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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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If you don't see how even the most basic of AI images, videos, deepfakes, etc. can manipulate the public, the electorate, popular opinion, or even sow just enough doubt as a cause a problem, then I don't know what to tell you.
People are already dying because of deepfakes and fake AI porn. We know that most people who see some headline on Facebook will never click farther to read it, and will just accept the headline and/or the synopsis as fact. They will accept something a 1000x re-shared image says, without sources or verification. The fact that a picture or vid might have a person with 8 fingers on one hand in the background isn't going to prevent them from taking in the message. And we've all literally seen people around the web say , explicitly, something to the effect of "I don't care if the story is true or not, it's a real issue we need to consider" when we know for a fact that it is not.
Yes, mis- and dis-information are far more of an existential thread than chem or bio weapons, and we know this because we are already seeing the consequences of it. If you refuse to see that, then you are lost.
You don't need AI for any of that. Determined state actors have been fabricating information and propagandizing the public, mechanical Turk style, for a long long time now. When you can recruit thousands of people as cheap labour to make shit up online, you don't need an LLM.
So no, I don't believe AI represents a new or unique risk at the hands of state actors, and therefore no, I'm not so worried about these technologies landing in the hands of adversaries that I think we should abandon our values or beliefs Just In Case. We've had enough of that already, thank you very much.
And that's ignoring the fact that an adversarial state actor having access to advanced LLMs isn't somehow negated or offset by us having them, too. There's no MAD for generative AI.
What beliefs and values would we be abandoning by fighting back against tech that is literally costing people their literal lives?
Hah I... think we're on the same side?
The original comment was justifying unregulated and unmitigated research into AI on the premise that it's so dangerous that we can't allow adversaries to have the tech unless we have it too.
My claim is AI is not so existentially risky that holding back its development in our part of the world will somehow put us at risk if an adversarial nation charges ahead.
So no, it's not harmless, but it's also not "shit this is basically like nukes" harmful either. It's just the usual, shitty SV kind of harmful: it will eliminate jobs, increase wealth inequality, destroy the livelihoods of artists, and make the internet a generally worse place to be. And it's more important for us to mitigate those harms, now, than to worry about some future nation state threat that I don't believe actually exists.
(It'll also have lots of positive impact as well, but that's not what we're talking about here)
Ah gotcha. I must have misunderstood the flow there. Yeah, definitely seems like we're mostly on the same side