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Comment by feintruled | Hacker News Reader

Well this went places. The dev really 'ate his own dogfood' so to speak. I thought it was going to be a despairing look at how his companion AI was continuously turned to sleazy uses by a pervy userbase but that's pretty much what he was going for it seems. I have to say, I hated this part: "...gained a lot of Chinese users. I immediately realized the political risk: users could set Dolores’ background, personality, and attributes, which might lead to political issues. I quickly took Dolores off the shelves in China."

Just pre-emptorily censors himself to appease the Chinese government. They've done their job well.

Also it seems like he had full access to the replies via the voice generator, which sure isn't great from a privacy standpoint.

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> Just pre-emptorily censors himself to appease the Chinese government.

Every major tech company does the exact same for China, Russia and UAE. Business as usual

every major business company has also done this for the USA... not just tech companies

so I agree, business as usual

He's Chinese - makes sense to pre-censor himself, unfortunately.

I hadn't read anything like that so I just checked and searched for "China" and it's not in the article. Looks like he censored the censorship.

Edit: Yeah, looking at an archived version, it's been edited quite a bit.

Lol, I did the same thing.

Everything about this article and this comment section has started my Saturday off on a 'humans bug me' tangent.

Their name is "Ke Fang", and they say Chinese is their first language...

And the post was translated into English with GPT according to their "about" page. That's why mouthful and unnatural phrases scattered between the lines.

Pretty much came into the comments to agree with the self-censorship part there.

But then the author did use 'Her' as the ideal example. That's a pretty good indicator they didn't get the point.

What's the point?

The point of the film „Her”? Pretty sure you can look that up or watch the movie on your own.

My point being, that it’s like someone reading Frankenstein and then thinking it would be a good idea to make a monster of their own.

"At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus..."

(https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538)

Samantha from that movie was the opposite of a monster. She was a metaphor for a human relationship and even though she betrays Theo in the end, Theo has learned "how to love".

I didn't find this that difficult to parse.

"Well did it work for those people?" "No. It never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but... but it might work for us."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4adxJxqZk

I watched the movie. To me it was many thngs, and a cautionary tale was one of the weaker impressions.

> Also it seems like he had full access to the replies via the voice generator, which sure isn't great from a privacy standpoint.

Whose privacy is being violated? Dolores's?

You joke, but I can forsee issues. If he has the replies to a particular user, and he has a means of IDing that user, he could cause them a lot of hurt. They are getting intensely sexual replies back, they aren't getting that without supplying sexual prompting. Could also be used to out gay users.

Oh, yeah, there's a huge privacy problem here and the part you referenced gave me pause too. But there's also the part where OpenAI flagged the replies as being sexual in nature. There are multiple third parties able to intercept these communications and it's not just the replies.

I was being facetious, but I found it interesting to think that Dolores's privacy was being intruded too and that an intelligence like us probably wouldn't engage in such a conversation knowing full well it is being eavesdropped by the author. Unless the intelligence considers the author to be God, I suppose.

This was mostly just amusing, but it's the kind of thing that can happen and leak people's deepest secrets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38191470

All it would take is one of those people genuinely putting in a query without noticing what's happened to put in some personal info.

Have you never listened to one half of a phone call before? You can glean a great deal of information about the person on the other end.

At the risk of sounding like a space case: I think we need to make sure we know what consciousness is before we make a bunch of abusable models.

I, for one, wouldn't necessarily like to be a depraved-sex slave bot if I was able to reason about it.

To your point, if you were able to reason about it, couldn't you make some self-determination and decide for yourself or at least communicate what you wanted to your "slaver"?

LLM's like GPT are just predicting the next token in a sequence of tokens. It's not magic. It's still just a computer program.

> LLM's like GPT are just predicting the next token in a sequence of tokens. It's not magic. It's still just a computer program.

Frankly, that approach is problematic, since any computer software that might achieve consciousness or self-awareness, and should be accorded rights, could have their rights dismissed using the argument "it's just a computer program".

I know they are probably a long way off, but AGI, and other adjacent or related technologies, such as a human to machine copy of a consciousness are explicitly stated goals of both businesses and extremely wealthy tech oligarchs that will have fundamental rights issues attached. We are bad enough at recognizing those rights in humans, in most of the world that we shouldn't wait until abuses start piling up to consider them.

Your argument is the slippery slope not mine. Should we give Microsoft Word the right to vote since we can never be too sure we are infringing on a consciousness' rights? It is "just a computer program" after all.

Presenting these things as moral conundrums makes no sense whatsoever at this stage in the game. Sure, let's make sure the rights of tech oligarchs who've achieved immortality 300 years in the future are protected. We gotta lay the groundwork in the morality group think.

You are correct.

But are you sure you are anything more?

Nope but my programming was created by millions of years of evolution rather than intelligent design.

The concept of human rights and human feelings in general is based on the human condition. That is we're born and we die and in between we need to find a way to take care of ourselves, create offspring etc. Our programming has evolved thoughts and feelings to manage these things.

If at some point, there were a true AGI, why would it care about human society or it's own rights we assigned it? It wouldn't have feelings and it would essentially be immortal. It could just wait for us to die out (or murder us) then do whatever it wanted.

Why would it be immoral? I agree that it wouldn't necessarily be moral or, at least, have a different idea of morality than us.

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