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The article names a lot of other things that AI is being used for besides scamming the elderly, such as making us distrust everything we see online, generating

by muvlon 9mo ago

The article names a lot of other things that AI is being used for besides scamming the elderly, such as making us distrust everything we see online, generating sexually explicit pictures of women without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, driving autonomous killer drones and more generally sucking the joy out of everything. And I think I'm inclined to agree. There are a small amount of things that have gotten better due to AI (certain kinds of accessibility tech) and a huge pile of things that just suck now. The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables.

pixl97 9mo ago
Here's the thing with AI, especially as it becomes more AGI like, it will encompass all human behaviors. This will lead to the bad behaviors becoming especially noticeable since bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them. This is something everyone needs to think about when discussing AI safety. Even ANI applications carry a lot of potential societal risks and they may not be immediately evident. I know with the information superhighway few expected it to turn into a dopamine drip feed for advertising dollars, yet here we are.
- ethbr1 9mo ago
  > bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them You'd think we would have learned this lesson in failing to implement email charges that net'd to $0 for balanced send/receive patterns. And thereby heralded in a couple decades of spam, only eventually solved by centralization (Google). Driving the cost of anything valuable to zero inevitably produces an infinite torrent of volume.
- mogsor 9mo ago
  AI doesn't encompass any "human behaviours", the humans controlling it do. Grok doesn't generate nude pictures of women because it wants to, it does it because people tell it to and it has (or had) no instructions to the contrary
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    I hate to be a smartass, but do you read the stuff you type out? >Grok doesn't generate nude pictures of women because it wants to, I don't generate chunks of code because I want to. I do it because that's how I get paid and like to eat. What's interesting with LLMs is they are more like human behaviors than any other software. First you can't tell non-AI (not just genAI)software to generate a picture of a naked women, it doesn't have that capability. So after that you have models that are trained on content such as naked people. I mean, that's something humans are trained on, unless we're blind I guess. If you take a data set encompassing all human behaviors, which we do, then the model will have human like behaviors. It's in post training that we add instructions to the contrary. Much like if you live in American you're taught that seeing naked people is worse than murdering someone and that if someone creates a naked picture of you, your soul has been stolen. With those cultural biases programmed into you, you will find it hard to do things like paint a picture of a naked person as art. This would be openAI's models. And if you're a person that wanted to rebel, or lived in a culture that accepted nudity, then you wouldn't have a problem with it. How many things do you do because society programmed you that way, and you're unable to think outside that programming?
  - vrighter 9mo ago
    If it can generate porn, it can do so because it was explicitly trained on porn. Therefore the system was designed to generate porn. It can't just materialize a naked body without having seen millions of them. they do not work that way.
    - xigoi 9mo ago
      Not all pictures of naked people are porn.
n8cpdx 9mo ago
You’re way off base. It can also create sexually explicit pictures of men.
- abustamam 9mo ago
  Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but women are disproportionately affected by this than men.
  - apublicfrog 9mo ago
    That sounds like it could be true, but do you have any actual evidence of that?
    - abustamam 9mo ago
      These are one of those things that are hard to get statistics of due to the nature of the subject, but going to any website that features AI generated content like CivitAI will show you a lot more naked AI generated women than men, and that the images of women are greatly better in quality than the men. None of the people actually exist, of course, but some things stem from this: 1. There are probably AI portals that are OK with uploading nonconsensual sexual images of people. I am not about to go looking for those, but the ratio of women to men on those sites is likely similar. 2. The fact that the quality of women is better than the quality of men speaks to vastly more training being done on women 3. Because there's so much training on women it's just easier to use AI for nefarious purposes on women than men (have to find custom trained LORAs to get male anatomy right, for example). I did try to look for statistics out of curiosity, but most just cite a number without evidence. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/women-face-new-sexual-harassment-with-deepfake-pornography https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/women-face-new-sexual-hara... https://verfassungsblog.de/deepfakes-ncid-ai-regulation/ https://verfassungsblog.de/deepfakes-ncid-ai-regulation/ https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-shoulder-worries-ai https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-shoulder-worries-ai
      - xigoi 9mo ago
        Obviously there is more interest in generating images of naked women, since naked women look better than naked men. It’s not some kind of patriarchal conspiracy.
sunaookami 9mo ago
[flagged]
- mogsor 9mo ago
  It's true, making these things easier and faster and more accessible really doesn't matter
  - collingreen 9mo ago
    That's a bonkers take. Am I misunderstanding you or are you somehow saying anything done in the past is fine to do more of?
    - yifanl 9mo ago
      Poe's Law, mate.
notanastronaut 9mo ago
>The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables. When I think of the internet, I think of malware, porn, social media manipulating people, flame wars, "influencers", and more. It is also used to scam the elderly, sharing photoshopped sexually explicit pictures of men, women, and children, without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, and definitely sucking the joy out of everything. Revenge porn wasn't started in 2023 with OpenAI. And just look at META's current case about Instagram being addicting and harmful to children. If "AI" is a tech carcinogen, then the internet is a nuclear reactor, spewing radioactive material every which way. But hey, it keeps the lights on! Clearly, a net positive. Let's just be intellectually consistent, that's all I'm saying.

by muvlon 9mo ago

pixl97 9mo ago

Here's the thing with AI, especially as it becomes more AGI like, it will encompass all human behaviors. This will lead to the bad behaviors becoming especially noticeable since bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them. This is something everyone needs to think about when discussing AI safety. Even ANI applications carry a lot of potential societal risks and they may not be immediately evident. I know with the information superhighway few expected it to turn into a dopamine drip feed for advertising dollars, yet here we are.

ethbr1 9mo ago
> bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them You'd think we would have learned this lesson in failing to implement email charges that net'd to $0 for balanced send/receive patterns. And thereby heralded in a couple decades of spam, only eventually solved by centralization (Google). Driving the cost of anything valuable to zero inevitably produces an infinite torrent of volume.
mogsor 9mo ago
AI doesn't encompass any "human behaviours", the humans controlling it do. Grok doesn't generate nude pictures of women because it wants to, it does it because people tell it to and it has (or had) no instructions to the contrary
- pixl97 9mo ago
  I hate to be a smartass, but do you read the stuff you type out? >Grok doesn't generate nude pictures of women because it wants to, I don't generate chunks of code because I want to. I do it because that's how I get paid and like to eat. What's interesting with LLMs is they are more like human behaviors than any other software. First you can't tell non-AI (not just genAI)software to generate a picture of a naked women, it doesn't have that capability. So after that you have models that are trained on content such as naked people. I mean, that's something humans are trained on, unless we're blind I guess. If you take a data set encompassing all human behaviors, which we do, then the model will have human like behaviors. It's in post training that we add instructions to the contrary. Much like if you live in American you're taught that seeing naked people is worse than murdering someone and that if someone creates a naked picture of you, your soul has been stolen. With those cultural biases programmed into you, you will find it hard to do things like paint a picture of a naked person as art. This would be openAI's models. And if you're a person that wanted to rebel, or lived in a culture that accepted nudity, then you wouldn't have a problem with it. How many things do you do because society programmed you that way, and you're unable to think outside that programming?
- vrighter 9mo ago
  If it can generate porn, it can do so because it was explicitly trained on porn. Therefore the system was designed to generate porn. It can't just materialize a naked body without having seen millions of them. they do not work that way.
  - xigoi 9mo ago
    Not all pictures of naked people are porn.

n8cpdx 9mo ago

You’re way off base. It can also create sexually explicit pictures of men.

abustamam 9mo ago
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but women are disproportionately affected by this than men.
- apublicfrog 9mo ago
  That sounds like it could be true, but do you have any actual evidence of that?
  - abustamam 9mo ago
    These are one of those things that are hard to get statistics of due to the nature of the subject, but going to any website that features AI generated content like CivitAI will show you a lot more naked AI generated women than men, and that the images of women are greatly better in quality than the men. None of the people actually exist, of course, but some things stem from this: 1. There are probably AI portals that are OK with uploading nonconsensual sexual images of people. I am not about to go looking for those, but the ratio of women to men on those sites is likely similar. 2. The fact that the quality of women is better than the quality of men speaks to vastly more training being done on women 3. Because there's so much training on women it's just easier to use AI for nefarious purposes on women than men (have to find custom trained LORAs to get male anatomy right, for example). I did try to look for statistics out of curiosity, but most just cite a number without evidence. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/women-face-new-sexual-harassment-with-deepfake-pornography https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/women-face-new-sexual-hara... https://verfassungsblog.de/deepfakes-ncid-ai-regulation/ https://verfassungsblog.de/deepfakes-ncid-ai-regulation/ https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-shoulder-worries-ai https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-shoulder-worries-ai
    - xigoi 9mo ago
      Obviously there is more interest in generating images of naked women, since naked women look better than naked men. It’s not some kind of patriarchal conspiracy.

sunaookami 9mo ago

[flagged]

mogsor 9mo ago
It's true, making these things easier and faster and more accessible really doesn't matter
- collingreen 9mo ago
  That's a bonkers take. Am I misunderstanding you or are you somehow saying anything done in the past is fine to do more of?
  - yifanl 9mo ago
    Poe's Law, mate.

notanastronaut 9mo ago

>The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables. When I think of the internet, I think of malware, porn, social media manipulating people, flame wars, "influencers", and more. It is also used to scam the elderly, sharing photoshopped sexually explicit pictures of men, women, and children, without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, and definitely sucking the joy out of everything. Revenge porn wasn't started in 2023 with OpenAI. And just look at META's current case about Instagram being addicting and harmful to children. If "AI" is a tech carcinogen, then the internet is a nuclear reactor, spewing radioactive material every which way. But hey, it keeps the lights on! Clearly, a net positive. Let's just be intellectually consistent, that's all I'm saying.