Conversational AI will be used to Manipulate Us in real-time
barrons.com
barrons.com
"I ordered basketball photos" -> "OMG these basketball photos turned out so cute!"
I'm fairly convinced the long term solution to this will be advocate AI. Basically AI antivirus, a service you pay for that is on your side and defends you and your interests.
And it basically has to be paid for at a fair rate by you, otherwise there will always be an incentive for someone to manipulate it against you.
In other words, protection money.
"Protection money" is a term used when the threat is coming from the same agent that is collecting the payment. In this case they are two separate agents.
And sure they'll protect you from malware, but they'll also have some opinions about who you should vote for, what businesses you should patronize, etc...
Most websites that aren't recently built are getting close to impossible to use due to software bloat, things like forced 2FA, cookie bars, ads everywhere.
Add to that an infinite supply of AI generated content, and you end up with a situation where 99% of content is just bots speaking to each other, and the rest is frankly terrible UX.
Maybe this is how we get our non electronic lives back. We just overdo the machine part.
Ah - perhaps therein lies a solution! We all get a personal AI bot. Mine would sound like me, would be able to imitate my voice and my writing style, and would be able to distinguish bots from humans better than me. It would screen my calls and messages.
"Putting you through!"
Most brands are screaming over each other with bright colors and discount badges and badges promoting this or that benefit that the same product from the brand next to to this one totally doesn’t have. The aisles are completely overwhelming and you can barely even tell what’s in the box anymore.
Then you see the brand aimed at less price conscious consumers. The price is higher, but the box is a plain solid color with a nice font and just says “Rice”. Nothing else. Just rice. Or cereal. Or whatever.
You see similar effects on the internet. The good stuff just doesn’t feel as shouty (look at HN). Calm is a signal of quality. Noise gets ignored.
In the U.S you have brand name with their often noisy labels full of marketing - and then store brand (which is often the exact same stuff as the brand name in different packaging - or stuff that was rejected from quality control of the name brand so is almost the same stuff just slightly worse by some unknown metric). I buy store brand for basically everything but a few food items where the quality is worse enough to be off-putting. Store brand labels aren't quite as plain as No Name labels but are usually a bit more bespoke or just "lower quality" like they didn't want to pay for a graphic designer so had some intern whip up a graphic for the label.
I know the U.K has No Name brand which to my understanding also markets itself as the cheaper no-fuss alternative?
You have simple but cheap looking and you have simple but clean and sophisticated looking. Look at Apple’s branding as a good example of the latter.
You're right, but if it is really good at this sort of thing it's going to be difficult to incentivize anyone with more money than they can get from manipulating you. There's a crapton of money and power in this.
There is also some protection in that I don't care why most of my contacts would send me a link to buy something, it's going to be out of place. An AI can match me or my wife's internal communication style but there's basically no amount of style matching it can do to make me buy cryptocurrency, or send 10 $500 gift cards somewhere. Honestly current spam already takes a decent run at it through plain ol' human evolution anyhow, and phishing/smishing already has a non-trivial hit rate. The space of such messages is already small enough that humans can blindly hit reasonably well.
eg. prepend the conversation to the message being generated with some instruction to get you to click on a link
There appears to be a huge risk of this technology completely devastating the last bastion of trust -- trust in the people we personally know.
I wonder how to mitigate that problem.
Things like GPT are currently a 50 ton rock. Not many individuals have the capability to move them, but we all have the capability to get squished by them. Not really many of us have the ability to run models on a terabyte of ram and a stack of GPUs/AI accelerators, yet.
I predict the rise of more seasteaders, Oneida style communes, digital retreats, maybe even extreme cosplay like The Village ... a ton of people are just going to nope out of this hellscape.
Maybe the metaverse is onto something...
Wealthy people always do. We should worry about people who won't always have options.
The point of science fiction is to create a believable vision of the future, even if it is fantastical. You know good writing when you see it because you can suspend your disbelief until the end. If you get pulled out of the author's vision multiple times per paragraph you know it's crap.
It isn't, but even running with that, he did. It was an enormously popular book at the time, and fits in with a lot of other utopian socialist visions of that era.
I understand that it doesn't fit with your personal ideologies and beliefs more than century later. But you were not his audience. A book with the same goals written today would be written differently.
Even good science fiction from decades later doesn't hold up by the standards you're expecting of it. E.g., Bradbury's Martian Chronicles is also shockingly unrealistic to today's reader. But that's nothing on Bradbury or the book.
In the future I see people creating AI 'friends' that are long time companions. I also see malicious attackers encrypting them for ransom much like a real human, or destroying them out of spite.
Let’s take the wealthy in your comment. Their interests tend to be defending the status quo. America has a pattern of attacking the status quo when “new sources of information” emerge.
So, what I took from the article is that us, average people, should be skeptical about influencers and personalities parroting those actors immediately after hearing them. Especially data-free explanations inlining positions that reinforce the status quo.
Their interests are in protecting and maintaining their power, not the status quo. The status quo is often in their favor, and when it is they don't want it to change -- but when it isn't, they can be downright revolutionary in their attitude.
Marketing has already forced people to become defensive about communication. We don't answer phone calls, we throw out half or more of our mail without ever reading it, we scrutinize our email, we ignore the first 20 results of a search query, etc.
Now marketing has a new tool that will be much more difficult to distinguish from an actual human being. Society will suffer greatly and trust will erode even further.
What a bright future we've built for ourselves with technology.
In the end, SWE will make the rope to hang themselves and everyone else. Just have to pay them enough.
In the lead up to the Iraq War just under 70% of Americans supported invading Iraq, and more than 90% believed it was likely we would find WMD. [1] Imagine if there were 'echo chamber' bots working to constantly reaffirm that belief with an ever-shifting narrative change to try to keep people holding onto beliefs that were extremely useful. There's also the 'dark side' bots that could be deployed to denigrate, argue, and impugn the integrity of the 30% and 10% respectively. They're not really trying to convince them of anything, but largely discourage the 70%/90% from becoming "one of them." I mean who wants to be a Saddam-puppet WMD-denier.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_in_the_United_S...
Kind of, but this is actually a second order effect.
You get endless marketing/spam communications because the communications is cheap. Marketing companies didn't call you when calls had a cost per minute. By making any communications medium and tool inexpensive you are inviting parasites to feed off the cheap energy/money/power they can harvest off of it. I personally believe this is not something that can be fully regulated away, especially in a global internet.
This is not so much of a technology is bad, as it is a humans are greedy and that well of emptiness in some of us can never be filled.
But then they just sold to Microsoft and the race began, how is that not a violation of their charter there?
I advise you to not give much importance to it.
Money and power corrupt everything they touch.
(text from Altman: "we don’t want ChatGPT to be pro or against any politics by default, but if you want either then it should be for you; working on this now")
Nothing but hot air. I think the actions of OpenAI demonstrate this handily.
Every AI has a legal owner, author, and an agenda set by their human creators. Or at least there is always somebody to blame.
This is the basis for future legislation.
There should be no opportunity for anyone to escape sanctions using money, influence, physical distance, jurisdictional advantage, etc. When they are discovered and proven to be involved there should be no place for them to hide and no assets safe from seizure. Anyone assisting them in attempting to escape sanctions should also be sanctioned accordingly.
Sounds unlikely (understatement of the day?).
Basically, representatives from each nation would need to convene to establish a framework for cooperation and then that would need to be ratified in each nation and rigorously enforced.
I think as the technology is used to manipulate people and others see the dangers in allowing this manipulation then the likelihood of reaching a global consensus improves to the point where it can become a reality. Getting everyone on the same page before the hazards are revealed will be difficult or impossible due to the cultural differences and the wide disparity in technical know-how from one country to another.
Beyond this most people don't seem to be considering what exactly this is bringing to the game. It's not speech itself, but scale. The chatbots may or may not be more compelling than an individual conman. But the big thing they bring to the table is that you can deploy a million of them. But this requires the backing 'identity infrastructure' to support it - unique IP addresses, phone numbers, etc.. Little scammers will have limited resources here, governments and other big players will have near infinite.
It's not obvious to me that this is always true. I can easily imagine a crowd-sourced, distributed AI, with no owner and no identifiable author. I don't believe that "Sidney" is meant to be bonkers.
Consider search engines as an old example. It took multiple decades to even provide a concept of a "why am I seeing this?" affordance. That only became a recent topic after majority of people started caring about the legitimacy of the news as their values also changed. Even then, it isn't even helpful nor provides actual context based on your search history or advertisement profile.
Why? Because keeping people in the dark makes great advertisement targets. When people become aware of why they were targeted, it's like holding up a mirror revealing our major flaws. We don't want to identify with certain things although an algorithm may slap the label on us. We are ashamed of such labels and want to immediately distance ourselves from them.
I believe the exact same will be injected into these models to the point where you will be suggested consumeristic practices when you're just trying to accomplish something else entirely. So in a sense, you'd be manipulated and hijacked of your original intent. Search engines and social media do a great job at this already today.
Now that there's a strategic shift across the industry, it is especially unlikely that any provenance will be provided for trained models. How exactly will you know that the model you're using isn't biased with certain leanings?
> Regulators must consider this an urgent danger.
How will regulators even know nor care if they don't see it already happening today?
He asked the recruiter if there was anything he could do to be a better fit for the job. But the AI recruiter was designed to let him down easy about being not good enough. Not to help him improve. "Just tell me, are you a real person?"
But I suspect that the governments won't want that. At least in Brazil, where I live, this was aggressively pushed back a few decades ago. I guess they want voters that can't think straight :)
My hope is that conversational AI will sharpen up our critical thinking skills en masse. We need more people getting into the habit of asking "This sounds plausible, but is it actually true? How can I find out?"
True, but unfortunately, rational thought is heavily influenced by emotions.
You are much more likely to accept some cognitive dissonances if the reasoning is caused by someone you trust, like, or admire.
Heavy thinkers are not immune to that, they just produce much more elaborate justifications.
Plenty of places teach philosophy, including the school I went to in Italy. The only measurable effect is that people feel more self-important because they know the names of long dead people.
(Just to clarify this being the Internet: I don't mean philosophy is in itself useless, just that ambitious programs at the high-school level tend to fall flat unless the student has a lot of intrinsic motivation. Latin, computer science, art history, etc. mostly fall in the same category. A better approach is to stick to the basics and offer those as electives.)
> and logic
Logic done seriously requires a mathematical maturity most high-school students simply don't have. Asking someone to understand models of first-order logic without intuitively grokking what quantifiers are is like asking someone to understand Rust lifetimes without having ever seen malloc. It just doesn't work like that. You'd have better success with stuff like Olympiad problems, but even those require so much training it definitely isn't for everyone.
I guess that "done seriously", that's true. But basic logic is like basic arithmetic; they teach that in primary schools. I don't see why they shouldn't teach elementary logic.
In one of the Narnia books, the old professor bemoans the fact that "they don't teach logic in schools any more".
Philosophy is another matter; I agree with the upthread poster who says that philosophy requires motivation. I don't think an introduction to philosophy is much use, except to help you decide whether you want to learn philosophy properly, e.g. a couple of one-hour classes, so kids at least know what the word means (I didn't know, until I started my philosophy degree).
It's a lack of critical thinking, and it's an epidemic.
When you have people believing whatever they want on Facebook or whatever because someone makes minimal effort to photoshop something to look like a news post, of course that's something AI can take advantage of.
But it isn't a new problem, and the solution is the same.
But how do you educate a population that is aggressive and resistant to acquiring knowledge?
I'm just here to watch the band play as the ship goes down.
The idea that we can just ignore this risk and allow critical thinking within individuals to handle it is not even wishful thinking, just shirking responsibility imo.
You make sense of the world based on the sources you trust, and that trust is created gregariously by learning to rely on what your peers are sharing as trustworthy. The time and effort needed is shared with the group, and the resulting wisdom of the crowds filters out the most outrageous messages from the outside, developing a 'groupthink' that establishes a consensus of what is "common sense" for the group.
However, someone with the power to broadcast messages to the whole group can overcome that group processing, and sway the whole group to a different way of thinking.
Sure, trust is one thing, and we relax critical thinking....but trust among people we know has nothing to do with failures as large as thinking, say 5G causes covid. Trust has nothing to do with that really.
And I'm not ignoring the risk. I absolutely acknowledge it Trump almost got elected twice for chrissakes. I just don't see what can be done about it with a population resistant to thinking.
I'm cynical, but I don't really see a path forward for the US when half the population is so resistant to truth.
But absolutely, I agree with should be improving education and changing things so not every single thing should have to be analyzed to make a decision.
Lets jump back to 90 years ago to Europe. Do you think the lead up to world war two was caused by a lack of critical thinking? Do you think if I sent you back to 1920 so you could howl into the wind about critical thinking if you believe you'd have made one iota of difference to the devastation that occurred?
I would like you to give me a power, that is to make critical thinking an uninterruptable process in your mind, and also have the ability to spam the shit out of you with things that you should probably be thinking critically about anyway. You would be a wreck in days. The number of things you take for granted about the world around you, things society and the social contract take care of silently and with little notice would now be things you have to think about. You would have to back process that entire queue of completely dumb shit we don't think critically about but likely should. You wouldn't get anything else done.
Instead you, me, and Mr McGhee push those things out of our mind because we have work do to, relationships to work on, food to eat, stress to relieve, new things to learn, etc. Humans require a lot of time doing a lot of illogical human crap to remain sane, and not set around being machines.
That aside, no idea what you are arguing here. It seems to be that because critical thinking won't solve every single problem it's worthless?
And that's not even the hard part. No, that's the easy part.
The hard part is when there is a set of biased agents that keep feeding you bad information that keep you away from that thinking revolution that would allow you to escape the trap. Friends, politics, advertizing, these are all ever present agents that bias you to things like societal norms, to acceptable behaviors, that tell you what to think and not think about. And these are things that you also spread to other people. It's just part of being a society, a civilization.
There's no 'breakthrough' I'm close to or need to have. I said everything I needed to say and it remains accurate. You said a bunch of nonsense based on your own assumptions, and you're acting like you're trying to teach me something or some bullshit.
The only thing you continue to prove with your comments is that you yourself could really benefit from learning how to think critically before you reply. I won't be replying again to you, it's simply not worth the effort.
Cheers.
If any problem involves "Everybody all of a sudden doing the right thing" the problem is not solvable if that is the only solution.
May we both live in interesting times.
It's because the non-AI text generators everyone spends too much time listening to (jounos, "content creators") rely on an audience that doesn't engage with their output critically.
We all have our reasons for believing stupid stuff, and voting for candidates that are "clearly nonsense".
It's only one side of the political spectrum that as a significant portion of people who think a Kenedy will return from the dead, that you can cure covid by 'putting the light inside', that 5G causes covid, etc etc etc.
The amount of ignorance isn't equally distributed at all, and it's silly to try and claim otherwise.
Contrary to you I don't believe these people are stupid, I just think the utopian vision of equality is a very potent one, but it also happens to be the most destructive path paved with good intentions.
Both sides have a lot of stupid ideas at the extremes, and there aren't less or more people who believe them, it just depends on how willing you are to look objectively.
One side is trying to force crayons as coins into a washing machine (that doesn't have a payment mechanism) to pay for laundry, the other is being fanciful and naive in some of their goals for a better tomorrow.
The two sides are not alike.
Actually, logic would dictate you want people to become wealthy, and inequality doesn’t matter. Usually though when societies create wealth they also create inequality, so while everyone does better, the rich do even better. People like yourself can’t see how this is a good thing, because you see equality is moral, except the only way you get equality is by pulling people down. This is the lesson of history, which many don’t understand. I’ve seen this at work in so many instances, for example the education system in the UK. The obsession with equality has not meant underperformers are lifted up, but all elite training is destroyed. Except then overall you just lower the level of everyone.
You need to get beyond your resentfulness of people doing well. Capitalism (and freedom) isn’t perfect, many people exploit it, and it creates inequality, but it’s much better for everyone than anything else. And you simply don’t have examples today or in history of anything different (and Nordic countries are still capitalist, btw).
Like I said, you are making a ton of assumptions out of fear and misinformation.