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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

>There is a clear risk from these sorts of models as they get better - I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images

And the risk behind that is...?

If you drill down with such claims the core is always "someone might use this to lie online" and the proposed solution every single time is: more surveillance. End anonymity. Have a Facebook account required to use the internet. Real name and real face policies for every online interaction.

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I strongly suspect you’ve never been on the end of an internet doxxing/hate brigade if you can’t imagine how this could be used to make someone’s life a living hell.

I’ll explain again that I think they can be used for bad actions, and also that they should still be released, because the benefits will outweigh the negatives. It does not hurt to admit that some things can be dangerous when used in nefarious ways. No one suggests we ban kitchen knives even though they are lethal, because their utility is massive, and outweighs their danger. In much the same way these models have extreme utility, that almost certainly outweighs their potential negatives.

> I strongly suspect you’ve never been on the end of an internet doxxing/hate brigade if you can’t imagine how this could be used to make someone’s life a living hell.

Sounds like you're saying the even without advanced AI, online bullying is already somewhat harmful?

So what exactly is the additional harm of AI?

I totally agree. People often argue that photoshop has been around forever and so on. Creating sophisticated pornographic video of any individual is brand new. Creating an app that realistically removes clothing from any photo is new technology.

I actually just now came up with an idea for a browser plug-in that removes clothing from every image loaded.

The trolling terrifies me.

Trolling someone by creating awful video (just think about how deeply, photo-realistically, awful it could be - porn is just the tip of the iceberg) is going to get really bad. I am not sure how this is going to shake out. The easiest will be video of famous people doing awful things. A little harder is doing a custom training on a particular person's likeness, and videos of that person doing awful things. That high-schooler. That child. It's not a happy idea. There should be severe consequences for deliberately making something like this with the intent to harass (troll).

The fact is we have not even scratched the surface of classifying trolling as a real crime. I am less concerned with the tech (it's inevitable, hand wringing about it is not useful), and more concerned with the fact that we still have essentially no real consequences to this kind of harassment.

I suspect that strong anonymity is incompatible with civilized life, since the few edgelords will always end up ruining it for the many. We have collectively decided that some amount of privacy must be sacrificed to live in a civilized place where you can address grievance (the subpoena must be served to someone). Surveillance is a weapon for tyranny, but I think that we need to flip the script. The relationship between tyranny and surveillance means we need better governments, not more anonymity.

I also suspect we don't need to change anything except enforcement. I think trolls are a lot less anonymous than they think they are, since their opsec is typically nonexistent. It's just that we have no enforcers, and for some reason don't care. If I had a magic wand, I would convert the DEA wholesale over to dealing with online crimes (trolling, CP, trafficking, etc).

"The relationship between tyranny and surveillance means we need better governments, not more anonymity."

"Better governments" is not actionable, people have been wanting that since Socratese. Might as well wish for the second coming.

The real answer is to just let people know about the fakery, then they'll stop believing every video and the trolls will be defanged.

This. Like most tech misuse, there will be counters that will evolve to help reduce the negative impacts. There’s an emerging opportunity for the detection and identification of these faked images and videos. These may also require models to match the sophistication required to be effective validators. Perhaps the most cpu intensive models are only used as a shared societal resource on a particular tier of influencers and general compute detector models are available to all to run or tweak or rebuild. There would need to be a root to this validation trust tree, but we’ve figured this out before with cyphers and certs. Let the push and pull begin :-)

We already have laws against harassment and libel.

That's why the GP is calling for enforcing them.

Okay Ned Ludd. You're right that technology is only going to get more powerful. But hasn't this always been true? Who decides when it's over the line? The US government?

They clearly aren't the best arbiters of judgement, so who gets to decide "sever consequences"?

Yes, as a general rule the government decides when it's ok to forbid you from doing something. If the US government wants, it can make it a crime to train/use these models. Banning the training part is pretty much game over for this industry.

I personally hope it happens as soon as possible. Intellectual property theft (without which those models don't exists) shouldn't be allowed.

“Intellectual property” is a propaganda phrase that deliberately confuses copyright, trademark, and patent law in order to create the illusion that ideas can or should have owners. (See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html) I recommend specifically referring to the concept at hand, in this case copyright.

Personally I disagree, as the models themselves do not contain any material which can be considered a copyright violation, the value of scraping the open web is easily apparent, the ability to prevent scraping wholesale - even given the legal framework to disallow it - seems dubious, and lastly because the collective potential harm caused by restricting just one or a few of the more arguably more ethical nations from this technology pathway is a known unknown, and possibly a very large one at that.

And we're going to get very used to it in short order.

We may make laws that prohibit online harassment, and that should be the mechanism we use to deal with this. Not through technology bans.

> browser plug-in that removes clothing from every image loaded

Yep! Remove clothing and make-up to show everyone as they really are!

You can call it the "ugly truth" plugin.

Watch the great BBC show “The Capture” for an entertaining look at one way this could plausibly be abused by governments.

> Have a facebook account required

ROFL what a weird thing for any HN commenter to say

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