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We will get much better at manipulation and better at people “writing” things to justify their own feelings. What’s new about LLMs is that you can scalably man
by tyre 3mo ago
We will get much better at manipulation and better at people “writing” things to justify their own feelings.
What’s new about LLMs is that you can scalably manipulate people individually. It used to be that you could either have scale (speeches, tweets, interviews, website, etc.) or individual engagement (replying to mail/tweets/town hall questions.)
Now you can pull the history and preferences of an individual, then shape a message—in real time—to them, specifically. You can have conversations on social media with a single person and shape your message specifically to them.
Part of this can be good (you talk about what they care about, where 90% of broadcast messaging might not apply) and part of it can be bad (manipulation.)
My guess is that, in the US, the right will cynically adopt manipulation to great effect and the left will take a moral stand against shady practices and lose elections.
- lettergram 3mo ago> My guess is that, in the US, the right will cynically adopt manipulation to great effect and the left will take a moral stand against shady practices and lose elections. I think that statement may itself highlight how prevalent manipulation is. I fully anticipate all groups to continue maximal manipulation they can. One thing with LLMs is that it'll be a far less unified view, so a "divide and conquer" strategy is what I anticipate.
- scns 3mo agoIt is way harder to manipulate people to do the right thing i think.
- kortilla 3mo agoThat presupposes that the left in the US wants to do the right thing. Something like government run grocery stores is not clearly correct and there is very little evidence supporting that it will work well yet it is a very popular leftist policy in New York.
- galleywest200 3mo agoCity run grocery stores are certainly not evil.
- 0xWTF 3mo ago... not overtly, intentionally evil. FTFY
- tyre 3mo agoWhat’s the case that they’re secretly, unintentionally evil?
- kortilla 2mo agoThey destroy grocery stores that offer variety in every neighborhood they operate in. They offer worse service and people put up with it because the rest of New York is subsidizing them through taxes.
- snakeboy 2mo agoBad economic policy is subtly "evil", by way of allocating finite resources inefficiently. Usually this is unintentionally done by not appropriately taking second, third, ..., nth order effects into account.
- jdub 2mo ago... which would make (our current model of) capitalism especially evil. Compared to a supermarket.
- naasking 2mo agoThe margins for groceries are objectively thin. The only way to provide food at lower prices is to provide a worse good or service, eg. less variety, less quality, less availability, etc. You will see all of these outcomes in NYC, if anyone even accepts the bids to begin with.
- Levitz 2mo agoIt's harder to convince people to all agree on the same, different from the norm, thing. If you've got 5 people in a car and you play ABBA in every road trip, then one day you suggest to change, the problem is not in being okay with "something else", but on agreeing what that other thing should be, set against the already known thing. That's why there's so much infighting in the left.
- tyre 3mo agoIn US politics, the right is far, far better at winning elections than the left. This isn’t about personal preference. It’s objective political science. Look at the most contentious issues in the US: abortion, climate change, taxing the wealthy, gun control, Affordable Healthcare Act. The Democratic Party platform is aligned with national polling on every one. Every one of those issues has >60% support with voters and the Republican Party has blocked them all. They play the game to win. And they do.
- lettergram 3mo agoObjectively? > Democratic Party platform is aligned with national polling on every one. It depends on the pollster and where you're polling. I guarantee you rural Tennessee will not agree with downtown Washington DC on any of these issues. In contrast, rural California will likely agree with rural Tennessee. It's not as cut and dry as a homogeneous national poll of 2500 people. Every state, city, county are different. That's why there are federal, state, city, and county governments. For instance, Abortions are legal nationally. States can individually decide how, or if, they wish to restrict it. This is as the constitution intends under the 10th amendment: > powers not delegated to the federal government nor prohibited to the states are reserved to the states or the people. This allows for democracy to take place at the local level, rather than having particular regions thousands of miles away from each other ultimately oppress the other. To the point on LLMs, I think it's abundantly clear they will be used to propagandize and similar to social media will lock people in a bubble without alternative opinions. It'll be the worst of both worlds, the question is who's the puppet master. At some point soon, I imagine it'll be the AI.
- rswail 2mo agoSo we need to "prohibit to the states" the power to enforce medical procedures (or the prohibition of a medical procedure) on individuals. Which amendment protects someone's bodily autonomy or medical treatment from interference by the states? If the Federal Congress passed a law providing that abortions are legal on demand up to the 22 week of gestation, after which it would require the corroboration of two doctors, would that stand, or would it be struck down by SCOTUS? Same for legalization of marijuana, and many other "social" issues.
- plif 3mo agoNot new about LLMs. Targeted ads / big data is this. Another degree of capability, yes. But we have been trending here for a long time.
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- hnlmorg 3mo agoIt’s unfortunate that you’re being downvoted because this comment is true. And it just goes to show how far we’ve sunk that people have forgotten the problems of ad tech in the age of LLMs.
- tyre 3mo agoYou’re making a weird number of assumptions about people’s voting and extrapolating to assertions about Society. Ads are not really the same. They can’t be as tightly targeted to what resonates with someone. Programmatic ads are certainly much better and closer than, say, television advertising, but users can’t _engage_ with them. Like actually chat with them. That’s where this is headed and people are not ready. I don’t think we could prepare them, anyway.
- hnlmorg 2mo agoI’m not making any assumptions. > Ads are not really the same. They can’t be as tightly targeted to what resonates with someone. The EU referendum in the UK proved your point false. > Programmatic ads are certainly much better and closer than, say, television advertising, but users can’t _engage_ with them. Like actually chat with them. When people talk about “ad tech”, they’re not talking about TV ;) And yes, people can and do engage with them. That’s how ads on social media works. During the EU referendum, people were even resharing ads on Facebook without even realising they were ads.
- swedishagentic 3mo agoI'm surprised no one has mentioned Cambridge Analytica.
- attila-lendvai 3mo agothe fact that the useless left/right divide is still so widely used shows that manipulation is working well even pre LLMs... when it comes to the important question, then both "sides" are the same team. or if you want it with a pinch of humor: when a boot is on your face, it makes precious little difference whether it's the left or the right boot. (i lived the first 10 years of my life in communism)
- tyre 3mo agoIf you think that the American Left is anything like communism, I’m sorry, but, respectfully, I can’t take your comments seriously. The left in the US would be center-right in Europe, who are certainly not communist (they have separate parties that are communists!) Even the socialist strain of the US has nothing to do with socialism scaremongering about Venezuela, etc.
- sedivy94 3mo agoThe parent comment wasn’t making that comparison. In fact, quite the opposite. The communism comment emphasized personal experience with a boot in one’s face, not that the boot was communist.
- mensetmanusman 3mo agoWhat even is the left though in the US? I haven’t watched any TV in decades, and the online content is entirely algo driven, so I don’t know what is happening.
- Levitz 2mo agoThe "left" as in the party, sure, not that much of an authoritarian leaning. The "left" as in the pervasive group that crawled out of Tumblr, took hold of Twitter back in the day, and has a stronghold on Reddit now? Those do care about what you can say, think, watch and read, and the more they can control, the better. The US right can only dream to have half as much control as the left has had in the last three decades.
- 2mo ago
- wombatpm 3mo agoBiology would greatly benefit. We barely understand transcription and protein structure. And the straightforward systems that we know like insulin have complex post translational modifications. So while we have a map of the partial proteonome, we have barely scratched the surface on networks regulation and interactions.
- aswegs8 2mo agoI think the question is less about where it's most beneficial but which knowledge structure lends itself to LLMs most. Since biology's "language" is way more complex and irregular than maths or natural language, it isn't particularly accessible.
- dnautics 2mo ago> And the straightforward systems that we know like insulin have complex post translational modifications. insulin is not straightforward, the way the insulin molecule interacts with its receptor is nuts. on the other hand its post translational modifications are simple and dont have anything particularly surprising (no glycoslation, disulfide bonds where you would expect, nothing special kex2 cuts, arent really defective in disease states even)
- richardfey 2mo ago> Part of this can be good (you talk about what they care about, where 90% of broadcast messaging might not apply) and part of it can be bad (manipulation.) Side note: it's manipulation either ways because you chose what to talk about, with a goal in mind.
- KajMagnus 2mo agoActually, no. "Manipulation" is a negatively loaded word, and you wouldn't use that word if f.ex. someone helpfully & truthfully helps others see they've misunderstood sth.
- richardfey 2mo agoI disagree. Whether something is manipulation depends on whether you are trying to change someone’s opinion or behavior, not on whether the manipulator has “good” or “bad” intentions, since those judgments are not objectively universal.
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- KajMagnus 2mo agoYou can look up the word in a dictionary, instead of arguing. Bye & have a nice day.
- red75prime 2mo agoI believe that the decentralization of manipulation (taken in a very broad sense as an effort to modify people's views) spells trouble for democracies. The mass media of old, with all its flaws, created a shared pool of information managed by well-educated people, some of whom understood that they had the power to keep democracy running (keeping populists away from the "manipulation machine," curbing blatant manipulation attempts, and so on). Decentralized manipulation, by contrast, just runs amok creating echochambers and polarization.
- verisimi 2mo ago> We will get much better at manipulation and better at people “writing” things to justify their own feelings. Yes, ai has strong narcissistic traits. And so do the people that own them. And pay for them. In response, people in general will become fat more capable of recognising the manipulation. And will become more paranoid.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]