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Researcher builds anti-Russia AI disinformation machine for $400
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Why not. The people who are to blame are the people commuting the act.
The thing itself has no ethical or moral impact until it's used by a person. I think it feels good to blame an inventor but that's scapegoating the real culprits. Only way I see your argument making sense is if they intended their tools to be user for unethical reasons.
Because people should consider the pros and cons of what they work on not just pretend that none of the responsibility for those cons is theirs. AI is one of the things that could wipe out humanity. Not in the terminator sense but through unparalleled distruption of the economy and by facilitating a wedge between people through the production of propaganda like none that weve ever seen. i.e deepfakes, personally tailored propaganda etc.
Does it? Doesn't that threat exist even without AI. At its current state its a glorified chatbot. Get rid of it, we still have every think tank filled with quants, statisticians, social scientists and marketing teams pushing all that propaganda. Its not AI doing it. Its humans.
But AI does have potential to also develop new medicines. New materials. It has potential for a lot more good.
It also has a lot of potential to give people some powerful pocket access to some basic services they normally wouldn't have. Imagine an AI trained to help people sort out their finances. Act like an r/askdocs. Help with questions about new hobbies.
So where you see panic, other people see hope. And it isn't the inventors job to tell you or others how to use something.
If we destroy ourselves with every bit of advancement then we deserve it. It would be an inevitability.
Yes. Your point?
That AI isn't the issue
I'm saying that the world is facing many threats, and all of them need to be addressed. Including some AI.
What's the threat AI poses exactly?
Well, there are a lot of threats from AI that are popularised today. Some of them are fake, crazy, or stupid, but others are real. Here are some threats that are real, in my opinion.
In trying to use AI for good, we may give too much power to an AI that we do not understand well enough, and whose motivations are not clear. Worse still, this AI might have motivations that we humans could not understand, even if we wanted to. Such an AI may not value humans at all.
Another threat is that a country like China creates an AI and puts it in charge of their soft power program. It may be possible for an AI to be so intelligent that it could manipulate the world in ways that humans physically could not understand. This could allow China to not only literally take over the world, but also ensure that everybody with any kind of power is absolutely thrilled about it. (Anybody without the power to stop this AI would be disregarded in its calculations, no matter how much they hate the AI. This could easily include most humans.)
One thing AI has already been doing for a decade to our great detriment is optimising the ad revenue of search engines and social networks, with a total disregard for all other consequences.
All of these threats are not new. People have been talking about them for years, now. You should pay more attention.