Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

blog.openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 233 posts

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#111

Post by tritium »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #87
nerdponx wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

already accept it's happening and inevitable I've almost given up. I'm pretty much despondent at this point. There is a booth on my way to work where they give out free Lays chips in exchange for your photo. The gimmick is that it's like a photo booth. I asked the attendant to read the privacy policy, and it's frightening, to say the least. I have no doubt that they are contracting with some AI consultant to be able…

Have you ever stood in line for passport/ID control at an airport or anywhere else any time in the past decade? If yes, that government's security and intelligence services (and anyone they share data with) have enough video frames of your your face to build a high fidelity facial recognition model. And it's linked to your name, nationality and passport number.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because one party is doing it, doesn't mean we want everyone doing it, or even that we wanted it to ever happen at all.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#112

Post by cr0sh »

maze-le wrote: post #64
katzgrau wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 multivariabl…

> More people should view ML/AI as "a complex process minimizing an multivariable error function over a multivariable input field"

I don't know where you're from, but a statement like that here in the United States would surely get you an ass-kicking.

Ok - a bit of hyperbole there, but not far from it; most people would simply hear "wah-wah-wah-wah" and have no clue what you were talking about; others would fall asleep.

Could you teach high schoolers what "minimization" is, and what it means to "minimize" a "multivariable error function over a multivariable input field"? Maybe some of them, but even there I'd bet the majority won't get it, and those that do will only have it for the time it takes to pass a test, then promptly forget about it.

Honestly, there are plenty of other subjects I'd rather see taught in high school (and earlier) to kids, the greatest being critical thinking methods and how to question how you know what you know. Perhaps along with philosophy (general and "of mind"), and a few other similar subjects.

I doubt we'll ever see this any time soon, though, as such knowledge would undermine much of the status-quo, particularly religion.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#113

Post by ableal »

banderman wrote: post #90
nerdponx wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

already accept it's happening and inevitable I've almost given up. I'm pretty much despondent at this point. There is a booth on my way to work where they give out free Lays chips in exchange for your photo. The gimmick is that it's like a photo booth. I asked the attendant to read the privacy policy, and it's frightening, to say the least. I have no doubt that they are contracting with some AI consultant to be able…

It's the same as the Microsoft "How old are you?" and Google "What painting do you look like?" apps. People don't think about what's going on behind something that seems trivial.

In Microsoft's case, my guess is that it was just a research experiment. It worked pretty well on a few family photos I threw at it.

I think that the site is not even working anymore. Anyways, they said they were not keeping the images, and I have no reason to doubt it.

It's a pity that Microsoft is going only after the corporate market, Oracle style, and not trying to make money from consumers any more. That leaves Apple as about the only big independent player in that field. We could have benefited from the competition.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#114

Post by ScottBurson »

kypro wrote: post #93
Eridrus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm quite paranoid about this, yet whenever I speak to people about it either people don't care, or already accept it's happening and inevitable. I have yet to see much in the way of concrete harms from the supposed privacy issues plaguing online advertising. Everyone has a favorite hypothetical situation where Google dobs you in to the Chinese government, but no evidence that anything of the sort is actually happe…

The problem manifests in different ways though. I'm not so concerned about obvious violations of privacy like the one you mentioned, because it's so obvious that they are wrong. Let's say you tweet some anti-American stuff from time to time and the US government decides they want you to stop. They probably won't put a bullet in your head, but they might dig up information on you and arrest you for something totally u…

Joe Nacchio [0] is a better example than Shkreli. Convicted of insider trading, allegedly in retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the NSA.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#115

Post by ynniv »

book_mentioned wrote: post #102
nyolfen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this comment is incoherent

My takeaway/TL;DR: OpSec is harder vs. AI (ever-vigilant pattern matching) than humans. But it did drift into discussing a more offensive AI than passive monitoring done today.

How many sentences is TL these days? But yes, this is an offensive AI, and no, we aren’t passive-only today - look at the IoT botnets.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#116

Post by tree_of_item »

tudelo wrote: post #101
seren wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some every day scenario, with an impact, * You apply for a loan, it is refused * Your admission, for you or your children, to a school or university is refused because more worthy people have applied * Your job application is refused, All because of a fuzzy social score, that is mined from your contacts, activities on social network, meta data gathered from your smartphone in an opaque way, CCTV cameras, etc I mean i…

Doesn't the vast amount of data we have allow for things like getting a loan without knowing a guy? As for point 2, if someone is more worthy... why is that bad? And why should an employer not use information easily accessible to them to determine the character of a potential employee when they only can have brief correspondence via interviews? I'm not sure if you're talking about future implications or what but it s…

> As for point 2, if someone is more worthy... why is that bad?

Someone is "more worthy" according to an opaque machine learning algorithm. Your line is exactly the danger: people are going to confuse "the computer says X" with "X is true".

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#117

Post by tudelo »

tree_of_item wrote: post #116
tudelo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the vast amount of data we have allow for things like getting a loan without knowing a guy? As for point 2, if someone is more worthy... why is that bad? And why should an employer not use information easily accessible to them to determine the character of a potential employee when they only can have brief correspondence via interviews? I'm not sure if you're talking about future implications or what but it s…

> As for point 2, if someone is more worthy... why is that bad? Someone is "more worthy" according to an opaque machine learning algorithm. Your line is exactly the danger: people are going to confuse "the computer says X" with "X is true".

I agree that it could be frustrating, and maybe someone will not make that distinction. But either way, these are decisions that have to be made. What is your alternative to how the decisions are made? In the end, you are either leaving it to a human decision who is going to make a choice based on some heuristics and prejudice or an algorithm which is going to make a choice based on heuristics and prejudice. I'm not sure if you have a problem with the lack of distinction between a human and an algorithm or the idea of a lack of fairness. The decisions that require something like a machine learning algorithm were probably opaque to begin with. Fairness doesn't seem so different in either case...

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#118

Post by Zak »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #82
Mizza wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's the difference between what they're calling "authoritarian states", the mustache-twirling dictators of the 20th century targeting their political opponents (a fetish in papers like this), and the _new_ form of corporate-driven mass surveillance and resulting fascism that is emerging. There is no need for an evil central power targeting threats to itself, but instead we have seen/are seeing the rise perva…

You are right on. To confine this worry to 'authoritarian states' is beyond naive. Could an A.I. program like you are discussing have prevented the school shooting in Florida by alerting the police of the shooter's state of mind and intentions? If an A.I. could save kids, is there any way we would not be demanding the A.I. protector be installed on every computer and mobile device today? It would be so easy to see ho…

An AI could have possibly alerted the police to the shooter's intentions if it was monitoring the right things, however, a human did alert the FBI, and they failed to act.

With correct follow-through, AI could be a useful tool for narrowing down who is a credible threat, but I agree there's a huge risk in relying on it too heavily and punishing people for pre-crime.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#119

Post by tudelo »

seren wrote: post #106
tudelo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the vast amount of data we have allow for things like getting a loan without knowing a guy? As for point 2, if someone is more worthy... why is that bad? And why should an employer not use information easily accessible to them to determine the character of a potential employee when they only can have brief correspondence via interviews? I'm not sure if you're talking about future implications or what but it s…

I am talking about a future that is already being built today, piece by piece. I am well aware we are already judged with multiple bias, in a an opaque way. But this is not systematic, hopefully Employer A can have different bias than Employer B. For me, the dystopic part would be to have a single, automated source of "truth", like the Sesame score, used everywhere. It means that everything becomes easy or difficult…

Hah, I can agree with a single source of truth. A credit score is essentially what you are referring to. I know for sure you cannot rent without a large deposit with a terrible score, and some jobs will not hire you (especially GOVT jobs) when you have large debts and bad credit. Not sure about the insurance rates, but it certainly would not surprise me.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#120

Post by [deleted] »

seren wrote: post #75
tyrex2017 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Some every day scenario, with an impact, * You apply for a loan, it is refused * Your admission, for you or your children, to a school or university is refused because more worthy people have applied * Your job application is refused, All because of a fuzzy social score, that is mined from your contacts, activities on social network, meta data gathered from your smartphone in an opaque way, CCTV cameras, etc I mean i…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN