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Comment by StarterPro | Hacker News Reader

Call me whatever you want, but this technology should not exist.

People to just create lifelike videos of anything they can put their mind to, is bound to lead to the ruining of many peoples' lives.

As many people that are aware and interested in this technology, there is 100x people who have no idea, don't care or can't comprehend it. Those are the people that I fear for. Grab a few pictures of the grandkids off of facebook, and now they have a realistic ransom video to send.

Am i being hyperbolic? I don't think so. Anything made by humans can be broken. And once its broken and out there, good luck.

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"Lighters should not exist. Anyone can start a fire, all the time, everywhere. This will lead to an inferno in no time." etc.

Your sentence is a strawman but the logic does apply quite soundly to e.g. guns.

lighters have surely led to many infernos

People will adapt pretty fast and will stop trusting videos

You mean like they stopped trusting the Internet, or YouTube videos, or newspapers, or old broadcast TV news? Except they didn't, because it's impossible to live life successfully without information sources beyond one's eyes and ears.

That's why this technology should not exist.

uhhh… i would respond differently to your rhetorical question…

there’s never been greater distrust of legacy media, and the fact that you can’t trust everything you read on the internet has been a trope for decades

Good point.

Maybe it's a useful thing to ponder why faked photoshopped pictures were never a big problem in human life. I think maybe it's because we use a lot of pictures in our lives, sure. But ultimately we have so much context that a fake would be easy to detect and therefore irrelevant. At most people used photoshop to alter images of documents.

Becoming good enough at Photoshop to do a convincing face swap was something that took a lot of time and skill. Not everyone with a copy of Photoshop had the ability to create a compromising photo of a politician, for example.

Should written language not exist as well? We can never say for sure that the words are true

> stop trusting

Yeah, that's a problem. Successful societies are built on trust, shared reality and communication. Democracy is a conversation.

The big problem with technology is you can't uninvent technologies that turn out to be net bad. It becomes a perpetual curse once it's invented.

It’s kinda pointless to say though

You can’t uninvent something

It's called banning, and it happened many times in human history

And it never worked? Prohibitionism fails

Yeah, that's why we have school shootings every day in Europe and Australia. Oh wait, we don't. Banning might not work well for some things, but this can totally be banned. Your comment is a blatant misrepresentation of the effectiveness. At best. At worst, it's willful undermining of democracy.

>>Yeah, that's why we have school shootings every day in Europe and Australia. Oh wait, we don't. Banning might not work well for some things, but this can totally be banned.

Sure, now let's talk about knife wounding and acid attacks...

The fundamental issue of human violence still exists.

You're consciously changing the topic from the effect of banning guns to violence as human nature. That's low.

It depends what you ban and how you ban it. I can think of many cases where banning does work.

Alcohol production didn't require massive amounts of funding, energy and compute power. Any shmuck could make moonshine in their bathtub. Shut down OpenAI and make their racket illegal, and who's going to have the resources to continue their work?

China.

You're right, there's a very real danger that bad actors within OpenAI could hand their research to China. But that's not an inevitability. We've managed to block certain countries from developing nuclear weapons technology. We can do it with this too.

I wasn't even thinking about an OpenAI defector releasing secrets. I think it's a matter of research and compute power, both of which China is increasing in these sectors so they don't trail behind the USA.

If we stop developing our tech, China will continue advancing even without leaks from OpenAI, and eventually they will develop better models, even if it takes another decade. Banning something only to cower in fear of ourselves while we watch someone else use it to destroy us seems like poor planning.

I can't believe you found that to be a worthwhile comment to type.

"Writing should be restricted to the educated few who can responsibly carry the Church's message." -anti-technologist from 1000 years ago, probably

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