Time to act on the risk of efficient personalized text generation | Hacker News Reader

Time to act on the risk of efficient personalized text generation

arxiv.org

57 pointsJimmc41434 comments

The proliferation of harmful AI capabilities has likely already occurred. Its naive to not accept this reality when tackling this. A more realistic approach would be to focus on building more robust systems for detection, attribution, and harm mitigation.

The paper makes some good points - it doesn't take a lot of data to convincingly emulate a writing style (~75 emails) and there is a significant gap in legislation as most US "deepfake" legislation explicitly excludes text and focuses heavily on image/video/audio

Agreed, it's just my experience, but for fb posts, I usually get over 80% accuracy in tone and voice using open source llms and maybe a dozen public posts from the original author.

I have the dread that in a relatively short amount of time the personal traits in peoples writing will over time decrease and may essentially end.

All our written interaction will have been polished and enhanced by one LLM or another into a uniform template.

My first thought to reading what you wrote was fast denial, but the more I thought about it, I agree. We’ve seen vocal accents decline with globalized media, we’ve seen slang become more global, same with the entire English language. For years my text messages have been de-personalized by picking the autocomplete word choice where it makes sense, so why wouldn’t better LLMs expand that to even more written text?

That said, I suspect this won’t remain true in literary circles nor in certain professional contexts - where word choice is an art or signal, it will remain valuable. Politicians won’t sound like ChatGPT, for example. Think of some of the most famous modern politicians… they all have a unique way of speaking that makes it clear who’s talking.

Perhaps ironic, but I feel compelled to point out that:

"That said,"

...is a bog-standard ChatGPT-esque way to begin one's "summarize and wrap up" paragraph :D

Is it? Because the paragraph-in-question that starts with this doesn't actually summarize any points. Not only that, but the phrase doesn't actually have any rhetorical connection to summarization.

> All our written interaction will have been polished and enhanced by one LLM or another into a uniform template.

Isn't that just a natural continuation of a global homogenization of human culture and experience?

If you visit anywhere in Europe, or Asia, or the Americas you now have virtually the same 'a la starbucks' coffee culture (even in countries with strong cafe cultures). Same lighting, same minimalist furniture, same music.

Couples now take the same style of wedding/newborn photos across the globe.

Music globally has become less, not more, diverse.[0]

A loss of writer's voice or style would be just another step in this global 'blandenization' of human experience/aesthetics.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-proves-pop...

Just because the same capitalists are running the same ventures in countries outside of the Western nations does not mean their local cultures have become homogenized any more than Western cultures are actually defined by Starbucks and ubiquitous fast food.

> From a philosophical viewpoint, the danger inherent in the new reality of mankind seems to be that this unity, based on the technical means of communication and violence, destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence. This destructive process can even be considered a necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would be a shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition. It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would simply disappear. This leveling down would be much more radical than the leveling to the lowest common denominator; it would ultimately arrive at a denominator of which we have hardly any notion today.

-- Hannah Arendt

I doubt it'll matter much. If the future actually turns out to be people using LLMs to write content, and other people using LLMs to read content, we'll probably give up on long-form writing entirely and just pass data around in some sort of LLM-to-LLM data format.

Eliminating both the creator AND the customer? It’s an almost perfect business model.

I think that has already largely happened. Writing has become more homogenous on the web. It is rare that I read anything with any real personal writing style anymore.

There are bloggers with distinctive writing styles, but most bloggers write in a fairly generic "blogger style", a bit like the writing equivalent of the ~universal "youtube video essay voice".

I would say the prevalent of automatic spelling and grammar checkers has has a bit of an influence. I find Outlook often "corrects" something I write to an alternative style that is not any more correct than what I wrote.

What is the point of using an LLM to pad out something that could be shorter? People would rather read less. The proper uses of an LLM, it seems to me, are to proofread and critique.

There are lots of perverse incentives baked into the web today. Eg. payouts based on time spent on content.

Most readers aren't attentive enough to notice a person's style enough that you have to resort to an LLM to fake it.

I guess there's 3 players in the games that often get invoked in discussions about AI cogsec:

- the corporation running the AI

- the user

- the AI, sometimes - depending on the particular conversation's ascription of agency to the AI

It seems the downstream harms are of 2 kinds:

- social engineering to give up otherwise secured systems

- 'people engineering' - the kind of thing people complain about when it comes to recommender systems. "Mind control", basically, y'know. [0]

Things like r/LocalLlama and the general "tinkerer" environment of open source AI makes me wonder if it wouldn't be rather trivial in some sense for users to build the same capabilities but for personal protection from malign influences. Like a kind of user-controlled "debrief AI". But then, of course, you might get a superintelligence that can pretend to be your friend but is actually more like Iago from Othello.

But is that really a likelihood in a situation where the user can make their own RLHF dataset and fit it to the desired behavior? Generally I'd expect the user to get the behavior they were looking for. Plus, like immune system memory, people could continually train new examples of sleights into it. I guess maybe there could be a hint of the "Waluigi problem", perhaps.

[0] I think it does the people who are distressed about it a disservice to saturate all their news channels with reports about how they are utterly incapable of outwitting an algorithmic super intelligence. But that's a different discussion altogether

> it wouldn't be rather trivial in some sense for users to build the same capabilities but for personal protection from malign influences.

Yes the implication of AI in economics and society is like that of scraping, spam, scalping or fraud, ie leading to an arms race. Insurance companies denying claims, citizens fighting back filing appeals with AI. Captchas and fingerprinting to protect against bots, that use OCR and now AI to bypass the defenses.

Well, this idea of increased net productivity relies on the fact that we don’t waste the excess on fighting each other in the same games we were playing all along. It’s like a feud between tribes going from sticks to swords to guns. It’s only when you replace the zero-sum activity with a positive value that the world actually improves.

The techno-optimists see only potential in an all-else-equal world, which isn’t the world we live in. Potential is irrelevant in the face of incentives.

> Currently, the Huggingface Hub provides model publishers the option of requiring pre-registration and/or pre-approval to download a specific model’s weights. However, downstream (e.g., finetuned) or even direct versions of these models are not required to enforce these controls, making them easy to circumvent. We would encourage Huggingface and other model distributors to enforce that such controls propagate downstream, including automated enforcement of this requirement (e.g., via automated checks of model similarity).

None of the watermarking methods I have seen work in this way. All of them require extra work at inference time. In other words, Gemini might have watermarking technology on top of their model, but if I could download the weights I could simply choose not to watermark my text.

Stepping back, in section 6 the authors don’t address what I see as the main criticism: authentication via writing style is extremely weak and none of the mitigation methods actually work. If you want to prevent phishing attacks I would suggest the most salient factor is the identity of the sender, not the style of writing of the email itself.

Another thing that annoys me about these “safety” people is they ignore the reality of running ML models. Getting around their “safeguards” is trivial. Maybe you think it is “unsafe” to talk about certain Tiananmen Square events. Whatever change you make to a model to mitigate this risk can be quite easily reversed using the same personalization methods the paper discusses.

The risk is not that one cannot forge correspondance in the style of another.

The risk is that any one of us peasants can do it without having to have a bunch of other people in on it

That’s exactly what the problem is.

I’ve done some content work using LLMs. Once I started to think about how inevitably it’ll get coupled with ad networks and how anybody can do this stuff, it made me go this isn’t good.

On the bright side, it might push us back to paper or other means of exchanging info. The cost should be prohibitive enough that it increases the quality of content. That’s very hypothetical, though. Mailers are already a direct contradiction.

My fear is that it will be used for scams

https://archive.ph/uMRXa

Ordinary people have trouble seducing other people because they can't deliver perfect mirroring because of their own self (e.g. they are uncomfortable adapting to another person's emotional demands because of the needs of their own self or aspects of their self that are unappealing to the other person manifest) Sociopaths and people with narcissistic personality disorder do better than most people precisely because their self is less developed.

An A.I. has no self so it has no limits.

Imagine being catfished for years, and in the end you discover that not only was the person who catfished you not who they said they were, they weren’t even human.

Is it truly better if they were human though?

"Doesn't matter, had cybersex"

Do sociopaths and people with narcissistic personality disorder do better at seduction? How would we know? Would a double-blind experiment setting up blind dates between sociopaths and average people to rate their seductiveness even be ethical if sociopaths are dangerously skilled at it?

At the very least they are not hindered by any conscience or empahty preventing their efforts and that is a major "advantage"

I'm not sure about seduction. Afaik, one of the defining traits is being very adept at manipulation.

Consider

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Manson

I find this whole discussion tiring. Really you go after the fraudsters and their enablers. They're in another jurisdiction? Who moves the money for them? Go after those people.

Look this is not fancy work. But writing about limiting models is just useless when it comes to fraud prevention. Why are we talking about watermarking models? Because it's easier than doing the hard work of policing money flows.

I don't think the important risk of efficient personalized text generation is impersonation as the article claims.

Humanity has already seen harmful effects from social media algorithms that efficiently identify content a person can't turn away from even if they consciously want to. The prospect of being able to efficiently generate media that will be maximally persuasive to each individual viewer on any given issue is terrifying.

I was actually looking into this idea. Using AI to select the content that would achieve the most engagement. Click bait and rage bait certainly exists. I'm not entirely convinced that having optimized content is really what matters so much as having it exist for people to see and getting it in front of as many people as possible. My own thoughts are definitely a little mixed. Video content might be a little different. I was only looking at text content.

Let's just concentrate this ability in the hands of few, so they can do it responsibly.

I’m far from convinced these hackernews threads on this stuff aren’t heavily botted.

the holy grail of course is adapting the text of the novel to the readers mood in realtime via smartwatch monitor and making them go and buy something before they reach the end of the chapter.

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