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Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

blog.openai.com

61–70 of 233 posts

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#61
post #48

Evil startup idea gleaned from paper: Use AI/ML to scour a sales prospect's online persona (social media) and build a 'vulnerability profile' and generate targeted, personalized cold-emails (or even phone calls eventually). Also identifies 'levers' for a particular person that can be used to influence a buying decision. May even pre-qualify leads for you and tell you when not to waste your time :) I mean, a good sale…

It's not an idea. You are already 5 years too late.

You don't need to scour online personas. Companies such as Acxiom and FullContact are just two of many which house identities of 10s of millions of individuals.

Then all that's needed to do is plug into twitters firehose and facebooks stream and voila. Real-time data based on what they are thinking/doing online.

Oh and connect to an RTB stream and get real-time where they are clicking. With enough data, you could forecast where they are going next.

Finally, have AI compose the content in the sales funnel to secure that conversion.

I can guarantee you, this is actively being worked on as I type.

Within 5 years, the entire marketing aspect will be mostly automated.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#62
post #48

Evil startup idea gleaned from paper: Use AI/ML to scour a sales prospect's online persona (social media) and build a 'vulnerability profile' and generate targeted, personalized cold-emails (or even phone calls eventually). Also identifies 'levers' for a particular person that can be used to influence a buying decision. May even pre-qualify leads for you and tell you when not to waste your time :) I mean, a good sale…

It's not an idea. You are already 5 years too late. You don't need to scour online personas. Companies such as Acxiom and FullContact are just two of many which house identities of 10s of millions of individuals. Then all that's needed to do is plug into twitters firehose and facebooks stream and voila. Real-time data based on what they are thinking/doing online. Oh and connect to an RTB stream and get real-time wher…

> It's not an idea. You are already 5 years too late.

Story of my life ;)

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#63
post #30

The disturbing thing about this paper to me - flashy though it may be - is what they left out rather than what they kept in. OpenAI appears to only be thinking of the crimes-against-individuals segment of malicious AI, rather then the crimes-against-humanity type of malicious AI that the surveillance advertising corporations who are supporting OpenAI are building. I am far, far less worried about an assassin's drones…

i dont share your concerns at all. my daily feelings and activities wouldnt change, whether facebook and google know about them or not. Contrast that to being killed by a drone.

privacy concerns is rather an interesting intellectual problem, and not a real one. if it was a real problem, people would change their use of those tools but they dont.

you can argue that loss of privacy allows corporations to manipulate us, but i see only trivial effects. look at how people vote and buy. i see more diversity and conclude less manipulation.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#64
post #30

The disturbing thing about this paper to me - flashy though it may be - is what they left out rather than what they kept in. OpenAI appears to only be thinking of the crimes-against-individuals segment of malicious AI, rather then the crimes-against-humanity type of malicious AI that the surveillance advertising corporations who are supporting OpenAI are building. I am far, far less worried about an assassin's drones…

I'm more concerned that AI will become a modern deity in that it's considered science and ought not to be questioned. Things like predictions of academmic success, criminal behavior, etc that impact the rights of individuals.

Hey, why would you want to think for yourself, when you have a computer do it for you?

A lot of people unfamiliar with Machine Learning are already showing these tendencies. I am by no means an expert in the field, only a interested amateur, but I know about the limitations and I think its important that people are taught the basics of ML. More people should view ML/AI as "a complex process minimizing an multivariable error function over a multivariable input field", instead of a "computer that thinks". This way, more of these applications of it might be questioned.

I think, the only way to stop these tendencies is to teach the fundamental basics and limitations of ML in High School. It might be possible, you don't even have to introduce tensor algebra or even vector spaces to accomplish it at this stage of education.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#67
post #43
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm more concerned about Google using AI to mine every conversation I've ever had or my browsing history to classify me as a dissiden before I apply for a visa to travel to China or the United States, or as a deadbeat before I apply for a bank loan, or sick before I apply for insurance, or as unrehabilitatable before I apply for parole. I'm quite paranoid about this, yet whenever I speak to people about it either p…

Lots of people care about this. I think the solution is to produce policy papers about this risk complete with proposals for how to go about curtailing those kinds of abuses. The EU still cares a lot about privacy, and other government bodies are happy to help if you can suggest how.

> ...and other government bodies are happy to help if you can suggest how.

Ah, you mean like the US punishing the company that leaked one out of every two social security numbers of its citizens? Or China, a country worldly-known for the Great Firewall? Or Russia, in which you either hand out data about your customers to the government, or your business fails?

I mean, the EU's actually giving a shit about their citizens' privacy, but they are pretty lonely in that fight. My country (bordering EU) doesn't give a shit, and neither does Serbia, a country that's supposed to join the EU in the next decade (yeah, I know, wishful thinking).

Even if you live in a so-called democracy, chances are that you can make exactly 0 effect. And there are all sorts of other problems which have much higher priority. FFS, I can't run to be a president of my own country. It's in our constitution that you have to declare yourself as a member of one out of three ethnicities just to be eligible to run. The country lost three cases in the European Court of Human Rights because of this and similar fuckups in our constitution, oldest of which will be a decade old next year, and our constitution is still unchanged.

I truly do care about my own privacy and about my citizen's privacy. Yet, if I decided to advocate for certain things inside my own country to make it better, I would have at least three problems much higher in my agenda than online privacy.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#68
post #12

It may be superfluous to point this out but this seems to be talking about malicious uses of narrow AI, rather than malicious strong AI. The only defense against a malicious strong AI is, of course, a friendly strong AI.

At the moment "strong AI" is science fiction so what could you possibly say about it? How do you even know what the "only defense" is?

A super-virus that has a 100% mortality rate, is incredibly infectious, and stays dormant for 1 year before killing the host. There's a fiction (I literally just made it up). Is it impossible to say anything about it?

A bomb that is 1,000 times for powerful than a nuclear weapon. Again, currently science fiction. Can't say anything about that either?

The fact that it doesn't exist right now doesn't mean we can't say anything about it, and the fact that it's potentially dangerous means we should be trying, at least, to think about it. Assuming it really is as dangerous as some people claim, do you really want to wait around until it's no longer science fiction, and only then, after it's too late, start thinking about it?

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#69

I find it quite funny, rather intruiging, that we seem to have gone full circle on trusted sources of information. Historically, a face-to-face meeting was considered as the ultimate legitimate and trustworthy way. Not story or rumors or witnessing, since the courts say people can be "decieved", "traumatised", etc. Then came microphones, cameras, CCTV in the 20th century, and then they became the ultimate trusted sou…

> I'm saddened that there are actual "smart" people who waste their days to work on these malicious forms of AI, be it Google's almost entire arsenal, or anything. However, i'm not surprised they do, but it is still sad. Am sure the usual justification to apply salve to your conscience for this sort of activity is the trope that the 'bad guys' will do it anyway, so we need to do it before them to counter them and be…

Calling it a trope or a justification doesn't make it wrong.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#70
post #20

I was thinking recently, isn't any usage of Strong AI is in fact the same as slavery and, hence, immoral?

An interesting moral question.

I think there's at least some consensus around the idea that Strong AI doesn't necessarily imply consciousness, and without consciousness, it isn't slavery/immoral. Of course, consciousness isn't well-defined or well-understood, which is why we're not really sure about whether that's true, or how to make sure a Strong AI doesn't have consciousness.

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