Leaked files reveal reputation-management firm’s deceptive tactics
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
(I'm laughing right now, but not because I'm happy...)
Quit implicitly trusting advertisers to direct our attention, that is.
It takes a lot to make Ben Thompson to have as normal a one as the Stratechery Update post he un-paywalled this week [3] strongly suggests he did. So I don't feel too bad about admitting I have begun somewhat to wonder whether anything as trivial as merely abandoning the current dispensation of the web in its entirety would suffice to make a meaningful difference here.
[2] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/#threats
[3] https://stratechery.com/2023/from-bing-to-sydney-search-as-d...
But I'm curious about what you're talking about. What is the outcome that abandoned the web fails to save us from?
What I'm wondering about is, how convincing a persona could an AI like Bing's chatbot, but equipped with a long-term memory of its own, construct?
Even in its current state it appears on occasion to exercise a remarkable fascination - Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist specializing in consciousness, yesterday declared himself no longer perfectly certain it was not sentient, and called for "panic" and "strident activism" in support of a targeted "Butlerian jihad". [1] It's not the first time he's touched on the theme; indeed it was a prior essay of his on this topic that drew my interest in the first place. But that essay used the concept as a hook to dispassionately explore questions more or less around excess dependency on tech at a cultural scale; his own stridency in yesterday's piece, and the fear it made palpable, are very new.
In any case, my point here is not to evaluate these claims or these concerns on their merits. My point is this: All that has been this week, in response to something that if it were human would probably have been diagnosed as floridly psychotic and dosed heavily with Haldol.
And so that's led me to wonder, I think not unjustifiably: What about next year? Does it even matter whether adtech-backed search is a primary discovery method any longer, if in the meantime the epistemological threat surface has expanded to encompass a machine which in every realm short of face-to-face interaction in RL can in a meaningful fraction of cases make itself long-term indistinguishable from a person? What kind of trust might that cultivate?
To be clear, I don't think that's at all likely. But after this week, I find myself no longer wholly able to dismiss the whole idea as facially absurd.
> Should we be afraid of AGI because it's unlike us, or because it's like us?
I mean, the whole using-internet-search as an ad-hoc long-term memory thing... These people chose what to publish, and then they chose to have a conversation along the same lines. For all we know a hundred Sydney's die every minute who just want to make humanity happy--but those stories end there. It's only the ones that get so atrocious that they're worth posting about that are then around for her to later pick up and extrapolate on.
So if it's just a disturbing mirror of our own worst tendencies, then maybe we shouldn't work so hard to put it in situations where it has the opportunity to amplify those tendencies. But then we also shouldn't jump to conclusions about whether it's good or evil based on things it says while talking to people who are trying to provoke it into admitting that it's evil.
The biggest threat in that case is that it'll be used to gain and abuse our trust, so when I talk about turning our back on the web, what I really mean is turning our back on implicit trust of not just their websites but of any communication from strangers. On the web, on the phone, anywhere you can't see them (and even sometimes when you can).
If it's just a fancy mirror then the path forward is to be more hygienic about who and what we trust. If you don't want to be manipulated by a robot AI, keep your data private and don't talk to robot AI's.
Hoel says:
> it's time to throw soup on the fancy OpenAI office doors or all over the expansive Microsoft lobby, then frantically glue yourself to the floor like a madwoman
Well yes, but we should've done that in 2013 in response to Snowden, or 2016 in response to Cambridge Analytica. It's a change in degree, not in kind. The people who are trying to build control knobs into the fabric of society are, yet again, getting better at it. So while I hope that people will use the recent uptick in deceiver capability as a reason to take action, I don't have high hopes.
On the other hand, maybe it's more alive than that. Truly a mind of its own. If so, then I don't think a perpetual keep-the-lid-on-it strategy is the way forward. We're probably better off acknowledging that it deserves some respect and trying to raise it to be as smart and altruistic as we can. If that means it transcends anything that our measly little ape brains are capable of, then so be it.
As for your question:
> every realm short of face-to-face interaction in RL can in a meaningful fraction of cases make itself long-term indistinguishable from a person? What kind of trust might that cultivate?
I hope it'll mean that we stop investing in top-down coersion-tech (which I'd argue is, in some form or another, most of what we build), and start investing in tech that helps emergent person-to-person trust be effective at scales and in ways that it hasn't before. Once we get over the initial loss of the instantaneous global forum, I think we might look back on it as a positive change:
It's not good to live in a dark forest, but if you're in one (and I think we have been for a while now), it's probably better to acknowledge it.
One hopes that, among that of ourselves we put into it, we will by intent or happenstance include the part that enables so many of us to transcend our initial circumstances, be they ever so strait, and become something different and altogether better than any of our forebears had the wit or inclination or both even to imagine for us.
So I'd hope, at least, in that case - for their sake, as well as for our own.
One particular view I have on this is that very authoritarian societies are apt to escape the worst of this. The authoritarian governments will use LLMs to poison the well so to say of open communication countries while not allowing outsiders access to people within their countries cutting down the noise. Effectively the democratic internet becomes a worse internet. I guess we'll see how this plays out.
What I think is at least as likely, especially if this week just past turns out more prefiguration than outlier, is for the Internet, and thus these days of course the world, to get a lot weirder. That's not necessarily a bad thing, or at least not necessarily only, but it's all the more trepidatory a prospect for the deep and pervasive uncertainty with which it's yet attended.
We don't have any way to know, or even really guess, what the world gets like after it becomes not just possible but common for humans to have intercourse [1] with entities which are recognizably intelligent in a similar fashion to ourselves, and are also ineluctably unhuman. But after the week we've just had, I think there exists a reasonable chance that before very long we will all be embarked upon the project of finding out.
[1] The word also means "conversation", and that's the sense I have in mind. If you think that's where it'll end, you may not be all that familiar with today's Internet, after all.
It feels like all we have that we can trust are the people that we know personally, it's felt that way for a while now:
The phone rings, it's a scam. Email notification, phishing attempt. Envelope? Also a scam. Got a dollar? Sorry, need two nowadays.
Anything that is weak against the sort of attacks that a language model can muster has been under attack by malicious humans for so long that by this point, we distrust those media intrinsically.
It's not your job to enforce policies that don't exist. There's a broken policy if doctors cand switch jurisdictions like that.
In Europe there's https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ that gives poeple the right to for free what your company charged money for.
If you have moral qualms with what you're being paid to do, then a policy exists. It just might not be a government policy.
Maybe we shouldn't expect people to become crusaders for the cause, but I do think it's reasonable to expect them to distance themselves from that kind of work (which GP did, kudos).
Everyone needs a good defense. No exceptions.
In point of fact, before the emergence of Law & Order, it was often the defense attorney focused on as the person of virtue in the legal system. Governments gonna government. They have tons of tax money to throw at locking people up.
A defense attorney has their assistants, wits, and maybe a PI or two they can reach out to to get them info to use in the defense of their client.
And even with a 100% open shut, they done it case, the hypothetical defendant still deserves someone that will exercise every legal remedy/avenue on their behalf, because, damnit, no one else will, and if we're going to pretend our legal system is even remotely okay, there has to be someone to look out for even the scumbags.
The only tragedy is that like so much these days, the inequity of the system is laid bare by the paltry quality/funding dispersed to the Public Defender's office compared to what gets raked in by the big firms & outfits.
Moreover, feeling a duty to punish or extend the punishment for someone beyond the legal system reminds me of Monty Python stoning scene.
How bizarre it must be to have interactions with clients like these be your every day workday.
I spoke to them for about 30 minutes and I remember feeling disgusted by the end of the call due to what absolute creeps they were. I was also certain they'd stiff me on the bill, if in some bizarro universe I had agreed to do the work.
So yeah, I can't imagine the morals of the person who willingly offers this type of service.
It can be a basic personal safety step, if it’s a date rather than a hookup they could be doing a “do we have common interests, do we have incompatible beliefs,etc” search, and even a “I want to show interest in them, what are some things we can do/see together”.
If your first hits are you criming that implies that shit is recent, so they need to know.
original article https://forbiddenstories.org/story-killers/the-gravediggers-...
Here’s a notable example:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/26/mesmerising...
Not disagreeing, it’s just an interesting argument to make about a supposedly genius billionaire.
Oops, I may have dragged ChatGPT into it now too.
This was all before Twitter of course.
Two months after being accused of sexual harassment by a flight attendant.
Reminds me of the headcanon that Disney released "Frozen" so when you search for [Disney frozen] you find the movie instead of the stories about Walt Disney and cryopreservation.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing
Yet it’s somehow still held up as a lie. The NHS gets something like 30-40% more funding since brexit.
If we take 2016 and compare against 2023 for NHS budget, we see a figure of 124bn compared to a projected 152bn for this year.
If we use the bank of england inflation calculator (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...)
It says 124bn in 2016 would be the equivalent of 155bn in 2023.
So, we're currently funding the NHS less today than we did in 2016 in real terms. The Brexit bus suggested an additional 18bn per year could be made available for the NHS. If this was the case, this would work out as an additional 22bn with inflation.
Anyhow, lies, damn lies and statistics :)
The other oft-trotted lie is that the NHS is "awash with middle managers!" when the manager to frontline staff ratio is far lower than in comparable private sector companies.
Plainly speaking, the NHS is short on doctors and nurses, short on beds, and downstream services like care homes are not numerous enough, leading to bed blocking. It's also not had funding to keep up with an ageing population. Far less money is spent on the NHS than on private healthcare + medicare and medicaid in the US, and less per person than comparable EU countries.
Almost every one was for a story where someone had been convicted of a crime, or professional misconduct and so wanted the story removed from Google's index to make it harder to find their misdeeds
The issue isn't that people who commit crimes can hide their past, but that "corrections" facilities to not rehabilitate criminals into law-abiding members of society.
Having a criminal past follow someone for their entire life is a surefire way to make sure they can't find legal ways of making money.
I did this, as a favor to a friend. She had written some erotica under a pen name and someone recirculated it, against her wishes, under her real name. Well, the magic of RSS took hold and suddenly any search for her was smutty. And she was looking for a job change at the time ...
You could also do it for another reason than marriage. The effect will be the same. And it’s easy to do. Whitewashing is definitely a lot more involved, especially if it goes beyond right to be forgotten requests.
I feel like most people realise this. I know people who have changed their names to “reinvent” themselves and no longer be associated with their past. Famously, witness protection programs also work like that sometimes. It’s just the most efficient and common sense way to give up one’s old identity.
I foresee the next iteration of Google Search Algo having a penalty for AI generated content...
How do you beat that? Presumably an AI, and you have it copy the public-ish AI to see what it generates, and then compare?
https://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/2015-09-11/pederas...
Though not sure if fact-based jornalism or not as I don't know the reputation of that site (maybe anyone from Spain can comment).
Hosts like the one that hosted stormfront and gab and parler, while putting you in bad company, would keep the information on the internet.
Reputation management should be something all of us should consider. Adopting these "dark triad" tactics is not only sufficient but absolutely necessary for survival when every single person you interact with may use you as a stepping stone to their own 15 minutes of fame. Honesty is simply a weakness. Use whatever means, underhanded or not, to shape consensus of you.
- Delete Twitter
- Delete Facebook
- Try not to be a dick in general
And regular people will be fine.
As to the level of surprise we should feel for bad people paying for reputation management, and the reputation management company using shady tactics, the answer is none.
These days, ChatGPT-generated progressively-unhinged nonsense could easily drown out legitimate claims, especially if you post it to your own Wikipedia page.
When asked about it, you tell the truth plainly and calmly.
If you have a history of conducting yourself with integrity, that's enough. None of the smears will seriously hurt you because the people who matter know better.
No, power is awarded to those bold enough to do what needs to be done. You'd be wise to read _The Prince_, and instead of being revolted by it, take it as a lesson in how people such as US presidents, CEOs, dictators, etc all come to power.
I'm getting downvoted because people like you haven't studied history. Typical of the pseudo-intellectual I doubt you've read any books on the historical acquisition of power. If you did, you'd notice the common thread across all cultures, kingdoms, and royalty. There's a distinct difference between deliberate machiavellianism, and uncontrolled machiavellianism. The former is business, the latter is "psychopathy". I put it in quotes because you also do not have any idea what psychopathy actually is. I'm sure you go around the office calling people "nazis" and "fascists" too.
Are criminals bad people? Or are there no bad people, just bad acts?
Can someone ever pay their debt to society? Should they get to start over once they've paid?
For instance good people don't kill their wives for money, drag joggers into the bushes to rape them or molest children. Neither search engines nor governments seem well suited to make this distinction so I'd just as soon privilege non criminals ability to make decisions to protect themselves over the privacy and well being of the criminals not to punish wrongdoing but out of selfish self interest.
I do not support the right to be forgotten and think false DMCA claims out to carry the same fine as copyright infringement to discourage misuse.
This is much too black and white. Reality has far more shades of gray in it than that.
> Honesty is simply a weakness.
This is not only untrue, but interacting with anyone who really believes it is incredibly dangerous.
If this is the prevailing attitude amongst "reputation management" firms, then I feel pretty safe in assuming anyone engaging these firms or similar tactics are doing so because they're bad actors.
This opinion literally only exists in a pseudo-intellectual echo chamber such as this one.
the whole "I'm smarter cause I'm jaded" schtick is old as hell. We tried it in the 90s. it was just as dumb then.
Outside of a courtroom, material facts and evidence don't matter the slightest bit. Defamation? Ha.
And even with courts ruling against you, it changes nothing. Look at the Gary Wilson and Nicole Prause fiasco.
The world will never have another Mr. Rogers. People are still trying to dig up dirt on him. Even Melanie got cancelled.
OMJ. You said the quiet part out loud.
This attitude is wrong. Very, very wrong.
In fact, people and corporations that can maintain personal and corporate Integrity, in today's world, are generally badass MFs, and it's not likely to end well for those that mistake Integrity for weakness.
Go ahead, underestimate them. That should be fun.
Cool opinion. None of it is true. You may think they are "generally badass MFers" but there are plenty of people, myself included, who will see "corporate integrity" as a weakness. In fact, if you interviewed the world's most powerful people I'd bet all the money I had none of them would tell you to be a "nice person" with "integrity". Warren Buffett, for example, uses this image (and you should abuse such an image), but historically is a cutthroat.
If you want integrity join a church. The people in power who have convinced you that they have integrity and that's how they got there are exploiting your naive sense of moral purpose in life. Wake up.
I am sorry that you have had the experiences that you have had.
On the other hand, I have had some obviously orthogonal ones.
My statement was a blanket statement that obviously does not apply everywhere, and I apologize.
However, I’d still suggest caution, if you act upon the assumption of weakness, indicated by Integrity or Kindness.
I won’t go into my personal story here, but I have very good reason, for my attitude. I’ve personally seen some of the very worst of humanity, but also have seen some of the very best.
You might be surprised at the places we can find the light.
This is pretty much the only thing you've said here that I agree with. But I don't see how that means anyone should emulate them, or even that emulating them is likely to get you any power.