Send Data with Sound

If you concern is humans being able to have some oversight/insight, then text is useful but in many cases not sufficient. The models are quite hard to understand and chaotic - what is to us trivial or no difference can change outcomes completely. This is well demonstrated via adverserial attacks etc. There is a lot of potential for stenography also with text, where messages can be hidden in plain sight.

Text is incredibly efficient and compressible. Combine it with some of the other projects mentioned here, and it would be like:

- Shall we switch to audio data for more efficient communication?

- Yes. [MODEM NOISES START]

It's probably not slower than words, the rate for English pronunciation is something like 150-200 words per minute only.

That said, the "gibberlink" demo is definitely much slower than even a 28.8k modem (that's kilobit). It sounds cool because we can't understand it and it seems kinda fast, but this is a terribly inefficient way for machines to communicate. It's hard to say how fast they're exchanging data from just listening, but it can't be much more than ~100 bits/sec if I had to guess.

Even in the audible range you could absolutely go hundreds of times faster, but it's much easier to train an LLM that has some audio input capabilities if you keep this low rate and likely very distinct symbols, rather than implementing a proper modem.

But why even have to use a modem though? Limiting communication to audio-only is a severe restriction. When AIs are going to "call" other AIs, they will use APIs… not ancient phone lines.

The core idea was to work with a commercial TV broadcaster in to embed the codes in certain ads, or have it as part of a TV show - so the "listener" would need an active app to handle it.

If it had all gone off well, the eventual plan was to have it be used on a live show where users could also interact. We had some prototypes ready with a native app - but then the Brexit referendum happened - and our company had a couple of clients pull out of upcoming projects - and the company got shuttered.

It's unclear to me too.

I'm not a lawyer, nor is my ham license even in the US, but perhaps "you can decode it by using our software" satisfies the legal requirements?

It's not, to my knowledge, deliberately obscured. That would be a legal no no, I think.

But yes, people have fought over VARA's state here.