonable and a good start to move in the direction of better privacy, way better than nothing. Just have to keep those details in mind. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/duckai/privacy-terms https://duckduckgo.com/duckai/privacy-terms
0x696C6961 1y ago
AI makes large scale retroactive thought policing practical. This is terrifying.
- j45 1y ago
  Like search histories but far more.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- apples_oranges 1y ago
  I think people will come to the conclusion that they don’t want to post anything online. Private chats, if they exist, will stay but already, if you generate a work of art, you donate it more or less to the shareholders of Google or Meta. This is even before the thought policing and similar implications.
  - dude250711 1y ago
    "...post anything online..." you probably mean "express true thoughts or emotions externally in a proximity of an electronic device".
- tim333 1y ago
  Roko's basilisk is on it's way.
  - sterlind 1y ago
    I'm not worried about the Basilisk, I'm worried about the AI researchers who believe they're being blackmailed by the Basilisk into creating it. ...hm. maybe I am worried about the Basilisk, then.
- sherburt3 1y ago
  I would argue that's been happening for a long time with much simpler methods. Take this website for example, I get points for posting comments that people upvote. If I post a comment that people don't like, I will get downvoted. I obviously want more points because... so I naturally work to craft the comment that I believe will net the most upvotes. This isn't 100% terrible because this helps weed out the assholes, but I think it has much more insidious effects. Feel free to call me an accelerationist but I hope AI makes social media so awful that no one wants to use it anymore. My hope is that AI is the cleansing fire that burns down social media so that we can rebuild on fertile soil.
alphazard 1y ago
I expect we will continue to see the big AI companies pushing for privacy protections. Sam Altman made a comparison to attorney-client privilege in an interview. There is a significant hold out to using these things as fully trusted personal assistants or personal knowledge bases because of the lack of privacy. The only real solution is locally running models, but that goes against the business model. So instead they will seek regulation to create privacy by fiat. Fiat privacy still has all the same problems as telling your therapist that you killed someone, or keeping your wallet keys printed out on paper in a safe. It's dependent on regulations and definitions of greater good that you can't control.
- dataviz1000 1y ago
  > but that goes against the business model. Not if you are selling hardware. If I was Apple, Dell, or Lenovo, I would be pushing for local running models supporting Hugging Face while I full speed developed systems that can do inference locally.
  - utyop22 1y ago
    Apple will eventually figure it out. Remember the iPhone took 5 years to develop - they don’t rush this stuff.
  - Wowfunhappy 1y ago
    Notably, Apple is pushing for local models, albeit not open ones and with very limited success.
  - alphazard 1y ago
    Local models do make a lot of sense (especially for Apple), but it's tough to figure out a business model that would cause a company like OpenAI to distribute weights they worked so hard to train. Getting customers to pay for the weights would be entirely dependent on copyright law, which OpenAI already has a complicated relationship with. Quite the needle to thread: it's okay for us to ingest and regurgitate data with total disregard for how it's licensed, but under no circumstances can anyone share these weights.
ankit219 1y ago
> your particular persuasive triggers through chatbot memory features, where they train and fine-tune based on your past conversations Represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how training works or can work. Memory is more to do with retrieval. Finetuning on those memories would not be useful given the data is going to be minuscule to affect the probablity distribution in the right way. While everyone is for privacy (and thats what makes these arguments hard to refute), this is clearly about using privacy as a way to argue against using conversational interfaces. Not just that, it's using the same playbook to use privacy as a marketing tactic. The argument starts from highly persuasive nature of chatbots, to somehow privacy preserving chatbots from DDG wont do it, to being safe with hackers stealing your info elsewhere and not on DDG. And then asking for regulation.
pessimizer 1y ago
This is silly, and there's no time. We can't even ban illegal surveillance i.e. we can write whatever we want into the law, and the law will simply be ignored. The next politician to come in will retroactively pardon everyone involved, and will create legislation or hand down an executive order that creates a "due process" in order to do the illegal act in the future, making it now a legal act. The people who voted the politician in celebrate their victory over the old evil, lawbreaking politician, who is on a yacht somewhere with one of the billionaires who he really works for. Rinse and repeat. Eric Holder assured us that "due process" simply refers to any process that they do, and can take place entirely within one's mind. And we think we can ban somebody from doing something that they can do with a computer connected to a bunch of thick internet pipes, without telling anyone. That's libs for you. Still believe in the magic of these garbage institutions, even when they're headed by a game show host and wrestling valet who's famous because he was good at getting his name in the NY Daily News and the NY Post 40 years ago. He is no less legitimate than all of you clowns. The only reason Weinberg has a voice is because he's rich, too.
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  You're right on all points, but it's easy to come to such a conclusion. The harder, and more rewarding path, is to organize with others and figure out what can be done even if it seems hard or impossible, because standing around observing our rapid decline isn't good for anyone. If the government is failing, explore writing civil software, providing people protected forms of communication or modern spaces where they can safely organize and learn, eventually the current generations die and a new, strongly connected culture has another chance to try and fix things. This is why so many are balkanizing the internet age gating, they see the threat of the next few digitally-augmented generations.
cousin_it 1y ago
This is a great point. Everyone who has talked with chatbots at all: please note that all contents of your past conversations with chatbots (that already exist now, and that you can't meaningfully delete!) could be used in the future to target ads to you, manipulate you financially and politically, and sell "personalized influence on you specifically" as a service to the highest bidder. Just wanted to make sure y'all understand that. EDIT: I want to add that "training on chat logs" isn't even the issue. In fact it understates the danger. It's better to imagine things like this: when a future ad-bot or influence-bot talks to you, it will receive your past chatlogs with other bots as context, useful to know what'll work on you or not. EDIT 2: And your chatlogs with other people I guess, if they happened on a platform that stored them and later got desperate enough to sell them. This is just getting worse and worse as I think about it.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  Or literally read out in court if you discuss anything relevant to a legal case.
- hkon 1y ago
  For me, what is most scary about ai-chatbot is the interface to an exploiter. They can just prompt "given all your chats with this person, how can we manipulate him to do x" Not really any expertise needed at all, let the AI to all the lifting.
  - bethekidyouwant 1y ago
    I can see how this would work if you just turned off your brain and just thought of course this will work
    - lordhumphrey 1y ago
      I take it you haven't seen this then: https://cybersecuritynews.com/fraudgpt-new-black-hat-ai-tool/ https://cybersecuritynews.com/fraudgpt-new-black-hat-ai-tool...
rsyring 1y ago
IMO: make all the laws you want. They generally won't be enforced and, if they are, it will take 5-10 years to make it's way through the courts. At best, the fines will be huge and yet account for maybe 10% of the revenue generated by violating the law. The incentives are all wrong. I'm fundamentally a capitalist because I don't know another system that will work better. But, there really is just too much concentrated wealth in these orgs. Our legal and cultural constructs are not designed in a way that such disparity can be put in check. The populace responds by wanting ever more powerful leaders to "make things right" and you get someone like Trump at best and it goes downhill from there. Make the laws, it will help, a little, maybe. But I think something more profound needs to happen for these things to be truly fixed. I, admittedly, have no idea what that is.
- martin-t 1y ago
  The law really should be "if you cause harm to others you will receive 2x greater harm done to you". And "if you profit from harming others, you will compensate them by 2x of what you gained". Instead of the current maze of case specific laws. --- > But I think something more profound needs to happen for these things to be truly fixed. I, admittedly, have no idea what that is. You know, you're just unwilling to think it because you've been conditioned not to. It's what always happens when inequality (of income, power, etc.) gets too high.
  - ddq 1y ago
    Yes, only 3x rather than 2x. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treble_damages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treble_damages
    - martin-t 1y ago
      Y'know, I used to say 1.5-2x, now I lean towards 2x but 3x is actually fine by me too. And for any kind of financial crimes, this should also be divided by the probability of getting caught and convicted.
- rightbyte 1y ago
Lerc 1y ago
I think much of the philosophical discussion on the pertinent issues here have been discussed at length in the context of Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. In essence, there is a general consensus on the conduct concerting trusted advisors. They should act in the interest of their client. Privacy protections exist to enable individuals to be able to provide their advisors the context required to give good advice without fear of disclosure to others. I think AI needs recognition as a similarly protected class. AI actions should be considered to be acting for a Client (or some other specifically defined term to denote who they are advising). Any information shared with the AI by the client should be considered privileged. If the Client shares the information to others, the privilege is lost. It should be illegal to configure an an AI to deliberately act against the interests of their Client. It should be illegal to configure an AI to claim that their Client is someone other than who it is (it may refuse to disclose, it may not misrepresent). Any information shared with an AI misrepresenting itself as the representative of the Client must have protections against disclosure or evidential use. There should be no penalty to refusing to provide information to an AI that does not disclose who its Client is. I have a bunch of other principles floating around in my head around AI but those are the ones regarding privacy and being able to communicate candidly with an AI. Some of the others are along the lines of It should be disclosed(of the nutritional information type of disclosure) when an AI makes a determination regarding a person. There should be a set of circumstances where, if an AI makes a determination regarding a person, that person is provided with means to contest the determination. A lot of the ideas would be good practice if they went beyond AI, but are more required in the case of AI because of the potential for mass deployment without oversight.
olyellybelly 1y ago
The hype industry around AI is making too much money for governments to do anything about it that's actually needed.
- testfrequency 1y ago
  Especially in the US right now where they are doing whatever it takes to be #1 in ~anything, ethical or not. It’s pure bragging rights and power, anything goes - profit is just the byproduct.
  - mark_l_watson 1y ago
    #1, likely not now: Most of my close friends are non-technical and expect me to be a cheerleader fir USA AI efforts. They were surprised when I started mentioning the recent Stanford study that 80% of US startups are using Chinese models. I would like us to win but we seem too hype focused and not engineering and practical applications focused.
    - testfrequency 1y ago
      I agree
    - BLKNSLVR 1y ago
      First they came for climate science, but I said nothing because I was not a climate scientist. Then they came for medical science, but I said nothing because I was not a doctor. Then they came for specialists and subject matter experts, and I said nothing because I was an influencer and wanted the management position.
- hungmung 1y ago
  America is in love with privatized surveillance, it helps get around that pesky Constitution that prohibits unwarranted search and seizure. "Wipeth thine ass with what is written" should be engraved above the doorway of the National Constitution Center.
- antegamisou 1y ago
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
Cool, but they're shoving AI into their products and trying to profit from the surveillance etc. that went into building that technology so this just comes across as virtue signaling.
aunty_helen 1y ago
This guy has been know to fold like a bed sheet on principles when it’s convenient for him. > Use our service Nah.
swayvil 1y ago
Surveillance is our overlords's favorite thing. And AI makes it 1000x better. So good luck banning it. Ultimately it's one of those arms races. The culture that surveills its population most intensely wins.
throwaway106382 1y ago
Unless it’s banned worldwide by every country by binding treaty this this will never work. Banning it just in USA leaves you wide open to be defeated by China, Russia, etc…. Like it or not it’s a mutually assured destruction arms race. AI is the new nuclear bomb.
- martin-t 1y ago
  While real nukes still work. What bad thing exactly happens if China wins? What does winning even mean? They can't invade because nukes. Can they manipulate elections? Yes, so we'll do the opposite of the great firewall and block them from the internet. Block their citizens from entering physically, too. We should be doing this anyway, given China is known to force them to spy for them.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    If China gets to ASI first, the nukes won't matter.
    - UncleMeat 1y ago
      "Don't worry, things will be good if the amoral megacorporations and ascendant fascist government in the US gets there first" is not my idea of a good time.
    - martin-t 1y ago
      ASI doesn't change physics. Perun has a very good explanation why defending against nukes is impossible to do economically compared to just having more nukes and mutually assured destruction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpFhNXecrb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpFhNXecrb4
      - fragmede 1y ago
        Who said anything about economically?
yupyupyups 1y ago
Wrong. Excessive data collection should be banned.
- quectophoton 1y ago
  But this is not excessive, it's Legitimate Interest and absolutely needed to provide a good service /s
sacul 1y ago
I think the biggest problem with chatbots is the constant effort to anthropomorphize them. Even seasoned software developers who know better fall into acting like they are interacting with a human. But a llm is not a human, and I think OpenAI and all the others should make it clear that you are NOT talking to a human. Repeatedly. I think if society were trained to treat AI as NOT human, things would be better.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  Yeah I’ve loved seeing people call them clankers and stuff for that reason.
- mejutoco 1y ago
  > I think if society were trained to treat AI as NOT human, things would be better. Could you elaborate on why? I am curious but there is no argument.
  - sacul 1y ago
    Yeah, thanks for asking. My reasoning is this: That chatbot you're interacting with is not your friend. I take it as a fact (assumption? axiom?) that it can never be your friend. A friend is a human - animals, in some sense, can be friends - who has your best interests at heart. But in fact, that chatbot "is" a megacorp whose interests certainly aren't your interests - often, their interests are at odds with your interests. Google works hard with branding and marketing to make people feel good about using their products. But, at the end of the day, it's reasonably easy to recognize that when you use their products, you are interacting with a megacorp. Chatbots blur that line, and there is a huge incentive for the megacorps to make me feel like I'm interacting with a safe, trusted "friend" or even mentor. But... I'm not. In the end, it will always be me interacting with Microsoft or OpenAI or Google or whoever. There are laws, and then there is culture. The laws for AI and surveillance capitalism need to be in place, and we need lawmakers who are informed and who are advocates for the regular people who need to be protected. But we also need to shift culture around technology use. Just like social customs have come in that put guard rails around smartphone usage, we need to establish social customs around AI. AI is a super helpful tool, but it should never be treated as a human friend. It might trick us into thinking that its a friend, but it can never be or become a friend.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
I stopped using Facebook because I saw a video of a little Australian girl maybe 7 years old age wise holding a spider bigger than her face in her hand. I wrote the most internet meme comment I could think of “girl let go of that spider, we gotta set the house on fire” hit the button to post, only it did not post, it gave me an account strike. At the time I was the only developer at my employer who managed our Facebook app integration, so I appealed it, but another AI immediately denied my appeal, or maybe a really fast human idk but they sure didnt know meme culture. I outrifht stopped using Facebook. We are doomed if AI is allowed to punish us.
- philipallstar 1y ago
  Maybe it banned you because you used a comma splice[0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice
  - mmaunder 1y ago
    Burn the witch.
  - gcanyon 1y ago
    damn, you smoked them, please stop, they've had enough, don't be so, cruel
    - andrewflnr 1y ago
      > don't be so, cruel We've got the real criminal right here.
  - drzaiusx11 1y ago
    The song 'word crimes' (Weird Al) immediately comes to mind https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc
- iammrpayments 1y ago
  The way facebook uses automation to manage their products is a disgrace, they can’t even manage to keep themselves automatically banning a lawyer who happens to be called Mark Zuckerberg: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-zuckerberg-lawsuit-impersonation_n_68bb000fe4b0acb9ffebbd05 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-zuckerberg-lawsuit-imper... If you advertise on facebook you’re almost guarantee to have your ad account restricted for no apparent reason and no human being to appeal to, even if you spend big money. It’s so bad that is common knowledge that you should start a fan page, post random stuff and buy page likes for 5-7 days before you start advertising, otherwise their system will just flag your account.
woadwarrior01 1y ago
Contrary to their privacy-washing marketing, DuckDuckGo serves cloaked Bing ads URLs with plenty of tracking parameters. Is that sort of surveillance fine? https://imgur.com/a/Z4cAJU0 https://imgur.com/a/Z4cAJU0
lordhumphrey 1y ago
The worker-drones powering the software world have so far resolutely not managed to reflect on their primary role in implementing the dystopian technological landscape we live in today, when it comes to privacy. Or they have and they simply don't care, or they feel they can't change anything anyway, or the pay-check is enough to soothe any unease. The net result is the same. Snowden's revelations happened 12 years ago, and there were plenty of what appeared to be well-intentioned articles and discussions in the years that followed. And yet, arguably, things are even worse today.
furyofantares 1y ago
I'm really impressed with how menacing Facebook feels in the cartoon on the left. And then a massive Google lurking in the background is excellent, although it being a silhouette of The Iron Giant takes a lot away from it for me. The ChatGPT translation on the right is a total nothingburger, it loses all feeling.
citizenpaul 1y ago
Lets not forget that Gabereial Weinburg is a two faced ghoul or wolf in sheep clothing. He has literally said he does not believe people need privacy yet that supposedly is the duckduckgo's main selling point. He has made all kinds of tracking deals with other companies so duckduckgo "is not tracking you" just their partners are. Most of the controversial stuff he has done is being whitewashed from the internet and is now hard to find.
- kogasa240p 1y ago
  Interesting find, wasn't he selling info to Microsoft?
  - doitLP 1y ago
    This is baseless with no references or citations. What possible incentive would he have for sounding this alarm and urging congress to act when he could be using the data he secretly is collecting for his own gain when all the AI companies are doing it openly for obvious gain
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - reaperducer 1y ago
    Interesting find, wasn't he selling info to Microsoft? It's not a find. It's an allegation. HN is supposed to be better than that.
- hsartoris 1y ago
  This is a pretty serious allegation, but cursory searching didn’t yield anything. Do you have any sources you can point to? Being as it’s very difficult to actually ‘whitewash’ things from the internet, I would expect there is something to point to. Thanks!
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
FollowingTheDao 1y ago
I cannot understate how afraid I am of the use of AI Surveillance. The worst thing is there is nothing you can do about it. It does not matter how private I am online, if the person I am sending things to is not privacy conscious and, say, uses AI to summarize emails, then I am in the AI database. And then there is just the day to day data being scraped, like bank records, etc. I mean a PARKING LOT in my town is using AI cameras to track and bill people in a parking lot! The people of my town are putting pressure on the parking lot owner to get rid of it but apparently the company is paying him too much money for having it in his lot. Like the old video says "Don't talk to the Police" [1], but now we have to expand it to say "Don't Do Anything", because everything you do is being fed into a database that can possibly be searched. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
dyauspitr 1y ago
You through enough identifiers into the mix and even low level employees will be able to get a summary of your entire past in seconds. It’s a terrifying world and I feel bad for gen z and beyond.
bubblebeard 1y ago
While I cannot see a way to effectively stop companies from collecting data from you (aside from avoiding practically everything), that doesn’t mean we should do nothing. DuckDuckGo aren’t perfect, but I think they do a lot to all our benefit. Theirs have been my search engine of choice for many years and will continue being so. Shout outs to their amazing team!
jmort 1y ago
I think a technical solution is necessary, rather than a legal/regulatory one
catigula 1y ago
I think this type of AI doomsday hypothesis rubs me the wrong way because it's almost quaint. Merely being surveilled and marketed at is a fairly pedestrian application from the rolodex of AI related epistemic horrors.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bArray 1y ago
Protected chats? The ship already sailed, text messages via the phone network are already MITM'd since a very long time. Even in real life, the police in the UK now deploy active face recognition and makes tonnes of arrests based on it (sometimes wrongly). Shops are now looking to deploy active face recognition to detect shoplifters (although it's unclear legally what they will actually do about it). The UK can compel any person commuting through the UK to give over their passwords and devices - you have no right to appeal. Refusing to hand over the password can get you arrested under the Terrorist Act, where they can hold you indefinitely. When arrested under any terrorism offence you also have not right to legal representation. The days of privacy sailed unnoticed.
- 8bitsrule 1y ago
  No devices, no passwords were ever required of any of us (yet). We deliberately walked into this, we can walk right back out again. Will we have to make do with less? (Did we really need it anyway?) While I owned a cellphone, I never left the house with it. While using it, my location was always known. None of this is terribly new. For decades our names and addresses were collected in telephone books (along with our numbers) that were given away to everyone. Telecorp doxxing. That too was involuntary. The company whose buses I carded into (instead of paying cash) knew where I got on and got off. Once you get tuned into these 'services', you are in a position to limit their accuracy. That skill can be refined. We don't have to become predictable.
  - pixxel 1y ago
    [dead]
whyenot 1y ago
It seems highly unlikely to me that it will be banned by congress in the next few years, if ever. So, what we really should be asking is how do we live in a world of pervasive surveillance, where everything we do and say is being recorded, saved, analyzed, and potentially used to manipulate us. As I write this, sitting in Peet's Coffee in downtown Los Altos, I count three different cameras recording me, and I'm using their public wifi which I assuming is also being used to track me. That's the world we have now.
- trod1234 1y ago
  When you say pervasive, WIFI and Cameras aren't that pervasive. What actually is is quite a bit worse than this. For example, The WIFI signals can uniquely identify every single heartbeat in realtime within a certain range of the AP, multiple linked access points increase this range up to a mile. The radio devices you carry around with you unknowingly beacon at set intervals tracking your location just like an animal on a tracking collar. This includes the minute RFID chips sewn into your clothing and fabrics. The phones don't turn off their radios when in airplane mode. Your vehicle had at least 3 different layers that uniquely beacon a set of identifiable characteristics to anyone with a passive radio. OBD-II uplink, TPMS sensors (one for each wheel), and Telematics. Home Depot in cooperation with Flock, has without disclosure captured your biometrics, and tracked your minute movements and put that up for sale to the highest bidder through subscription based profiling. Ultrasonic beacons are emitted from your phone to associate geographically local devices to individual people. All visible to anyone with a SDR, manipulable by those with a Flipper0, and treated as distinct sources of truth in a layered approach. All aspects of social interaction with the wider world have now been replaced with a surrogate that runs through a few set centralized points that can be turned off/degraded to drive anyone they wish into poverty with no visible indicator, or alternative. Imagine you are a job seeker, the AI social credit algorithm they've developed to target wealthy people on one side, and to torture/make people better incorrectly identifies you as a subversive, and so they not only degrade your existing services but isolate all your communications from everyone else intermittently through failure following a statistical approach similar to Turing during WW2. Imagine the difficulty of finding work in any specialized field which you have experience for, where you can never receive those callbacks because they are inherently interrupt driven; and interrupt driven calls are jammed without your ability to recognize the jamming. Such communications are vulnerable to erasure. Should any system ever exist whose sole purpose or impact has become to prevent a arbitrary target through interference from finding legitimate work, or other aspects to feed themselves or exercise their existential rights. In effect such a system of control silently makes these people into slaves without recourse, or informed disclosure. It fundamentally violates their human rights and "these systems exist". Failure of government to timely uphold the social contract promises and specifics of the constitution becomes after-the-fact purposeful intent through the gross negligence and failure to uphold their constitutional oaths. History has shown that repeatedly if the civilization survives at all, it repeatedly reforms itself through violence. Something no good person wants, but given the narrowing of agency and choice to affect the future; it is the only alternative when the cliff of existential exctinction is present (whether people realize that or not).
drnick1 1y ago
The dude is against "surveillance," but his blog has dependencies (makes third party requests) to Cloudflare, Google, and others. Laughable.
gcanyon 1y ago
Is there anyone who has a credible take on how we avoid an effectively zero-privacy future? AI can identify people by their walk, no facial recognition required, and now technology can detect heartbeats through variations in wifi signals. It seems guaranteed we are heading for a future where someone knows everything. The only choice is whether it's a select few, or everyone. The latter seems clearly preferable.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- pilingual 1y ago
  Legislation or, my favorite, market forces.
  - BLKNSLVR 1y ago
    "Market forces" is in serious decline as a leveller at this point in history, especially around products of interest to power or those producing outsized profits. Or maybe it never was and this fact is just becoming more transparent.
    - cowboylowrez 1y ago
      market forces are even slower than government regulations at making corrections in the market.
BLKNSLVR 1y ago
From reading the comments I'm getting vibes similar to Altered Carbon's[0] AI hotels that no one uses. The opposite of "if you build it they will come". (The difference being the AIs in the book were incredibly needy, wanting too much to please the customer to the point of annoyance, which is a heavy contrast against the current reality of the AI working to appease the parent organisation) [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon
deleted 1y ago
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gblargg 1y ago
As long as the first ones to be surveilled are the companies that make it (including their employees) and all politicians who vote for it. We need to be able to access all the data the AI gathers from these groups.
EchoReflection 1y ago
we're fooling ourselves if we think there's "still time". AI surveillance is just too powerful and valuable for companies/governments to NOT use it. It's just like saying "ok let's all agree to not increase our power and capabilities". Nobody thinks humanity would collectively agree to that, and for good reason (unfortunately).
deleted 1y ago
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pjjpo 1y ago
AFAIK there isn't currently any surveillance on search - searching for how to make a bomb does not lead to police at your doorstep the next day. But the police raid after a mass shooting generally brings up plenty of similar searches. Maybe it could be good to have some integrations between this data and law enforcement to reduce leading to tragedy? Maybe start not with crime but suicide - I think a search result telling you to call this number if you are feeling bad saves far less lives than a feed into social workers potentially could. Just a thought, and this isn't have a computer sentence someone to prison but providing data to people to in the end make informed decisions to try to prevent tragedy. Privacy is important to a degree but treating it as absolute seems to waste potential to save lives.
metalman 1y ago
Lets bring on the Pan Opticapocolypse, (heh ,heh) dispense with the could's ,should's, ethafuckicks,and get it over with, now
scubadude 1y ago
Isn't this pretty much the main reason AI is being pushed so hard?

602 points by mustaphah 1y ago

If the author sees this…could you go one step further, what policy specifically do you recommend? It seems like having LLM providers not train on user data is a big part of it. But is using traditional ML models to do keyword analysis considered “AI” or “surveillance”? The author…and this community in general…are much more prepared to make full recommendations about what AI surveillance policy should be. We should be super clear to try to enact good regulation without killing innovation in the process.

slt2021 1y ago
the law could be as simple as requiring to blur faces and body silhouettes of all people inside each camera, prior to any further processing in the cloud, ensuring privacy of the CCTV footage.
beepbooptheory 1y ago
From the TFA: > That’s why we (at DuckDuckGo) started offering Duck.ai for protected chatbot conversations and optional, anonymous AI-assisted answers in our private search engine. In doing so, we’re demonstrating that privacy-respecting AI services are feasible. I don't know if its a great idea, or just I wonder what does make it feasible, but there is a kind of implied recommendation here. By "killing innovation" do you just mean: "we need to allow these companies to make money in possibly a predatory way, so they have the money to do... something else"? Or what is the precise concern here? What facet needs to be innovated upon?
- iambateman 1y ago
  The country who most effectively deploys AI models has a big advantage over countries who bury their head in the sand. I believe that LLM’s will have the capability to fill in for human workers in many important ways. It’s like getting an economic infusion without the associated population growth required. But we aren’t there yet, so innovation looks like continuing to build out how to efficiently use AI tools. Not necessarily better models, but longer memory, more critical reasoning, etc. At the same time…there are winner-take-all dynamics and possibility to weaponize that are not good for society in the long-term. So we need to both encourage innovation while making sure we don’t kill each other in the process.
yegg 1y ago
Thanks (author here). I am working on a follow-up post (and likely posts) with specific recommendations.
- FollowingTheDao 1y ago
  While I agree with your take on the harms or AI surveillance, I will never agree that AI is beneficial, and there is a net negative outcome using AI. For example electricity prices, carbon release, hallucinations, cognitive decay...they all outweigh what benefit AI brings, which still is not clear. Like nuclear fission, AI should never have been developed.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    As well as crypto.
martin-t 1y ago
LLM providers should only be allowed to train on data in public domain or their models and outputs should interior the license of the training data. And people should own all data about themselves, all rights reserved. It's ironic copyright is the law that protects against this kind of abuse. And this is of course why big "AI" companies are trying to weaken it by arguing models training is not derivative work. Or by claiming that writing a prompt in 2 minutes is enough creative work to own copyright of the output despite the model being based on 10^12 hours of human work, give or take a few orders of magnitude.
- j45 1y ago
  Makes sense, have to deal with the cat being out of the bag though. The groups that didn't train on public domain content would have an advantage if it's implemented as a rule moving forward at least for some time. New models following this could create a gap. I'm sure competition as has been seen from open-source models will be able to
  - martin-t 1y ago
    It's simple, the current models and their usage is copyright infringement. Just because everyone is doing it doesn't meant it's right or legal. Only that a lot of very rich companies deserve to get punished and pay the creators.
    - j45 1y ago
      I was referring to the issue of the new models having to train different than the original ones. Not arguing, debating about the legality of what the models have done. Anthropic just paid a settlement. But they also bought a ton of book and scanned them, which might be more than other models. Maybe it's a sign of things to come.
      - martin-t 1y ago
        $3000 per book is laughable given they can then use the book as much as they want and if they build a good enough model, it'll completely obviate the need for the book. Copyright designed at a time when reproducing work in way which was not verbatim and not obviously modified to avoid detection (like synonym replacement) would require a lot of human work and be too costly to be done. Now it's automated. It fundamentally changes everything. Human work is what's to be rewarded, according to the amount of quality.

zvmaz 1y ago

The problem is, we have to take the word of companies for our privacy.

tantalor 1y ago

This is an argument against chatbots in general, not just surveillance.

beepbooptheory 1y ago
Doesn't seem the case because they do end up advertising the duckduckgo chatbot as a safe alternative.
- gdulli 1y ago
  Puffery isn't evidence for or against anything.
- quectophoton 1y ago
  They mention that they're "demonstrating that privacy-respecting AI services are feasible", knowing their duck.ai is sending the prompts to other AI services, and then in the same paragraph they mention leaks and hacks. To their credit, their privacy policy says they have agreements on how the upstream services can use that info[1]: > As noted above, we call model providers on your behalf so your personal information (for example, IP address) is not exposed to them. In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests, including not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models, as well as deleting all information received once it is no longer necessary to provide Outputs (at most within 30 days, with limited exceptions for safety and legal compliance). But even assuming the upstream services actually respect the agreement, their own privacy policy implies that your prompts and the responses could still be leaked because they could technically be stored for up to 30 days, or for an unspecified amount of time in the case of the exceptions mentioned. I mean, it's reasonable and a good start to move in the direction of better privacy, way better than nothing. Just have to keep those details in mind. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/duckai/privacy-terms https://duckduckgo.com/duckai/privacy-terms

0x696C6961 1y ago

AI makes large scale retroactive thought policing practical. This is terrifying.

j45 1y ago
Like search histories but far more.
deleted 1y ago
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apples_oranges 1y ago
I think people will come to the conclusion that they don’t want to post anything online. Private chats, if they exist, will stay but already, if you generate a work of art, you donate it more or less to the shareholders of Google or Meta. This is even before the thought policing and similar implications.
- dude250711 1y ago
  "...post anything online..." you probably mean "express true thoughts or emotions externally in a proximity of an electronic device".
tim333 1y ago
Roko's basilisk is on it's way.
- sterlind 1y ago
  I'm not worried about the Basilisk, I'm worried about the AI researchers who believe they're being blackmailed by the Basilisk into creating it. ...hm. maybe I am worried about the Basilisk, then.
sherburt3 1y ago
I would argue that's been happening for a long time with much simpler methods. Take this website for example, I get points for posting comments that people upvote. If I post a comment that people don't like, I will get downvoted. I obviously want more points because... so I naturally work to craft the comment that I believe will net the most upvotes. This isn't 100% terrible because this helps weed out the assholes, but I think it has much more insidious effects. Feel free to call me an accelerationist but I hope AI makes social media so awful that no one wants to use it anymore. My hope is that AI is the cleansing fire that burns down social media so that we can rebuild on fertile soil.

alphazard 1y ago

I expect we will continue to see the big AI companies pushing for privacy protections. Sam Altman made a comparison to attorney-client privilege in an interview. There is a significant hold out to using these things as fully trusted personal assistants or personal knowledge bases because of the lack of privacy. The only real solution is locally running models, but that goes against the business model. So instead they will seek regulation to create privacy by fiat. Fiat privacy still has all the same problems as telling your therapist that you killed someone, or keeping your wallet keys printed out on paper in a safe. It's dependent on regulations and definitions of greater good that you can't control.

dataviz1000 1y ago
> but that goes against the business model. Not if you are selling hardware. If I was Apple, Dell, or Lenovo, I would be pushing for local running models supporting Hugging Face while I full speed developed systems that can do inference locally.
- utyop22 1y ago
  Apple will eventually figure it out. Remember the iPhone took 5 years to develop - they don’t rush this stuff.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  Notably, Apple is pushing for local models, albeit not open ones and with very limited success.
- alphazard 1y ago
  Local models do make a lot of sense (especially for Apple), but it's tough to figure out a business model that would cause a company like OpenAI to distribute weights they worked so hard to train. Getting customers to pay for the weights would be entirely dependent on copyright law, which OpenAI already has a complicated relationship with. Quite the needle to thread: it's okay for us to ingest and regurgitate data with total disregard for how it's licensed, but under no circumstances can anyone share these weights.

ankit219 1y ago

> your particular persuasive triggers through chatbot memory features, where they train and fine-tune based on your past conversations Represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how training works or can work. Memory is more to do with retrieval. Finetuning on those memories would not be useful given the data is going to be minuscule to affect the probablity distribution in the right way. While everyone is for privacy (and thats what makes these arguments hard to refute), this is clearly about using privacy as a way to argue against using conversational interfaces. Not just that, it's using the same playbook to use privacy as a marketing tactic. The argument starts from highly persuasive nature of chatbots, to somehow privacy preserving chatbots from DDG wont do it, to being safe with hackers stealing your info elsewhere and not on DDG. And then asking for regulation.

pessimizer 1y ago

This is silly, and there's no time. We can't even ban illegal surveillance i.e. we can write whatever we want into the law, and the law will simply be ignored. The next politician to come in will retroactively pardon everyone involved, and will create legislation or hand down an executive order that creates a "due process" in order to do the illegal act in the future, making it now a legal act. The people who voted the politician in celebrate their victory over the old evil, lawbreaking politician, who is on a yacht somewhere with one of the billionaires who he really works for. Rinse and repeat. Eric Holder assured us that "due process" simply refers to any process that they do, and can take place entirely within one's mind. And we think we can ban somebody from doing something that they can do with a computer connected to a bunch of thick internet pipes, without telling anyone. That's libs for you. Still believe in the magic of these garbage institutions, even when they're headed by a game show host and wrestling valet who's famous because he was good at getting his name in the NY Daily News and the NY Post 40 years ago. He is no less legitimate than all of you clowns. The only reason Weinberg has a voice is because he's rich, too.

soulofmischief 1y ago
You're right on all points, but it's easy to come to such a conclusion. The harder, and more rewarding path, is to organize with others and figure out what can be done even if it seems hard or impossible, because standing around observing our rapid decline isn't good for anyone. If the government is failing, explore writing civil software, providing people protected forms of communication or modern spaces where they can safely organize and learn, eventually the current generations die and a new, strongly connected culture has another chance to try and fix things. This is why so many are balkanizing the internet age gating, they see the threat of the next few digitally-augmented generations.

cousin_it 1y ago

This is a great point. Everyone who has talked with chatbots at all: please note that all contents of your past conversations with chatbots (that already exist now, and that you can't meaningfully delete!) could be used in the future to target ads to you, manipulate you financially and politically, and sell "personalized influence on you specifically" as a service to the highest bidder. Just wanted to make sure y'all understand that. EDIT: I want to add that "training on chat logs" isn't even the issue. In fact it understates the danger. It's better to imagine things like this: when a future ad-bot or influence-bot talks to you, it will receive your past chatlogs with other bots as context, useful to know what'll work on you or not. EDIT 2: And your chatlogs with other people I guess, if they happened on a platform that stored them and later got desperate enough to sell them. This is just getting worse and worse as I think about it.

HPsquared 1y ago
Or literally read out in court if you discuss anything relevant to a legal case.
hkon 1y ago
For me, what is most scary about ai-chatbot is the interface to an exploiter. They can just prompt "given all your chats with this person, how can we manipulate him to do x" Not really any expertise needed at all, let the AI to all the lifting.
- bethekidyouwant 1y ago
  I can see how this would work if you just turned off your brain and just thought of course this will work
  - lordhumphrey 1y ago
    I take it you haven't seen this then: https://cybersecuritynews.com/fraudgpt-new-black-hat-ai-tool/ https://cybersecuritynews.com/fraudgpt-new-black-hat-ai-tool...

rsyring 1y ago

IMO: make all the laws you want. They generally won't be enforced and, if they are, it will take 5-10 years to make it's way through the courts. At best, the fines will be huge and yet account for maybe 10% of the revenue generated by violating the law. The incentives are all wrong. I'm fundamentally a capitalist because I don't know another system that will work better. But, there really is just too much concentrated wealth in these orgs. Our legal and cultural constructs are not designed in a way that such disparity can be put in check. The populace responds by wanting ever more powerful leaders to "make things right" and you get someone like Trump at best and it goes downhill from there. Make the laws, it will help, a little, maybe. But I think something more profound needs to happen for these things to be truly fixed. I, admittedly, have no idea what that is.

martin-t 1y ago
The law really should be "if you cause harm to others you will receive 2x greater harm done to you". And "if you profit from harming others, you will compensate them by 2x of what you gained". Instead of the current maze of case specific laws. --- > But I think something more profound needs to happen for these things to be truly fixed. I, admittedly, have no idea what that is. You know, you're just unwilling to think it because you've been conditioned not to. It's what always happens when inequality (of income, power, etc.) gets too high.
- ddq 1y ago
  Yes, only 3x rather than 2x. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treble_damages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treble_damages
  - martin-t 1y ago
    Y'know, I used to say 1.5-2x, now I lean towards 2x but 3x is actually fine by me too. And for any kind of financial crimes, this should also be divided by the probability of getting caught and convicted.
rightbyte 1y ago

Lerc 1y ago

I think much of the philosophical discussion on the pertinent issues here have been discussed at length in the context of Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. In essence, there is a general consensus on the conduct concerting trusted advisors. They should act in the interest of their client. Privacy protections exist to enable individuals to be able to provide their advisors the context required to give good advice without fear of disclosure to others. I think AI needs recognition as a similarly protected class. AI actions should be considered to be acting for a Client (or some other specifically defined term to denote who they are advising). Any information shared with the AI by the client should be considered privileged. If the Client shares the information to others, the privilege is lost. It should be illegal to configure an an AI to deliberately act against the interests of their Client. It should be illegal to configure an AI to claim that their Client is someone other than who it is (it may refuse to disclose, it may not misrepresent). Any information shared with an AI misrepresenting itself as the representative of the Client must have protections against disclosure or evidential use. There should be no penalty to refusing to provide information to an AI that does not disclose who its Client is. I have a bunch of other principles floating around in my head around AI but those are the ones regarding privacy and being able to communicate candidly with an AI. Some of the others are along the lines of It should be disclosed(of the nutritional information type of disclosure) when an AI makes a determination regarding a person. There should be a set of circumstances where, if an AI makes a determination regarding a person, that person is provided with means to contest the determination. A lot of the ideas would be good practice if they went beyond AI, but are more required in the case of AI because of the potential for mass deployment without oversight.

olyellybelly 1y ago

The hype industry around AI is making too much money for governments to do anything about it that's actually needed.

testfrequency 1y ago
Especially in the US right now where they are doing whatever it takes to be #1 in ~anything, ethical or not. It’s pure bragging rights and power, anything goes - profit is just the byproduct.
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  #1, likely not now: Most of my close friends are non-technical and expect me to be a cheerleader fir USA AI efforts. They were surprised when I started mentioning the recent Stanford study that 80% of US startups are using Chinese models. I would like us to win but we seem too hype focused and not engineering and practical applications focused.
  - testfrequency 1y ago
    I agree
  - BLKNSLVR 1y ago
    First they came for climate science, but I said nothing because I was not a climate scientist. Then they came for medical science, but I said nothing because I was not a doctor. Then they came for specialists and subject matter experts, and I said nothing because I was an influencer and wanted the management position.
hungmung 1y ago
America is in love with privatized surveillance, it helps get around that pesky Constitution that prohibits unwarranted search and seizure. "Wipeth thine ass with what is written" should be engraved above the doorway of the National Constitution Center.
antegamisou 1y ago

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago

Cool, but they're shoving AI into their products and trying to profit from the surveillance etc. that went into building that technology so this just comes across as virtue signaling.

aunty_helen 1y ago

This guy has been know to fold like a bed sheet on principles when it’s convenient for him. > Use our service Nah.

swayvil 1y ago

Surveillance is our overlords's favorite thing. And AI makes it 1000x better. So good luck banning it. Ultimately it's one of those arms races. The culture that surveills its population most intensely wins.

throwaway106382 1y ago

Unless it’s banned worldwide by every country by binding treaty this this will never work. Banning it just in USA leaves you wide open to be defeated by China, Russia, etc…. Like it or not it’s a mutually assured destruction arms race. AI is the new nuclear bomb.

martin-t 1y ago
While real nukes still work. What bad thing exactly happens if China wins? What does winning even mean? They can't invade because nukes. Can they manipulate elections? Yes, so we'll do the opposite of the great firewall and block them from the internet. Block their citizens from entering physically, too. We should be doing this anyway, given China is known to force them to spy for them.
- fragmede 1y ago
  If China gets to ASI first, the nukes won't matter.
  - UncleMeat 1y ago
    "Don't worry, things will be good if the amoral megacorporations and ascendant fascist government in the US gets there first" is not my idea of a good time.
  - martin-t 1y ago
    ASI doesn't change physics. Perun has a very good explanation why defending against nukes is impossible to do economically compared to just having more nukes and mutually assured destruction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpFhNXecrb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpFhNXecrb4
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Who said anything about economically?

yupyupyups 1y ago

Wrong. Excessive data collection should be banned.

quectophoton 1y ago
But this is not excessive, it's Legitimate Interest and absolutely needed to provide a good service /s

sacul 1y ago

I think the biggest problem with chatbots is the constant effort to anthropomorphize them. Even seasoned software developers who know better fall into acting like they are interacting with a human. But a llm is not a human, and I think OpenAI and all the others should make it clear that you are NOT talking to a human. Repeatedly. I think if society were trained to treat AI as NOT human, things would be better.

BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
Yeah I’ve loved seeing people call them clankers and stuff for that reason.
mejutoco 1y ago
> I think if society were trained to treat AI as NOT human, things would be better. Could you elaborate on why? I am curious but there is no argument.
- sacul 1y ago
  Yeah, thanks for asking. My reasoning is this: That chatbot you're interacting with is not your friend. I take it as a fact (assumption? axiom?) that it can never be your friend. A friend is a human - animals, in some sense, can be friends - who has your best interests at heart. But in fact, that chatbot "is" a megacorp whose interests certainly aren't your interests - often, their interests are at odds with your interests. Google works hard with branding and marketing to make people feel good about using their products. But, at the end of the day, it's reasonably easy to recognize that when you use their products, you are interacting with a megacorp. Chatbots blur that line, and there is a huge incentive for the megacorps to make me feel like I'm interacting with a safe, trusted "friend" or even mentor. But... I'm not. In the end, it will always be me interacting with Microsoft or OpenAI or Google or whoever. There are laws, and then there is culture. The laws for AI and surveillance capitalism need to be in place, and we need lawmakers who are informed and who are advocates for the regular people who need to be protected. But we also need to shift culture around technology use. Just like social customs have come in that put guard rails around smartphone usage, we need to establish social customs around AI. AI is a super helpful tool, but it should never be treated as a human friend. It might trick us into thinking that its a friend, but it can never be or become a friend.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

I stopped using Facebook because I saw a video of a little Australian girl maybe 7 years old age wise holding a spider bigger than her face in her hand. I wrote the most internet meme comment I could think of “girl let go of that spider, we gotta set the house on fire” hit the button to post, only it did not post, it gave me an account strike. At the time I was the only developer at my employer who managed our Facebook app integration, so I appealed it, but another AI immediately denied my appeal, or maybe a really fast human idk but they sure didnt know meme culture. I outrifht stopped using Facebook. We are doomed if AI is allowed to punish us.

philipallstar 1y ago
Maybe it banned you because you used a comma splice[0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice
- mmaunder 1y ago
  Burn the witch.
- gcanyon 1y ago
  damn, you smoked them, please stop, they've had enough, don't be so, cruel
  - andrewflnr 1y ago
    > don't be so, cruel We've got the real criminal right here.
- drzaiusx11 1y ago
  The song 'word crimes' (Weird Al) immediately comes to mind https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc
iammrpayments 1y ago
The way facebook uses automation to manage their products is a disgrace, they can’t even manage to keep themselves automatically banning a lawyer who happens to be called Mark Zuckerberg: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-zuckerberg-lawsuit-impersonation_n_68bb000fe4b0acb9ffebbd05 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-zuckerberg-lawsuit-imper... If you advertise on facebook you’re almost guarantee to have your ad account restricted for no apparent reason and no human being to appeal to, even if you spend big money. It’s so bad that is common knowledge that you should start a fan page, post random stuff and buy page likes for 5-7 days before you start advertising, otherwise their system will just flag your account.

woadwarrior01 1y ago

Contrary to their privacy-washing marketing, DuckDuckGo serves cloaked Bing ads URLs with plenty of tracking parameters. Is that sort of surveillance fine? https://imgur.com/a/Z4cAJU0 https://imgur.com/a/Z4cAJU0

lordhumphrey 1y ago

The worker-drones powering the software world have so far resolutely not managed to reflect on their primary role in implementing the dystopian technological landscape we live in today, when it comes to privacy. Or they have and they simply don't care, or they feel they can't change anything anyway, or the pay-check is enough to soothe any unease. The net result is the same. Snowden's revelations happened 12 years ago, and there were plenty of what appeared to be well-intentioned articles and discussions in the years that followed. And yet, arguably, things are even worse today.

furyofantares 1y ago

I'm really impressed with how menacing Facebook feels in the cartoon on the left. And then a massive Google lurking in the background is excellent, although it being a silhouette of The Iron Giant takes a lot away from it for me. The ChatGPT translation on the right is a total nothingburger, it loses all feeling.

citizenpaul 1y ago

Lets not forget that Gabereial Weinburg is a two faced ghoul or wolf in sheep clothing. He has literally said he does not believe people need privacy yet that supposedly is the duckduckgo's main selling point. He has made all kinds of tracking deals with other companies so duckduckgo "is not tracking you" just their partners are. Most of the controversial stuff he has done is being whitewashed from the internet and is now hard to find.

kogasa240p 1y ago
Interesting find, wasn't he selling info to Microsoft?
- doitLP 1y ago
  This is baseless with no references or citations. What possible incentive would he have for sounding this alarm and urging congress to act when he could be using the data he secretly is collecting for his own gain when all the AI companies are doing it openly for obvious gain
  - deleted 1y ago
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- reaperducer 1y ago
  Interesting find, wasn't he selling info to Microsoft? It's not a find. It's an allegation. HN is supposed to be better than that.
hsartoris 1y ago
This is a pretty serious allegation, but cursory searching didn’t yield anything. Do you have any sources you can point to? Being as it’s very difficult to actually ‘whitewash’ things from the internet, I would expect there is something to point to. Thanks!
- mixmastamyk 1y ago

FollowingTheDao 1y ago

I cannot understate how afraid I am of the use of AI Surveillance. The worst thing is there is nothing you can do about it. It does not matter how private I am online, if the person I am sending things to is not privacy conscious and, say, uses AI to summarize emails, then I am in the AI database. And then there is just the day to day data being scraped, like bank records, etc. I mean a PARKING LOT in my town is using AI cameras to track and bill people in a parking lot! The people of my town are putting pressure on the parking lot owner to get rid of it but apparently the company is paying him too much money for having it in his lot. Like the old video says "Don't talk to the Police" [1], but now we have to expand it to say "Don't Do Anything", because everything you do is being fed into a database that can possibly be searched. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

dyauspitr 1y ago

You through enough identifiers into the mix and even low level employees will be able to get a summary of your entire past in seconds. It’s a terrifying world and I feel bad for gen z and beyond.

bubblebeard 1y ago

While I cannot see a way to effectively stop companies from collecting data from you (aside from avoiding practically everything), that doesn’t mean we should do nothing. DuckDuckGo aren’t perfect, but I think they do a lot to all our benefit. Theirs have been my search engine of choice for many years and will continue being so. Shout outs to their amazing team!

jmort 1y ago

I think a technical solution is necessary, rather than a legal/regulatory one

catigula 1y ago

I think this type of AI doomsday hypothesis rubs me the wrong way because it's almost quaint. Merely being surveilled and marketed at is a fairly pedestrian application from the rolodex of AI related epistemic horrors.

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bArray 1y ago

Protected chats? The ship already sailed, text messages via the phone network are already MITM'd since a very long time. Even in real life, the police in the UK now deploy active face recognition and makes tonnes of arrests based on it (sometimes wrongly). Shops are now looking to deploy active face recognition to detect shoplifters (although it's unclear legally what they will actually do about it). The UK can compel any person commuting through the UK to give over their passwords and devices - you have no right to appeal. Refusing to hand over the password can get you arrested under the Terrorist Act, where they can hold you indefinitely. When arrested under any terrorism offence you also have not right to legal representation. The days of privacy sailed unnoticed.

8bitsrule 1y ago
No devices, no passwords were ever required of any of us (yet). We deliberately walked into this, we can walk right back out again. Will we have to make do with less? (Did we really need it anyway?) While I owned a cellphone, I never left the house with it. While using it, my location was always known. None of this is terribly new. For decades our names and addresses were collected in telephone books (along with our numbers) that were given away to everyone. Telecorp doxxing. That too was involuntary. The company whose buses I carded into (instead of paying cash) knew where I got on and got off. Once you get tuned into these 'services', you are in a position to limit their accuracy. That skill can be refined. We don't have to become predictable.
- pixxel 1y ago
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whyenot 1y ago

It seems highly unlikely to me that it will be banned by congress in the next few years, if ever. So, what we really should be asking is how do we live in a world of pervasive surveillance, where everything we do and say is being recorded, saved, analyzed, and potentially used to manipulate us. As I write this, sitting in Peet's Coffee in downtown Los Altos, I count three different cameras recording me, and I'm using their public wifi which I assuming is also being used to track me. That's the world we have now.

trod1234 1y ago
When you say pervasive, WIFI and Cameras aren't that pervasive. What actually is is quite a bit worse than this. For example, The WIFI signals can uniquely identify every single heartbeat in realtime within a certain range of the AP, multiple linked access points increase this range up to a mile. The radio devices you carry around with you unknowingly beacon at set intervals tracking your location just like an animal on a tracking collar. This includes the minute RFID chips sewn into your clothing and fabrics. The phones don't turn off their radios when in airplane mode. Your vehicle had at least 3 different layers that uniquely beacon a set of identifiable characteristics to anyone with a passive radio. OBD-II uplink, TPMS sensors (one for each wheel), and Telematics. Home Depot in cooperation with Flock, has without disclosure captured your biometrics, and tracked your minute movements and put that up for sale to the highest bidder through subscription based profiling. Ultrasonic beacons are emitted from your phone to associate geographically local devices to individual people. All visible to anyone with a SDR, manipulable by those with a Flipper0, and treated as distinct sources of truth in a layered approach. All aspects of social interaction with the wider world have now been replaced with a surrogate that runs through a few set centralized points that can be turned off/degraded to drive anyone they wish into poverty with no visible indicator, or alternative. Imagine you are a job seeker, the AI social credit algorithm they've developed to target wealthy people on one side, and to torture/make people better incorrectly identifies you as a subversive, and so they not only degrade your existing services but isolate all your communications from everyone else intermittently through failure following a statistical approach similar to Turing during WW2. Imagine the difficulty of finding work in any specialized field which you have experience for, where you can never receive those callbacks because they are inherently interrupt driven; and interrupt driven calls are jammed without your ability to recognize the jamming. Such communications are vulnerable to erasure. Should any system ever exist whose sole purpose or impact has become to prevent a arbitrary target through interference from finding legitimate work, or other aspects to feed themselves or exercise their existential rights. In effect such a system of control silently makes these people into slaves without recourse, or informed disclosure. It fundamentally violates their human rights and "these systems exist". Failure of government to timely uphold the social contract promises and specifics of the constitution becomes after-the-fact purposeful intent through the gross negligence and failure to uphold their constitutional oaths. History has shown that repeatedly if the civilization survives at all, it repeatedly reforms itself through violence. Something no good person wants, but given the narrowing of agency and choice to affect the future; it is the only alternative when the cliff of existential exctinction is present (whether people realize that or not).

drnick1 1y ago

The dude is against "surveillance," but his blog has dependencies (makes third party requests) to Cloudflare, Google, and others. Laughable.

gcanyon 1y ago

Is there anyone who has a credible take on how we avoid an effectively zero-privacy future? AI can identify people by their walk, no facial recognition required, and now technology can detect heartbeats through variations in wifi signals. It seems guaranteed we are heading for a future where someone knows everything. The only choice is whether it's a select few, or everyone. The latter seems clearly preferable.

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pilingual 1y ago
Legislation or, my favorite, market forces.
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  "Market forces" is in serious decline as a leveller at this point in history, especially around products of interest to power or those producing outsized profits. Or maybe it never was and this fact is just becoming more transparent.
  - cowboylowrez 1y ago
    market forces are even slower than government regulations at making corrections in the market.

BLKNSLVR 1y ago

From reading the comments I'm getting vibes similar to Altered Carbon's[0] AI hotels that no one uses. The opposite of "if you build it they will come". (The difference being the AIs in the book were incredibly needy, wanting too much to please the customer to the point of annoyance, which is a heavy contrast against the current reality of the AI working to appease the parent organisation) [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon

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gblargg 1y ago

As long as the first ones to be surveilled are the companies that make it (including their employees) and all politicians who vote for it. We need to be able to access all the data the AI gathers from these groups.

EchoReflection 1y ago

we're fooling ourselves if we think there's "still time". AI surveillance is just too powerful and valuable for companies/governments to NOT use it. It's just like saying "ok let's all agree to not increase our power and capabilities". Nobody thinks humanity would collectively agree to that, and for good reason (unfortunately).

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pjjpo 1y ago

AFAIK there isn't currently any surveillance on search - searching for how to make a bomb does not lead to police at your doorstep the next day. But the police raid after a mass shooting generally brings up plenty of similar searches. Maybe it could be good to have some integrations between this data and law enforcement to reduce leading to tragedy? Maybe start not with crime but suicide - I think a search result telling you to call this number if you are feeling bad saves far less lives than a feed into social workers potentially could. Just a thought, and this isn't have a computer sentence someone to prison but providing data to people to in the end make informed decisions to try to prevent tragedy. Privacy is important to a degree but treating it as absolute seems to waste potential to save lives.

metalman 1y ago

Lets bring on the Pan Opticapocolypse, (heh ,heh) dispense with the could's ,should's, ethafuckicks,and get it over with, now

scubadude 1y ago

Isn't this pretty much the main reason AI is being pushed so hard?