Deepfakes start ringing in voters' ears
aipoliticalpulse.substack.com
aipoliticalpulse.substack.com
It is not just elections, but the complete end of privacy which also means the end of free societies which I wrote about as well here.
https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-end-of-privacy-end-of-sanity
I still haven't seen any proposals that have any high confidence for counter balance.
If AI solves all disease, is it still worth it if we are living in nice gilded cages?
But everyone who is worried about AI existential risk wiping out humanity, I'm not sure they have considered that an all powerful AI could easily create a mind virus to control everyone. Why not, billions of resources at your disposal until not needed. You would be perfectly happy doing the AI's bidding as it rewires your brain to get a dopamine boost for your obedience.
We do not actually know if an all powerful AI would try to manipulate humanity (it absolutely might, but we do not know), but we know for a fact there are a lot of people right now already trying to do that, and AI tools will make it easier for them to do so.
I'm more concerned about the societal implications for AI used as "intended".
Such as I've elaborated on FYI
We would do to remember thw world before. The abuse of digital technology for surveillance, fraud, impersonation, spamming, hacking, tracking, behavioural prediction and influence..... an entire world of shit, was already doing just great.
It would be a shame to fixate on "AI" as a Hollywood villain, which would be to miss the real problem. For the past 40 years digital technology has been on a trajectory to dehumanise and dominate. Let's think about why, and who is doing the deeds.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves"AI is simply a power upgrade for all the institutions who wish to control thought and social engineer society to their liking.
I remember hearing a lot about "democratizing" AI a few years ago, but now I just hear about "alignment," which is sort of the opposite. competing institutions, by definition, aren't aligned in their goals, so how could their AIs be?
In other words, google, still owns search, instead of like presearch, and rest of big tech own social media. The alts represent still an insignificant portion of users.
I hope open source AI can have greater success, but the users are motivated by convenience and not freedom or privacy.
Yes, alignment has so many obvious problems that are simply hand waved away currently. One of the best simple quotes on the subject "Demonstrably unfriendly natural intelligence seeks to create provably friendly artificial intelligence."
Agreed, but that's actually helped open-source AI too! Stable Diffusion beat DALL-E 2 because you could actually run it, you didn't have to be a vetted influencer or whatever OpenAI required at the time. And it's hung on because you can fine-tune it to make porn, or celebrities, or even just anime. The least convenient model is the one you don't have access to (or that can't/won't do what you're asking of it.)
That's a great quote on alignment.
This is only true if you accept that most discussions are had via online forums and social media.
I wouldn't be surprised if we all just simply moved away from online communication rather than letting society collapse.
It's a far-off (?) and abstract, "in the limit" question, and I'm probably as horrified as you are, but our ancestors would probably be horrified by how their sacred cows are eviscerated on a daily basis by modern societies. :p (Death is a neat "mental refresh" of the human mind in the abstract when viewed that way, allowing it to adapt to new realities.)
Yes. All matters of a free society seemingly will be lost. It is not directly AI. I've seen this coming long before as the progression of technological power simply points to that outcome. I don't see a way out of the dystopian trap. AI is just an accelerator that arrived a bit sooner than expected.
All the people who thought this was mind-numbingly obvious got shouted down by people who "know better". Yet here we are.
This is the catch-22 of privacy: it's great that AT&T can't snoop on my calls, but that means malicious robocall attacks can only be detected and prevents using signals other than content, which makes it tremendously more challenging.
It's kinda got me curious: what recording would be so obviously fake?
Even if it works, what's the upside? Now your brand is associated with negativity and people are thinking "maybe they didn't say that, but why take the risk? X is a safer bet".
In Fall he talks more about how that kind of layered infosphere arises - and he’s not optimistic about it. The ‘flood the zone with the worst possible bot generated trash’ defense is applied directly on behalf of Maeve in Fall as a response against the post-truth impossibility of publishing the truth in the face of conspiracy narratives. It doesn’t work. The bots - and others like them - destroy the value of the internet as we know it. Everyone retreats to AI-mediated (‘edited’) information bubbles.
I think it’s sort of the current that runs through most Stephenson futurism.
Yes, it degrades trust, but no, this does not result in enlightenment. It results in a depoliticized populace that let the rulers get away with almost anything. See: Russia. Domestic Russian propaganda isn't designed to be believable, it's designed to make people lose trust in everything and cynically withdraw from politics, turning democracy into dictatorship.
See also: terrorism. It does not "shake society awake," it sends society running towards the nearest strong-man archetype that promises safety, which is the exact opposite of "awake."
With AI, anyone can be an impersonator.
People who are racists didn't need to hear Obama call his healthcare bill Obamacare to oppose it on those grounds, even as it benefited them: and we know that because Obama never called it that. Republicans did. People who are anti-trans due to the widespread (and wrong) belief that trans-people abuse children didn't need to see trans people abusing children, they needed to be told it was happening by a figure they trusted. People who hear the call phrases like "cultural marxism" have no idea what the hell that means, beyond "the things I don't like" and the thing that it's being attached to, if it isn't within their Things I Don't Like set currently, will be added to it with little thought or consideration for why it's there.
Why all this happens is a larger topic that we don't really have the space here for and I'm probably already skirting HN's rules on politics pretty hard so I'll digress and just say: bigots are bigots, they were bigots before they heard whatever talking head they like say whatever really inappropriate and disgusting thing that they are now parroting, and now they're just a bigot that has that new thing to say. And humans are excellent at motivated reasoning: once they've decided a thing, like that Democrats eat babies to attain eternal life, you will be hard pressed to make them understand that they don't. It's probably why a lot of these same people also trend very well in religion: there's a subset of humanity that just really likes the idea of nice sounding bullshit that confirms whatever bullshit they heard before, and if you're willing to feed it to them, you can parlay that into attention and eventually, money.
While I certainly oppose the use of AI tools being used to generate photorealistic evidence of Biden consuming babies on the weekend, and it will almost certainly be used for that, I have a hard time seeing that as really changing the field at all. There is a huge, huge section of the populace that would already believe that and having it rendered in perfect HD video would... certainly be upsetting, but in the age we're in, if you're aware that AI video can be created that way, to that quality, you would already assume this is a forgery, unless you were motivated enough to resist that thought. At which point it doesn't matter, it could be VHS quality that looked like it was taped next to a rare earth magnet and transmitted through a fun house mirror room, and Biden had seventeen fingers: you'd still believe it.
If it all it did was agree with pre-existing prejudices, that's not how they got that way.
And, IME, post political extrenists didn't get that way from fake news at all, but the problem with convincint fake news (whether AI is involved or not) isn’t that it creates extremists or otherwise influences ideology, but the reactions it creates in people applying their non-extremist ideology through the lens of false factual premises.
Ideological indoctrination isn’t primarily based on news, true or false. It doesn't work from views on fact to get people to adopt extreme values.